Podcasting Tips

oreilly.com: Ten Tips for Improving Your Podcasts From Jack Herrington, author of Podcasting Hacks. Part part teaser, sample chapter, part summary, part discussion. Emphasis on the audio portion of podcasting. Mostly from the context of "citizen radio," with few ideas that are really specific to podcasting. Alludes to the diversity of viewpoints in podcasting. Still some notion of what a successful podcast might be like. Format, schedule, and script are probably the ones which warrant the most discussion. Herrington's tone is non-authoritative enough that discussion would be possible. Maybe in the Comments section. One major advantage of podcasting in contrast to radio is that duration isn't so much of an issue. Of course, a show shouldn't be so long as to discourage download or listening. But if a good discussion is happening in a podcast, there's little reason to cut it short. At worse, it could be split into shorter pieces. This is rather similar to the open-ended interviews we do in ethnographic research: getting people to talk. Herrington's tips still allow for this type of freedom but seem to make little difference between a radio show and a podcast. Granted, podcasting is still emerging and much of its development does relate to radio shows. Yet the advantages of podcasts over commercial or public radio can also be discussed lest we reproduce the mistakes of "Old Media" mimicking their regular content in online form. Podcasting differs from radio as web pages differ from print pages. With the added dimension that podcasts can in fact include video, text, and images.