Deep Podcast Queue
Posted on April 5, 2009
Filed Under podcasting | Leave a Comment
This seems a little odd, but I can pinpoint the time my podcast queue got out of hand. In December 2007, I had actually underflowed my list. I was running out of things to listen to and by the end of the day, everything downloaded the previous day would have been listened to. In the middle of that month, we took a trip to San Francisco and when I got back I had a queue again. Ever since then, I’ve never been close to caught up again.
In recent months, the queue exceeded 30 days. The shows I were listening to were over a month old by the time I got to them. That’s been pulled in to around 20 days, but it is still pretty substantial. It tends to fluctuate based on how much I have to talk to other people at my day job. When I have long stretches of listening time, I catch up and when I’m in lots of meetings I fall behind.
This weekend actually had an unusual amount of podcast listening time. I crossed a line where I’m listening to shows on a Sunday that were recorded on a Tuesday, so that means I pulled in to the 19 day type backlog. I know some people declare “podcast bankruptcy” when they get way behind on these things, but I like to chug on through. I don’t care so much about the timeliness of the shows. I do bump The Writers Almanac up to the top of my list every day because I do prefer to listen to those closer to their actual time, rather than a month later.
This is why I really dislike it when podcasters make a big deal in their shows of doing a show on a Tuesday when they normally do it on Monday, etc etc. When I get to that episode, whatever time difference they are discussing is long gone. When I mentioned above about shows being recorded on Tuesday, the only reason I know that is because they said so in the show. Even those shows that are on a rigorous weekly schedule, for the most part I can’t remember what that day is. I look forward to the day when I’m listening to these shows closer to their publish time, but for the most part schedule and timing are things that many people say are really important in the podcast world but about which I couldn’t care less.
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On FriendFeed, this post was liked by 3 people and commented on 7 times hide- Ken Kennedy,
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- Derek Coward
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This is one of the reasons why I TRY not to mention the length between shows anymore. I listened back to a bunch of mine in a row and it was pretty irritating. And it occurred to me that there will be people who will listen in a few weeks, months, maybe even years and they won't care. Simple as that.
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Yes, exactly. For me, the most extreme case was the episode of Bill Shunn's Shunncast where he spent 10 minutes on the subject, and I was listening weeks later and care absolutely nothing about the whole topic. I've tried to keep it to a minimum myself as well.
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Also, I have exactly the same issue with shows full of timely holiday music. The absolute last thing I want to listen to on Jan 15th is a show of xmas songs. I end up skipping a lot of those every year.
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I put my only Christmas episode in the middle of June or July just to be a smartass.
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I don't listen in any sort of chronological order, and often have stuff on my iPod that's 6+ months old. As a result, any podcast that tends toward timelessness is more likely to stay in my subscription list and any that is stale 2 weeks, 2 months or 2 quarters later is likely to get dumped eventually.
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.NET Rocks is constantly talking about whether it's a "Tuesday" or "Thursday" show. I'm only checking to see if it's a post .NET 3.5SP1 show.
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There is a more general issue, that many podcasts spend those precious first few minutes talking about things that matter to the podcasters at the time of recording but don't matter to listeners at all or after a short duration. I have 140 more shows on the player, get to it, kids or you get skipped.
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