Category: 2 and a half stars :: Go to Main
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: 
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
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.
Tagged: podcast podcasting review law williams vlawg video
Posted by cori at 09:35 PM
October 29, 2004
Podcast Review: Lowgravity.org
This entry posted in:
2 and a half stars
, I do not subscribe
, Podcast Review
Format: talk
Content: politics and religion
Rating:
What I'm going to do: hmm, probably not listen
Typical Length: 15 - 20 minutes
From somewhere on the other side of the politcal and cultural spectrum, we have Todd Higginbotham at lowgravity.org.
Todd's got a lot he wants to say, and he's a little bit of a rarity in the podcast world as far as I've seen, being a social conservative and supporting Mr. Bush (he comments on it in his 'cast). While I may disagree with his politics, I think this is a good thing - it's refreshing to see some actual discourse from the other side of the aisle, and I'd hate to see podcasting become so homogenous that there was only one political voice being heard.
That said, Todd definitely has a message to deliver and he tries to hammer it home through repetition. I didn't care for his equation of liberalism and hatred, or his exclusive equation of his religion and positivity, both of which seem inaccurate at best. He spoke a lot about open-mindedness while simultaneously commenting that there is only one path to truth.
In his latest 'cast he was commenting on wanting his podcast to be more like radio, which seems limiting to me, but I hope he has success with incorporating Skype into his 'casts as a mechanism for live commentary others.
Todd's audio quality is fairly good; his voice is clear and easy to understand. He's created his own intro/outro that sounds pretty decent, and he's chosen to do with out a musical bed. In his later 'casts the outro is a little loud and overpowers his outgoing speech. In his last 'cast the vocal quality was pretty muffled, but he's aware of that problem and promises to fix it in the next 'cast.
Todd's website has links to some of the content he talks about in his 'cast.
Subscribe to mp3s.
Tagged: podcast podcasting review
Posted by cori at 07:08 AM