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April 19, 2005

Podcast Review: May it Please the Court podcast

This entry posted in: 2 and a half stars , I do not subscribe , Podcast Review

WLF | May it Please the Court Law Weblog

Format: short audio blog posts
Content: quote of the day, commentary, rants
Rating: 2 and a half stars
What I'm going to do: not subscribe
Typical Length: 1½ - 3 minutes

May It Please the Court is the irregularly published podcast from the Williams Law Firm in California. J. Craig Williams et. al. produce short podcasts containing a quote of the day and some commentary on the headline of the day. Most of the time the headlines and related commentary are related to a legal issue or court case that's come to the attention of the producers. On a few other occasions the loosely law related headline serves as a spring board for a rant about congress in baseball or Microsoft Word.

Don't get me wrong, sometimes a rant is just what the lawyer ordered. I'm certainly guilty of enough of them. But in this case the rants take away from what I perceive to be the value of this 'cast: a short opinion by a lawyer that could serve to clarify a complicated issue. The May It Please the Court blog at the link above certainly fulfills this purpose more often than not in its posts, but the podcast does it less often. On some Fridays, MIPLC repodcasts several other podcasts (Grape Radio and Reel Reviews Radio, to be specific). I'm assuming for the sake of this review that he's got the rights to do so, but I'm not sure why he would choose to repackage that content here.

In terms of audio quality, the actual sound quality is satisfactory, although there are a few occasions where there's significant clipping of the vocals. It's encoded at 128 kbps, which is quite high for the content, but given the short length of the 'cast the size of the files is still negligible. The quality of the actual delivery is sometimes uneven; it seems as though the podcasters are still getting used to the medium, but if they continue to podcast I suspect that will improve.

Speaking of rants, this is probably the first podcast the I've reviewed where I have a beef with its RSS feed. For one thing, there's no tag, which means that audio.weblogs.com will not accept a ping (for what it's worth, for this reason is almost a required element for podcast feeds). It's also missing all contact and date information at the channel level. These are all optional elements, and though I can't see any reason why the shouldn't be there, they don't have to be. However, the elements have the required attribute of "length", but it's always filled with "1". This means that iPodder (and some other aggregators beside, I'd surmise) don't know how big the enclosure is. Not a killer problem, but an inconvenience.

May It Please the Court also produces a tech channel and a video blog ("Vlawg") with different content. They originally requested reviews for both podcasts, but unless there's some more activity on the tech channel I don't see a reason to add it to the queue.

Subscribe to mp3s.

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Posted by cori at April 19, 2005 09:35 PM