Podcast vertigo

As I've gotten deeper into podcasting (both listening and producing my own CTO Connection podcast), I've realized that I simply don't have the same blogosphere bearings I've grown to rely on so much -- those key bearings that allow me to participate in the conversation. You know, the trackbacks, the backlinks, my Technorati cosmos, my PubSub subscription. . . and as the absolute last resort, the occasional decidedly old-school Google search. As it stands, I'm suffering from a serious case of podcast vertigo.

I don't even exist on Podscope (at least as of this writing). Through a stroke of PubSub subscription luck and the undying love of easily-searched textual metadata from diligent podcast producers, I was able to divine that Shel Holtz had mentioned my name on the latest "For Immediate Release" podcast, but I would have missed it without their well-annotated show notes that were so gracefully indexed by PubSub, and I still had to listen to a good chunk of the 75-minute podcast to get the context. Fashioning a response to this mention (and it was merely a passing mention relating to this column, but I still appreciate it) would have meant re-listening to the relevant section, transcribing it, putting it into context myself (textually), then offering my own input into the conversation. That's a lot more work than noticing that someone linked back to me via my Technorati or PubSub ego feed and typing out a thoughtful response.

I think what Dave wrote today about how podcasts differ from blogs is really illuminating: Podcasts can go deep. If blogs are the noisy college bar where dozens of people are vying for your attention all at once, podcasts are the intense one-on-one 3am conversations in your dorm room that require your full attention. Maybe the tools don't exist just yet to reach deep into podcasts so we can keyword search and find mentions of our own names and pull quotes out of context to comment on them and find out what people are saying about our products. That's not necessarily a bad thing -- maybe the beauty of podcasts is that we are forced to step away from our hyper-efficient RSS news aggregator world and actually listen for once.