Podcasts

Being that it's the word of the year according to the New Oxford American Dictionary I wanted to post two quick things about podcasts.

After listening to quite a few, mainly focused on new ventures and entrepreneurship, there's only one I regularly listen to: Greg Galant's Venture Voice. It's entertaining, has pretty good production value, and the guests are usually really great.

The other thing I wanted to say is that I have a general beef with podcasts that are interview based (including Venture Voice). They need to learn how to adjust audio levels. I've listened to more than one podcast where the two participants in the discussion are at radically different audio levels. I listen primarily at the gym and sometimes it's been a struggle to find the volume level where I can hear one person and not have my ears destroyed by the other. The audio levels also sometimes change throughout the recording. In a totally digital medium, with easy to acquire digital audio manipulation tools, it seems like it shouldn't be that difficult to do some post production to fix this.

It's interesting that the production values of podcasts have generally improved, adding music and other "polish" elements, but this fundamental aspect, hearing the two participants in an interview has been overlooked.