How Not to Podcast

I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts lately, and I’ve compiled a list of mistakes that a lot of audio bloggers are making. Here, in ascending order of ease of implementation, are the things I would very much like to see less of in the near future:

• Endless, random blabbing — I was surprised to find during my research that most podcasts haven’t learned much from the short history of weblogging, of which audioblogging is but one descendant. At first, webloggers linked to and wrote about anything and everything. Then people found that keeping a weblog about just one topic was a more successful model. The same should hold true for audioblogs. People are ignoring this wisdom mainly in two ways: talking about podcasting, and talking about themselves.
  • Talking about podcasting — Unless your show is about podcasting, I don’t want to hear you talking about it. In particular, podcasters seem obsessed with being at the top of popularity lists, which is obnoxious for listeners to have to deal with. I’m not going to vote for your show, no matter what. If it’s good, I’ll tell my friends. Isn’t that enough? When weblogging was enjoying its explosion back in 2000, people blogged about blogging all the time. That was annoying, too, but it was really easy to skip over while reading. It’s not quite as simple with an audio file. Please, just keep on topic.
  • Talking about yourself — Likewise, unless your show is entitled “My Mundane Life” (many shows employ this as a formula, if not a literal title) you’re just wasting time when talking about your one-and-a-half hour drive to the “recording studio” or what you’re having for dinner or what sort of mischief your dog is up to. I want to be clear on this point: if your show is an audio journal of your life, that’s fine. But if it’s ostensibly about something more objective, like cooking or carpentry, then you need to keep the personal details to a minimum.
• Episode numbers — Really. Stop that. Do you watch anything on television or hear anything on the radio where they tell you the episode number? It’s not important, and I don’t believe anybody cares. It’s internal information. Dawn and Drew listeners aren’t going to refer to “episode 185,” they’re going to say, “the one where they watch themselves on the news,” the concept of which has its own special problems.
• Calling it “radio” — This should be a no-brainer. You’re not on the radio. I suppose there’s a slight chance that your show is being replayed on some radio stations somewhere (congratulations on that, Coverville), but aside from that, no. No radio for you. The same goes for the phrase “on the air.”
• Keeping a schedule — Do you do your show weekly? Twice a week? Twice a month? Why? The only reason I can think of for keeping to a rigid schedule is because life might be easier when there are routines to rely on. But I have a suspicion that people do weekly or daily shows because we all grew up that way. Break free, people. My fancy RSS aggregator (in my case, iTunes) will keep an eye on your feed and tell me when it’s been updated. That’s all I need. Do a show when you’re ready and when it’s warranted. It doesn’t need to be more frequent than that.
• Keeping a set length — Just like with the schedule, there is nobody enforcing a duration on your show. Your audience will appreciate a show that is not dragged out to meet an arbitrary length of time.
• Uh… um… uh… — Your show is not broadcast live (putting aside the fact that it’s not broadcast at all for the moment), so there’s no reason for us to hear you stammering, searching for your notes, losing your train of thought, etc. If you have more than one “uh…” per sentence, I’d recommend re-recording. You can pause the recording at any time and resume later if you need to collect your thoughts.
• Speech synthesizers — the occasional modification of your voice for entertainment purposes is okay, but under no circumstances should you be using any text-to-speech software to do your speaking for you. It’s simply unlistenable.
• The word “podcast” in general — This is a play on words of the term “broadcast” and the popularity of the iPod, making it both somewhat inaccurate and somewhat elitist. Broadcasts are most frequently associated with radio and television, and one does not need an iPod to listen to your show. In fact, one doesn’t need a portable audio player at all. What you’ve got is an audioblog. With that being said, I will continue to use the term “podcast” until the end of this entry, so’s Google will take notice. Google loves weblogs.
• Advertisements — Come on, now. Sponsorship for your show means that the quality level is so high that you have to take time away from other, income-producing activities. Are you spending even more than two hours putting your show together? So far, it doesn’t sound like it. (I’ll go ahead and exclude Teknikal Difficulties from that statement. Seems to me that that guy works his ass off.)

Given the ideas above, here’s my idea of a successful podcast formula:

1. Pick a topic on which you can speak with some authority, and limit your talk to that topic, sub-topics or topics that have a direct impact on the main topic.
2. Compile some notes in advance that you estimate will make for enough content to fill however many minutes you want your show to be this time, and keep them in front of you.
3. If you screw up part of the show, go back and fix it before making it public.
4. Put concise details of the content of each episode (including the duration of your show and any URLs mentioned or referenced) in the associated blog post.

That’s what I think. Feel free to disagree, but at least I got you to think about these little annoyances.

For what it’s worth, I am putting my formula to the test with my new project theynow.com. Who knows? Maybe I’ll have to revise some of the shouldn’ts listed above. Comments, as always, are welcome.

Comments [3]

20 November 2005, 21:55