I had a great conversation today with Michael Nutley, editor of New Media Age. We met up at the Soho Hotel - not for the first time, though this time we skipped the bar and sat in the drawing room. Much nicer.

Mike and I talked a bit about podcasting, and I admitted that there is no podcast I listen to regularly. (There are a few reasons for this, but primary amongst them is that I rarely hook my mp3 player up to my PC to change the line-up. I'm waiting for wireless transfer, I guess.) I do try to listen to the election podcast that my partner, Antoine Clarke, does with Brian Micklethwait every Tuesday night, but the truth is that I have access to Antoine's election insight whenever I want it, and hear a lot of that stuff on a day-to-day basis anyway. Plus, I'm not an election enthusiast.

One of the dilemmas that Brian and Antoine seem to have is how long or short the podcast should be. (Here's Brian blogging about that very topic today.) When Brian was round for dinner the other week, he said something about how, when he opens up a podcast and sees that the whole file runs at something like 32 minutes or whatever, his heart sinks. I can relate. But the point is that a podcast is just a recording of a conversation, and you shouldn't rush the conversation if it's interesting to you. Better to provide detailed show notes so that people can choose to zip right to the parts that interest them. Michael Vanderdonk summed this up quite well in a comment on the blog for Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz's For Immediate Release podcast:

The real anoying part for me is that ‘time’ is the measuring stick. If you are baking a double chocolate mud cake, the cake is ready when the cake it ready. Speeding up the cooking time to have it ready ruins the cake. Taking the cake out half baked (pun intended) ruins the cake. Skipping ingredients or preparation steps, ruins the cake. Accept the fact, Neville and Shel, that FIR takes over an hour to ‘bake’. Let the listeners decide how they want to slice it…

Second verse, same as the first: Control what you can, not what you wish you could. Let people have a choice. Do your thing and then get out of the damn way.