In the last month or two I have been listening to a number of podcasts. They have whiled away the hours of driving from Nice to Barcelona and Turin, some other drives around England as well as a number of tedious train journeys, and I think it may be worthwhile commenting upon the phenomenon. Mind you I am no all-knowing connoisseur in the podcasting business, my podcasting selection has been pretty much limited to the Glenn & Helen show, the Northern Alliance Radio podcasts, a few Nerd TV episodes and Japundit but perhaps that pickiness may help illustrate my points.
Firstly I hate iTunes. I have tried it a couple of times courtesy of Instapundit's heavy pushing and one of the Japundit music choices and I completely fail to see its attraction. Perhaps if I possessed an iPod things would be different but as someone who listens purely via the PC and who has no particulalr desire to buy music I find iTunes to be practically Microsoftian in its intolerance of alternatives (in this case to buying music from Apple and playing it on the iPod). I'm still keeping it because my accidental installation of it seems to have supplanted the perfectly good quicktime player I had before but I'm not going to use it for anything other than playing the very rare quicktime movie. It has always amazed me that people whom I generally respect seem to go completely batty about Apple products that I personally hate and iTunes seems to be no exception. Having said that the French parliament's idea to force iTunes/iPod interoperabilty with other systems is a classic example of a government meddling to make a bad situation worse. If, as I suspect, Apple's response to this sort of diktat is to stop selling stuff in France then all the pols have done is reduced choice for their constituents and that may not tbe the only way that choice is reduced. iTunes has done the world a major favour by convinvingly demonstrating to the record labels that at the right price people will buy music rather than "pirate" it and the government intervention seems most likely to make it easier to pirate iTunes tracks thereby reducing the incentives for the music publishers to continue to embrace the new market and leading to an increase in "piracy". Sadly there seems to be a French gene that leads its people to be unclear on the relationship between "cause" and "effect" and/or "incentives" and "consequences" - this gene is also on display in the current strikes/riots (see comment later).
Secondly my listening to (and occasional straying from) the podcasters listed above has made me decide that in general the best podcasts are those that are dialogues, interviews or panel discussions. The Japundit monologues are interesting but not as entertaining as the Glenn & Helen show or the Northern Alliance Radio which are typically interviews and discussions. About the only problem Ihave is that I want to go all bloggy and comment on the shows which is tricky since I tend to listen to them days or even weeks after their creation. Fortunately the ones where I have really wanted to interject (generally with words like "Moron" or "Damn Straight") have been listened to in the car where no one can hear me rant. I'm not sure how to do it but I think that an opportunity to recond brief messages on the topic of the podcast which could then be edited together with those of others would really help the medium. The interactive feedback is, after all, one of the major strengths of the blog world and being able to do the same with podcasts would help.
Thirdly the quality of analysis on the podcasts I have listened too is far superior to anything I can find on the radio or TV - even the BBC (see below). Political debate as it occurs in the MSM is usually extraordinarily facile and a complete waste of time. Typically the producers seem to prefer to get fireworks in debates rather than serious analysis and their debates are generally so short that the background to any issue is usually lost. The US port scandal is probably the best recent example although the ongoing failures in Iraq coverage are just as glaring.
Fourthly on my recent trip back to the UK I noticed that the BBC is really the only media producer that seems likely to be able to do podcasting properly. If it does it right I reckon the BBC could in fact make a nice little earner out of it. The BBC has a number of excellent programmes on the world service and Radios 3 & 4 that would make very good podcasts such as the "From our own correspondent" series and these could be sold at iTunes-like prices or in subscription form and I think they would be bought. It seems to me that Radio 4 in particular has suffered from a good deal of dumbing down of its news and current affairs with interviews kept short and interviewers seemingly more interested in unsettling their subject than getting a useful answer. Now it has to be said that in many cases unsettling the politicians, corporate shills and activists who get interviewed is good thing but what seems to happen is that in many cases the bit that is broadcast later (or in some cases earlier) is the unmasking and stammering soundbite rather than the whoile thing where one can hear the context. Now I'm not Derida deconstructionist, but the context is frequently inportent, witness the brief brou-ha-ha about Tony Blair's God moment recently, and therefore making the entire interview available as a podcast would seem to be a good way to let those who really want it listen to the entire thing.