Podcasts, Videocasts vs. text blogs

Podcasting or videocasting may not be as fun as it may first seem. An alternative of RSS to support and eventually replace text ? No, I don't think so

Podcasts and videocasts have a importance of their own, they maybe good for songs or some professional videos but that's pretty much it. I was trying to hear some news on a podcast the other day, it just seems so impossible to stay with the pace of the podcasting news reader. In the time I was able to listen to one news I could have browsed through maybe 10-20 articles. On the other hand I would have loved to hear songs or watch videos delivered via podcasts cos that's what I am supposed to do with audio or video (I can make out if the song is gonna be good or not if it catches my attention in 10 seconds, else its pretty much like TV where I have lots of other channels to switch to only in this case it is almost guaranteed that I am not coming back to this blog/podcasting/vcasting site as I have zillions of options available at my disposal). Even if lets say like a TV I were to hear the news I would go and download CNN or engadget podcasts not by just anyone as I will have no idea if its gonna be good or not. Blogs are interesting but lets face it not all blogs are good. If I don't get a guaranteed seal of quality (which is the case with blogs) I can spare a few seconds to filter out the content that I want from several text blogs but not audio or video for which I really have to spend the entire playtime of the podcast/videocast to figure out if it was worth it.


Normally I just read bites of the long article first to see if it makes a good read. Maybe something comes up tommorow that indexes the audio/video and allows me to switch to certain parts of audio/video which I find good then maybe someone can convince me but till then ...

podcasting or videocasting may be fun in social sense where I can tell my friends to listen to me but I don't really think that by podcasting in public u will make any impact unless u can bring up something really compelling for me in the first 5 seconds (even that time is way too much)