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December 06, 2004
Podcast Review: IT Conversations; The Gillmor Gang
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4 and a half stars
, I subscribe
, Podcast Review
Format: "on-air" conversation
Content: wide variety of technical subjects of import today
Rating: 
What I'm going to do: listen often
Typical Length: 45 - 70 minutes
As you may have heard, the next few talk-related reviews I'm going to be doing are for a few of the IT Conversations podcast series. Here's an unsolicited plug for IT Conversations as a whole (skip to review):
Doug Kaye at IT Conversations has put together an unbelievable set of recordings about information technology. IT Conversations is a wonderful resource of a tremendously wide variety of technical conversations, interviews, and conference sessions. Doug's work in this field in undeniably important; he is, in essence, the archivist of today's IT world, capturing the issues that IT professionals deal with and the voices of those making IT what it is and guiding it towards what it will become. He provides a record of many sessions from the better-known technology conferences and interviews with many luminaries in the field. Along the way he throws in cultural information in the form of interviews with authors, legal thinkers, and others.
As a side-note (remember, this is unsolicited by Doug), Doug does all of this work at his own expense. He has only recently started accepting donations via a tip jar, and if you subscribe or download please leave a tip (I know I will be). I say this not for Doug's sake, but for my own selfish reasons - I want Doug to be doing what he does for a long time to come.
Now to the review:
The Gillmor Gang series of IT Conversation recordings is so called because it's led by Steve Gillmor (Steve Gillmor's Inforouter). The rest of Steve's band of merry men are typically some combination of Jon Udell (Jon's Radio), Dana Gardener (of The Yankee Group), Michael Vizard (of Editor-in-chief of CRN Magazine), and Doc Searls (Senior Editor | Linux Journal). A sharper, smarter group of individuals you'd be hard-pressed to find.
The topics of the conversation cover such a vast array of technology topics that it's an exercise in futility to try to encapsulate them here, or even to do the breadth of coverage a modest amount of justice. Within that long list are issues such as open source, blogging, distributed computing, and (gasp) podcasting. There are often guests on the show, whose presence usually directs the conversation (when Jonathan Schwartz is the guest, for example, talk naturally gravitates towards Sun). In other conversations the regulars discuss the week's IT news. The participants each have their own take on the subjects at hand and each their own understandings of the issues involved and the implications of the technology under discussion. The combination provides for an assessment that is both deep and broad.
Therein lies one of the main strengths of the show, and also one of its "problems", if it can be termed such. The regular participants and their guests are far smarter about these subjects than I am, so much so that I find myself occasionally having to listen to segments of the podcast more than once in order to grasp the entirety of what's being said. This is something important to be aware of. While listening to the Gillmor Gang will always enlighten you, the level of enlightenment you desire may require a greater involvement and more active listening experience than other podcasts might. I think that's in tune with what I see as the educational aspect of these podcasts, at least for me. For educational they always are; even when discussing a subject I think I know a fair amount about, I universally learn something new - a new factoid, a new way of looking at a problem, a new product or technology.
From the content point of view then, the discussions on The Gillmor Gang cover a tremendously wide variety. There is certain to be a Gillmor Gang recording for everyone in the IT industry, and more likely several or many that any one person would be interested in. But not every one will interest every person. The quality of the discussion is always high but also naturally varies with the guest(s) involved; the specific appeal of any one show will depend entirely on the listener.
Production and audio factors for the Gillmor gang revolve almost entirely around the technical questions of the recording. Aside from intro / outro music and an introduction from Doug Kaye, there's little aside from the conversation involved here. However that in itself is quite a feat as there are a tremendous variety of different recording situations involved for the Gillmor Gang. Venues vary from someone's office with a couple of folks around a microphone to podcasts from a conference show floor with 3 or 4 people using a couple of mics, and there are almost always one or more participants who call in. That must pose some interesting technical problems, but Doug and whoever his helpers are always seem to get it right; no matter what the difficulties, and while the audio quality is different from one podcast to another, there is never a substantial problem being able to hear or understand any of the participants. The biggest difficulty that I've heard is from momentary static on the phone line as one person gets disconnected for one reason or another, but they always come back without undue interruption of the discussion, and the disruption is minimal in the rare cases when this does happen.
All in all I find that I make better use of the Gillmor Gang by subscribing to one of the feeds listed below in my text aggregator instead of in a podcatcher. While that does mean that I need to go download a specific Gillmor Gang manually, it insures that I do not blindly download podcasts that I am unlikely to listen to. Until iPodder becomes able to allow me to select a particular enclosure within a feed, or until I find a podcatcher that does allow for that, I am likely to continue this practice in order to save Doug needless bandwidth.
There is no internal music in the Gillmor Gang podcasts, so music track lengths are irrelevant. As far as meta-data goes, the file naming is satisfactory - I can easily identify the files in Windows (although they appear as http encoded, which is a slight pain), and between the track title and artist name in my media players (both orotable and desktop) the podcasts can be identified. This is one case where some additional information in the comments ID3 tag would be tremendously helpful; right now to find out what a certain show is about I need to go to the website and find its entry. Luckily all the entries for past shows are there for easy reference, but having a brief description (even just the participant's names) in the comment field would be very helpful.
The New, New Podcast Review: Podcast Review: IT Conversations; Memory Lane
The New, New Podcast Review: Podcast Review: IT Conversations; Voices in Your Head
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Tagged: podcast podcasting review
Posted by cori at December 6, 2004 12:02 PM