More on podcasting

I forgot to include a demonstration of what I meant in my last post about podcasting.

I don't listen to much radio but I absolutely love Fresh Air on NPR. It's my favorite interview show period. Once a month or so I go to the site, skim the archives and listen to the shows that sound promising. Recently I found out they even have an RSS feed, so now I just read the titles in bloglines.

Now that I see the daily shows, I get to skim the archives constantly and I find that I click into about 1 in 10 segments and probably listen to half of those. I love Fresh Air, but the interview subjects are all over the map and many times aren't that interesting.

Imagine if they converted to a podcast stream. I'd be sucking down hundreds of Mb a week that I don't even want to hear. It could get so bad that I'd be hassled by having to delete them constantly.

Now do you see why I'm saying defaulting podcast streams to download absolutely everything may be a design flaw?

It seems like adding a new tag called "preview" could contain the 30 second preview track as an RSS enclosure, and the full track could be a link in another tag. This way, I could "skim" the downloads by listening to them and clicking on the ones I liked. Intelligent software could handle my list of ones I wanted to hear more of, and could pull down and transfer those to my iPod.