Radio hosts keep your attention. Radio/podcast is a one-media medium, that is to say it only engages you with audio, so that radio host is competing for attention with things you’re feeling, smelling, and especially seeing. You have to admit, even if you’re very interested in what he’s talking about, Dave lets you space out. He babbles, bumbles, and mumbles.

On the radio, you live with the fact that at any moment, someone could’ve just switched the channel and has no idea what’s going on. The problem is not as severe with podcasts (people don’t typically start listening in the middle), but Dave manages to, in almost every podcast he’s ever done, assume that every listener has been not only paying close attention to everything he’s written about, but also thinks about them the same way. Dave’s podcast with Steve Gillmor today contains very little (if any) summary, sign-posts, or road maps. They just start talking, and if you haven’t been paying close attention to everything Dave has “said” for the past several days, odds are that there will be times that you’ll have no idea what’s going on for some amount of time.

That’s before we even talk about how radio personalities control the conversation. “But that’s why the Sunday Gang is so much better than radio,” Dave would probably argue. He wouldn’t be saying that if Gillmor had wanted to spend the whole talk discussing, say, the NBA, though. A good host will guide guests and listeners through the topics, focus the conversation when appropriate, and generally keep everything between the buoys.

Dave does none of that. Not because he doesn’t want to for some principled reason, but because he simply can’t. He’s far too self-involved and self-absorbed to be capable of the foresight necessary to put out a professional-sounding podcast without heavy editing. Instead of tending to the conversation, he spends all of his time tending to his own thoughts… waiting to talk instead of listening, focusing on himself instead of his “guests”, letting himself go off on tangents.

In short, I’ve changed my opinion about Dave slightly. I used to think that his podcasts were bad because he didn’t edit them. That’s not really the case. His podcasts are bad because he’s bad at playing host (even to just himself) and he doesn’t edit out the cruft that nobody cares about.

Some problems with the implementation:

1. Easily spoofed.
2. Exposes your phone number to the world.
3. No customization of any kind

Those are all easily fixed, of course, and hopefully they will be. This is actually a pretty neat service, but there’s nothing even border-line revolutionary about it. What I like about it: it’s easy, it requires zero setup, and the sound quality is passable for phone calls.

But, really, this isn’t anything special. In 45 minutes the same could be replicated with a PHP script and a voicemail service that emails MP3 attachments. This will be a decent offering as soon as they implement PINs for the service and hide the phone number.

I just don’t even have the words for this. It’s like buying a Tablet PC and using it as a clipboard.

Why the change?

Scripting News used to be a big fish in a little pond. These days, though, the size of the pond is growing exponentially while the size of Dave’s fish is growing much more slowly (to be generous). It’s getting bigger because of professional organizations using blogs. Dave wants to kick them out of the ecosystem so he can be a bigger fish again.

What really cracks me up, though, is how narrow a view of business models Dave must have. Have a look:

My phone doesn’t have a business model. Neither does my porch. I still like having a phone and a porch because they help me meet new people and communicate with people I know. Same with my blog and podcast.

The only reason that Dave’s phone and porch don’t have business models is because he hasn’t come up with one yet. Porches have business models for the Girl Scouts, who routinely sell cookies on them. Phones have business models for telemarketers. And that’s to say nothing of the people whose business is making phones or porches.

The reason that people question the worth of podcasting is because the obvious business models haven’t really thrived on the platform. There hasn’t been much success in selling subscriptions to podcasts, and podcasts haven’t found themselves being vehicles for revenue the way the web has.

Dave takes questions of podcasting viability personally because he thinks of it as “his”. So when people say podcasting is worthless, he takes it personally. They’re probably right, though as it’s insanely difficult to turn a profit from a podcast.

That said, there’s not much of a market for hand-made macaroni greeting cards, but that doesn’t stop 1st graders from making them in art class and it doesn’t stop them from having some sort of non-commercial value to individuals.

This isn’t the first example of some unwritten “authenticity” rule being broken, either. You may recall a story from the infancy of podcasting, three years ago. The man who likes to credit himself with inventing podcasts, Dave Winer, was outraged at being fooled by a female impersonator.

“It’s an act!”, he gasped incredulously on air — on noticing, after several episodes, that a podcaster called Madge had a day’s stubble and an Adam’s apple. So outraged was Winer, that he demanded a directive from the podcaster on how he should interpret it: a sort of self-certificate of authenticity.

“I need to know which parts of what’s she’s doing are real!”, he pleaded. (See our story, Harvard Man in lesbian mix-up wants satire clearly labeled.)

As with Winer, this is just control-freakery, beyond anything a record company could envisage. And there’s such a mean-spiritedness about it, too.