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February 02, 2005
Podcast Review: TheCommute
This entry posted in:
3 stars
, I do not subscribe
, Podcast Review
Format: conversation
Content: whatever comes up - often light tech talk, traffic, daily goings on
Rating: 
What I'm going to do: maybe listen occasionally
Typical Length: 15 - 25 minutes (as long as the drive to or from work)
One of the two participants in this podcast (who are known only as voice one and voice two) thinks "it is entirely boring toss," whatever that is. In some ways, I agree. If Samuel Beckett wrote scripts for podcasts, this would be one of them. Nothing ever happens in this podcast (not that anything has to happen in a podcast), and little of any interest in it's own right is discussed. This is the blog-about-my-cat version of podcasting, where the greatest interest is likely to be from those who know the participants (disclosure: I have blogged about my cat). You know, if there were sparks that flew occasionally, or even some philosophical disagreement on a subject that I'm interested in - an interchange of differing opinions, whether it be confrontational or good-natured - that might give some compelling interest to the podcast.
But that's not what this podcast is about. And in point of fact, I was much more interested in Voice 1 and Voice 2's daily commute than I was in Chris Rockwell's dinner, and this is, if anything, less work than what Chris puts into his shows - a fine example of the fact that a person can podcast about anything (or nothing). No, this is a podcast about the mundanity of everyday life, and in fact revels in the basic boringness of driving to work and the ways these two gentlemen find to make it not so boring (for them, and by extension for us). And to be honest, I listened to a dozen or more of these an made sure I heard every bit of every one and while I wasn't enthralled, it was a briefly interesting slice of life in another country. Not something I'd want to listen to every day, and while there is somewhat of a through-line to the conversation as the participants refer to things they talked about several days ago or that occurred off-mic, none of the stuff they're discussing is important enough for me to feel the need to go back and find the earlier references, which is refreshing.
These fellows actually do a good job in keeping their conversations real. There's no attempt to make the podcast interesting for listeners - what you hear is what you get. And at least one of the participants is enjoying it enough to keep doing it five days a week. A classic podcast about nothing.
File-naming leaves a little to be desired here; while there's a date tag in the file-name, the file- or track-name "TC20050201H.mp3" isn't particularly revealing - the rest of the meta-data (artist, album - tags like that) is OK (rant). No music is played (although maybe they listen to the radio occasionally), so tack lengths are irrelevant. I would say that for the type of content (all talk) the 96 kbps encoding rate is pretty high, making for largish files. Aside from that there are no production aspects to speak of, and the participants are noticably un-self-conscious in their delivery. Since the motivating force behind The Commute seems to be enjoying what they're doing, I firmly encourage him to keep it up.
Subscribe to mp3s.
Tagged: podcast podcasting review
Posted by cori at February 2, 2005 06:11 AM