The Candadian Broadcasting Corporation's new pilot podcasting project is welcome, but oh! so conservative. Readers of my previous Auricle article Probing podcasting from the professionals will know that one of the CBC shows, Tod Maffin's /Nerd has actually been available for a while and the other CBC show, the science programme Quirks and Quarks, already had an extensive MP3 archive; so all CBC seem to have done is add the RSS wrappers and ramp up the PR. Anyway, let's not be churlish, give us more! more! more!.
But what's the BBC doing on the podcasting front? The Beeb's current offering, In Our Time, worthy programme although it is, is hardly going to set the podcast world on fire. So come on! BBC, you should also pick up the pace and set an example. You never know, you might find a whole lot of talent out there, who, with modest resources, could do a pretty good job, e.g. those Naked Scientists for instance?
What my brief sampling of the podcasting world has shown me is that, while there is certainly some dross 'out there', there's also some audio resources of surprising innovation and quality. Sometimes the dross and the gold come from the same podcasters on different days. Whilst my interests lie in the talk radio genre, I've also found some of the so called podcast safe music to be high quality. It's perhaps notable that my teenage daughter seems to pay more attention to this type of music than she does to putative chart toppers … Quick quick record companies you'd better find a way of banning podcasts:) Why not attempt to do the same fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) job as was attempted with open source software? … Why not declare listening or contributing to podcasts as evidence of communist leanings and, therefore, of unpatriotic behaviour? 🙂
