I’ve listened for the last few months as the media have been working themselves up into a feverish pitch about podcasting. From reading the breathless reports you would think this was some life altering technology that will stop global warming, feed all the starving kids in Africa, and give you instantly white teeth. Wow, some dumbass records stuff and you can download and listen to it. You’ve been able to do this easily ever since you could play back audio files on a computer. The only difference is now I can download them to my iPod. I fail to see what the Big Fucking Deal is.

I couldn’t agree more with Rui Carmo when he says (full blog post):

A new form of dispersing media which, incidentally, seems to have some trouble with my corporate firewall - either that or there are far too many people who apreciate hanging on every word uttered by bespectacled geeks’ reedy voices as they stutter through the description of their latest bit of gadgetry.

Or perhaps they’re dissecting a newfangled technique to achieve GTD nirvana using a chopstick with numbered notches, their sentences punctuated by the occasional hiss of static as they forget, time and again, that you’re not supposed to actually touch the mike, or breathe that close to it without taking a hit from their inhalers.

Considering that 99.999% of podcasts are pretty much a waste of time, I’m not exactly enthusiastic about the media. Or the fact that Apple has just added an amazing amount of infrastructure to podcasting, which turned it into a recording industry clone overnight (complete with rankings, meaningless “Top 40â€? lists and a swarming mass of online groupies).

Maybe we’ll be proven wrong.