Lately I've noticed a lot of podcasts where there really don't need to be podcasts. Harry Potter fansites are doing podcasts, Dear Ellie is doing a podcast, election campaigns are podcasting, it's ridiculous. And frankly, not only is it unnecessary, I find it less user-friendly than just posting in text. A podcast I have to download, which means I have to wait. No, I don't have to wait very long, but it is significant compared with the negligible load time of a text webpage. Then I have to listen instead of reading, which means that I have to turn off the TV and the music and listen to the phone, as compared with just idly scanning a page of text without pausing in anything else I'm doing. If I miss something I have to "rewind," if I get an instant message or an email I automatically miss something, and it's just generally more trouble than simple reading. And then once I do go to this trouble, I find that the content of the podcast does not actually require an audio medium. It would be just as easy to type it out and post it (especially since a typed-out soft copy of the script probably already exists), and easier for me to absorb in text form. In some cases, text form would be even more preferable. It's ridiculous to have Dear Ellie podcast a straight-out advice column, unless she engages in actual dialogue with the actual person who's asking for advice. SQ's Goblet of Fire in 8.7 minutes suffered from the podcast format, because it was done in the voices of the SQ people, and you couldn't tell by voices alone which character was meant to be which - you had to resort to your knowledge of the plot. Prisoner of Azkaban in 15 minutes, by comparison, was in text form, so I could read it and imagine the lines being spoken by the movie actors or by my mental version of the characters. There's just no point in using a new medium unless that medium is actually going to improve the user experience in a way that straight text can't. For almost every podcast I've heard, I'd rather have read a transcript than listened to the podcast.
In addition to all this, there's the fact that podcasts are not searchable. In my professional life, as well as for personal research, I use the internet as a corpus. If something is posted on the Web in HTML or any other searchable text format, it shows up in Google's index and I can use it to research terminology and collocations or look up random facts or find out the general opinion about something. A podcast just shows up as the presence of an mp3 to be downloaded, thus contributing nothing to my use of the internet as a language and research tool.
I think before anyone makes a podcast, they should ask themselves "What benefits will the users get from this audio medium that will justify their having to download a file and turn off their background music to listen to it." If they can't come up with anything better than "But it's cool!" they should just post a normal article or blog entry and save us all some trouble.
3 comments:
To play 'Devil's Advocate' I could say that I could have listened to that blog in 20 seconds if it had been on podcast :) I know what you mean though. I see podcast as being useful if you are the sort of person who wants to listen to something in their ear and multitask in other ways. Sometimes when I'm not feeling well, I'd like to read but I can't. So podcasts could come in handy. And also, think of how many doors this opens for people who are not in a position to ever be able to read? CNIB has "books on tape" now upgraded to CD, but podcasting could keep those individuals so much more plugged into the world!
They do have web browsers for the blind that read the material on the screen out loud. If people can't read what's on the screen for whatever reason, they wouldn't be able to FIND the podcasts.
Interesting point. I don't know much about that.
Post a Comment