Podcastplayer.org news

Mike Manual at Media Guerilla likes the idea of podcasting, but (like so many of us) gets frustrated by the podcast listening experience. The focus of this particular complaint is on the lack of indexed content:

While I enjoy the show I’ll admit, I haven’t yet found religion with podcasting. IMO the technology still has some obstacles to overcome before it can become a solid communication tool. The fact that it’s a one-way medium and expensive to produce are things I can live with, but my biggest gripe is this – the lack of indexed content.

At the moment there’s no way to easily digest a podcast, you’re basically stuck listening to the entire thing. The latest H&H Report runs about 45 mins long, so you better have the time to listen or face the alternative of hit-and-miss dialing on your iPod. And don’t ask me how to earmark something you found interesting other than just joting down the time stamp. It’s just frustrating. I will, however, give credit to Neville and Shel for including show notes with their podcasts, it really helps. It appears that this is becoming more of a common practice among regular podcasters.

In the comments, Shel Holtz offers more player suggestions:

As far as time-shifted radio goes, I love podcasting. I listen to half a dozen podcasts, some daily, and I’m hooked. For convenience’s sake, though, I’d like devices you can bookmark so you can return to a show right where you left it and that have WiFi built in (so podcasts can go straight to the device). The wish list among other, more seasoned podcasters is longer, but I’d settle for that right now.

Sure, show notes are a neat idea, but producing them is so fiddly. If podcasting is really going to work (in the way that blogging works) it will need good, comfortable, tool support for this sort of stuff. Creation tools need some sort of automatic “scene detection” (like all the entry-level video editing software has), simple roll-and-click annotation of sections, and support for generating some kind of standardised metadata. Distribution and player technology needs to include support for passing through and displaying/interacting with this metadata.

More and more I’m coming to the view that the key to a podcasting breakthough is work on some sort of standardised but flexible metadata to accompany each podcast on its travels.

Read the article at: Media Guerrilla: The Hobson & Holtz Report, Report