Podcasting

Posted by stephen on Wednesday, 18th January, 2006 @ 02:12

I know I'm rather late to the party, but I've recently discovered podcasting, more specifically audio blogs rather than the various commercial offerings. And I can't work out exactly how I feel about it.

On an intellectual level, it seems mostly to be a load of people drivelling on about nothing particularly interesting. But there's some more basic, human value in it.

First off, there's the Big Brother style of appeal. Every year I tell myself I'm not going to watch it, and every year I find something oddly compelling about the whole thing. And Podcasting seems like a microcosm of that experience. Little snippets of other peoples lives are somehow interesting, sometimes from a comedy perspective, sometimes for drama. I'm sure there's some deep psychological, sociological and evolutionary reasons for that.

Secondly, and perhaps related to the previous point, there's something almost comforting about the experience of listening to someone else talking about their lives. It reminds me of the phone conversations I have with my far away friends who I don't get to see as much as I'd like to. Maybe I need more friends? I don't think so though, I think perhaps it's that when you see people often you don't always talk about the little details or the deep stuff on a regular basis. And that stuff is important.

Which leads me to an observation about the medium as a whole. Audio blogs strike me as ideal for personal publishing. Like listening to the radio, listening to a podcast in my experience is something done whilst doing something else, like driving or writing documentation! Which makes it ideal for non-technical subjects, where a much higher level of concentration would be required. In the case of audio blogs, devoting too much attention to listening would likely prove less valuable.

Because of that, I believe there's considerably less value in video blogging, or vlogging or video casting or whatever the latest buzzword is. Watching video generally involves a much higher level of involvement. Perhaps I'm wrong though, doesn't Big Brother prove otherwise?

In fact I know a lot of people who have the TV on all the time, in the background, paying little attention to it. I've never really done that, perhaps because the majority of TV content is geared to the viewer paying attention to keep up with the plot. Time will tell no doubt.

In the mean time I'm far too self conscious to do either a podcast or a vlog. I don't believe I've got anything interesting to talk about, but perhaps that doesn't matter?