Om, Mike, and Robert are on the phone

Robert, I have no intention to hurt you, but in my oppinion this is the best example of podcasting being harmful. 27MB (!), 60min (!) of mumbling, not only it is impossible to skip uninteresting parts, but also the voice quality is sometimes too weak. Voice overlapping, connection problems, background-ringing-cell-phones...
Raw data -- cheap to publish for the author on expense of your listeners.
No, thanks, I can not recommend it further.

A 27MB podcast in and of itself is fine... Personally I encode at 128kbps and no one's complaining yet. But an hour worth of podcasting should be edited, cleaned up, have decent audio (whenever phones or skype is involved, it's a compromise though).

I haven't listened to this so I'm not commenting on Robert's podcast. I just wanted to say that in theory neither the length nor the size are a problem to me. But then again I've turned off a lot of hour long podcasts 10 minutes into it when it became apparent it was a waste of time.

You can fast forward or skip forward, just drag the player icon Alex in the embedded Flash device.

Raw conversation over breakfast is great, I like this Raw style... It's real.

I certainly turned it off less than ten minutes in. 3 guys talking about themselves and their busy schedules I can take for about 15 seconds.

And this on a Sunday morning when I am sitting at the computer not really doing anything anyway. I only started to listen because I thought there would be some information on VOIP that might be interesting. But I just can't/won't spend that much time listening to idle chit chat!

I have to agree with "radaronpaws" -- this podcast (all podcasts?) may be cheap and easy for the producer to produce but a waste of time for the listener.

Is this the "best" that podcasting/audiocasting can offer?

Well some of the ScobleShow parts were interesting, but on the whole, it's 2 gas-bags, ego-festing away about fav "start-ups" with Robert just clinking in with a show promo. But yeah, I concur, who but the extreme geek 'halfway-needing-to-be-committed' nut has time (or the horrorfesty inclination) for this. But of the 3, Robert's the most friendly sounding, as Mike and Om always have this 'I-am-richer-than-God-you-are-a-peon-worship-my-feet' feel about them.

You jumped the shark with this one. D+. Get an editor. And for the record, Robert De Niro and Robert Byrd are two Roberts that are just a wee bit more important, Google notwithstanding.

Allen: not to mention Robert Kennedy and Robert Redford. But, Google isn't always fair.

I thought Robert Kennedy was dead?

How are both DeNiro and Redford important? They are simply celebrities.

God God was that horrible. I could only handle about 5 mintues, waiting for it to get interesting Between Arrington's "uh...uh...uh....uh"'s and Malik's "ya know, ya know, ya know, ya know."'s and the clicking in the background, and the poor sound quality.. I felt like I was in Mayberry and Sarah put into a partly line of some old ladies talking about their rhumatism

That was a bad podcast very low quality. You do yourself a dis-service in doing crap like that..

LayZ: you always crack me up.

Anyway, Howard Stern has millions of listeners talking about sex and stuff, gets paid $200 million or so, and you all are complaining about something we did for free on the spur of the moment on a Saturday afternoon?

But, we'll work on finding a higher quality way to do this and find a format that works a bit better.

I do wonder though if any of you listen to talk radio? Most of those shows are an hour long and I don't see anyone complain too much. So I don't think it's the length. Certainly coming up with something interesting is much more difficult. Not everyone is Rush Limbaugh or Howard Stern.

I like it that we're still able to fool around and try new things out.

Not to mention that I've been watching Diggnation for the past few weeks and it's two guys sitting on a couch drinking Coke and talking about what they are seeing on Digg. It has 250,000 downloads a week.
As for chit-chat or editing? Sorry, does talk radio get edited? No. We do need to find something more interesting to talk about, though. At least get into some meat right away. The first few minutes of this is pretty boring, after we start talking about VoIP stuff it gets a little better. Also, the quality issues would be much better if we did this in a studio, but that would make us take some time away from our families and friends.

Robert, why don't invite Valleywag's Nick Douglas on your show?

Dimitar: that'd be fun. Good idea.

[Totally off topic()]
So when are you gonna post something about your TV show Scoble? If I read it correctly is it not airing tommorow for the first time??

Looking forward to it.

Granville: tomorrow night is when it starts up. I'll let you know when it's up.

People here should check out http://gillmorgang.podshow.com/ too for further evidence that an hour plus of rambling with sound quality issues can be very valuable and entertaining. Maybe that's just my opinion, but I don't think so. Haven't heard the boss on this TalkCrunch yet, but give me an hour of stuff like this and I'm generally happy.

The conversation at http://forimmediaterelease.biz around show length and converastion has been interesting as well. They do like 80 mins twice a week and have for a long time with apparently good results. I like that one too.

Robert, ignore the nit-pickers, there was nothing wrong with this.

Don't waste any time editing it, just do some more.

Talk radio is messy, that's just the way it is, but it works.

You and others like you spend large parts of your day reading about new stuff, so conversations like this are how you and your listeners get to put what you read into context.

Sure, some will not have the patience to keep listening long enough to get to hear the bits that would make them want to listen the next time there's a new podcast.

Sure, editing and cleanup would reduce that drop-out factor.

But think: you're mostly vdiscussing the latest developments: it's news-talk-radio, it gets to be not-news really fast.

Think: news radio is live, you get the stuff that the news-anchor says as she says it, mistakes, glitches, dead-air pauses, overlaps, miscued clips and all, yet it is still the most listened-to airtime, more so than the slickest-edited content on the station.

Don't edit, don't clean-up, just keep having naked radio conversations.

Ricky: thanks, agreed.

