Influx

Podcasts seem to have a lot of potential, but only if their creators approach them differently. In the early days of the internet, a website was a brochure and television used to be radio with images. Podcasts today just seem like radio broadcasts on the internet.

Unlike blogs that allows us to quickly skim and scan through news to find out what we need, Podcast forces us to listen to someone, sometimes a blogger. That’s fine, if the show is short, but most of them tend to go on, following the radio formula of a 20-30 minute broadcast.

There’s clearly a benefit for radio stations opening their programming up to on-demand access via Podcast and that will have considerable appeal for many listerners.

The problem is that we are currently using the radio model to think about the medium, but the selection on our new radio dial is not limited to 5 or 6 pre-sets, instead the options are now truly infinite.

For the amateur broadcasters competing for our precious attention, perhaps there need to be editors who bring us the best of podcasting. Could these editors be radio stations doing this as outreach? Perhaps the podcasters or whatever they are called, need to shorten their programming length.

Clearly we are at the early days of a potentially interesting new medium, that’s not just simply radio on the Internet.