@and talk radio hosts know how to get rid of callers that are not making any sense and are bad radio. Please, don't tell me you are comparing yourselves to talk radio hosts. Sure, there are lousy talk radio hosts. That's why they get shows from 2-6 am. or on Sunday mornings at 7 am.. when no one is likely to be listening.

Hey, I'm aware of the fact that some people have a lower quality bar than I do. Call me silly, but my time is worth something, even when the thing I'm spending it on is free. So, I expect a certain level of professionalism.

As for the 250,000, well we all know what Joseph Bassimer said: There's a sucker born every minute.. and two to take 'em". (In the case of this podcast, it was three)

Manual Trackback - still waving my arms :)

http://www.touchstonelive.com/blog/2006/09/miss...

Call me silly, but my time is worth something, even when the thing I’m spending it on is free. So, I expect a certain level of professionalism.

Amen to that. Something all the 'medium is the message' shaky cam's forget, think in terms of the customer for once, geesh. When they try for audiences beyond the narrow geek confines and drop the self-ego-worship, it will all start to click. If it doesn't, you can safely ignore.

ignore the nit-pickers, there was nothing wrong with this.

Ummm, entrering Fantasyland about now, eh? For starter's: poor audio, too many pregnant pauses, too much stammering, too many "ummm's", "yah know's". Can't get to a studio? Why should the audience suffer then? That excuse not accepted.

Talk radio is messy, that’s just the way it is, but it works.

Umm no, only the best talkers get shows. The more it sounds like it was edited, the better. The Rush Limbaugh's, Phil Hendrie's, Glenn Beck's and Sean Hannity's are an art, not the norm. Good Talk Radio is not messy, good talk radio is topical, directed, focused and controlled (can't let callers run with the ball).

Chris, nobody is going to argue with you that the best talk radio isn't razor sharp and crystal clear.

But good talk radio doesn't have to be the best, it just has to be good and that means that it can afford to and often does get some things wrong, so long as it gets enough things right.

The Gillmor Gang was the only decent 'news radio style podcasty thing' that I ever listened to (I listened to hours of it, but by no means every episode) and it was often very patchy and almost always very messy.

But when it was good, the good stuff was as good as anything I have ever heard on talk radio, or attending real world conferences on the subject matter they were discussing.

I have over 40 years of (what is now called) BBC Radio 4 listening experience, a station which is exclusively devoted to intellectual speech content, with an audience of about 10 million listeners.

This (Radio 4) is an extremely (perhaps the ultimate, highbrow) script-driven broadcast phenomenon, where proposals for increases in informal 'call-in-style' talk show programming (with the exception of a single programme (they don't call them 'shows') are received with sufficient levels of national disdain as to cause questions to be raised in parliament.

So I'm prepared to stick my neck out and say that my credentials for judging whether 'comparatively sloppily constructed radio material' can work (if certain other factors appertain) are not entirely inchoate, otiose, or nugatory.

I know what slick programming sounds like.

I know how to edit stuff so there is nothing in there but the best.

Nobody is saying that this treatment doesn't improve the content.

But the key factor in this type of content is throughput.

The stuff being discussed here is being both created and consumed at the same time, in real-time.

People know that they have to be more tolerant of imperfect presentation if they want to get something akin to a live feed.

The closer you get to the dynamics of a live feed (and newsy podcasts aren't live but they aren't far from it) the more the listeners respect the spontaneity.

When I was listening to the recording we are discussing right now, there were references to things happening which were only hours old.

Listeners who valued the content will use their recognition of this 'dimension of immediacy' as a key feature of their 'viral drivers', the basis upon which they will 'pass along and recommend' the content.

Part of that viral distribution and recommendation process will inherently include considerations of 'patience requirements' and 'rough quality toleration' of the recipients futher down the chain, so that a messy and informal unedited podcast of people discussing even the most pressing metablogosphere issues of five minutes ago will only be commended to those whose interests are not exclusively restricted to early rennaissance architecture or those blogosphere denizens who confine their online listening experience to finely crafted expositions of journalistic morphology.

The will always be a job for an editor, scriptwriter, director, light and sound crew in the online audio and video content market, because there will always be a contingent of the audience which would only tolerate content of 'professional quality'.

But as audiences go futher and further into nano-interest niches, the subject matter relevance level expectation climbs so high that attention becomes much easier to maintain and quality issues, whilst they are never entirely eliminated, are often transformed, often even reversed (so that sudden introduction of slickly produced content in such environments produces a suspicion-arousing contrast, producing concerns about an informal, credible forum becoming 'polluted' by 'vested interests': imagine you were having a conversation in a small group when suddenly two members of the group started saying things in such a smooth and coordinated fashion (maybe with perfectly appropriate and synchronistically faded in and out backing music) that it sounded like a professionally produced infomercial, would you feel that the flawless clarity and coherence of their dialogue increased the value that you attached to what you were hearing? or would you and the rest of the group feel a strong urge to move away from these shills and get back to hearing a real conversstion?

doesn’t have to be the best, it just has to be good

Ratings really determine that factor, what I or you think is pretty much irrelevant.

Still trying to hack my way thru your buzzworded ‘dimension of immediacy’ nano-interest niched forest ;) Gosh, good stuff tho -- in terms of the writing style. But basically a one-sentence sum-up: The more microscopically narrow your audience, the higher the poor-quality tolerance. Wide - Professional. Niche - Medium. Nano - Shaky Cam Heaven.

Viral drivers? Ohdearme... ;)

Thanks Chris, your summing-up was spot on.

Viral drivers?

Your're of course right to scoff.

The term viral has been used indiscriminately enough for a serious use of it to merit entirely justifiable derision.

But I was being quite definite about the 'recommendation chain' process which I was describing, and the term seemed apposite in this case.

I'll use something better if you can come up with it.