Okay, so regular readers know that this summer, I finally got my Palm Treo tricked out to the point that I can now listen to podcasts on it. (I mean, granted, it's not an easy process - I have to review subscriptions manually in my Bloglines account; email entries to myself that I want to listen to; once every week or two actually pull up these emails at an internet cafe; manually download all the MP3 files to my SD expansion card; then pop the card into my Treo and finally listen to them. Zuh?! When oh when is someone finally going to create a podcast-retrieval program for wireless mobile devices, man?) Anyway, despite all this, I was really excited about finally getting to listen to podcasts, mostly because I come from a college-radio background myself (four years as a DJ, two as a programming director as well), and was all intrigued by checking out this hot new thing on the web that's supposedly going to "kill radio" and "change broadcasting as we know it."

And then I started actually listening to some podcasts, and quickly realized what a lot you have probably realized recently as well - that the vast, vast, vast, vast majority of podcasts suck. They suck out loud. And I'm not just talking about random podcasts stumbled across on the web; this includes some of the most popular podcasts that are out there as well, podcasts that are winning awards, podcasts that have tens of thousands of listeners. And it's just so, so disappointing to discover this, because the hype really is true - the podcast format really does have this potential for changing in a revolutionary way how we think of audio programming. And it's just so disappointing to see (at this point in history, at least) that 99 out of every 100 podcasters don't understand what this potential actually is.

I mean, let's just take for example the three latest podcasts I sampled, the last time I was at the internet cafe - Digital Flotsam, Illinoise and The Dawn and Drew Show, all of whom originally came to my attention by being winners in last year's public-determined Podcast Awards. All three of these shows have very similar problems, which is why I think they're good examples of what I'm talking about today.

Let's start with the obvious first problem of these shows, which is the format themselves; namely, in all three examples the podcasts basically consist of one or two people sitting around their house, talking into a computer's microphone and conducting telephone interviews, just like you'd find at a talk-radio station or NPR syndicate. And this in my opinion is a deadly mistake, and one that 95 percent of all podcasts in existence are guilty of - that a podcast simply can't compete against a radio station, when they're offering the same exact thing a radio station does.

Why? Well, the production values, for one thing. I mean, seriously, half the podcasts I've sampled in the last month have been unlistenable, simply because of the production values - hosts who sit too far away from the microphone, recording environments where all these background noises are getting picked up, etc. It's simply a fight a podcaster cannot win - that if you try to compete directly against a professional, commercial operation, with hundreds of thousands of dollars sunk into a professional broadcasting environment, your Dell laptop with the built-in mic set up your kitchen is simply always going to lose.

And this isn't even the biggest problem, either - the biggest problem by far is in these podcast hosts' belief that their witty in-studio banter can directly compete with the witty in-studio banter of a professional DJ. Because you know what? It can't. Professional DJs are most often in the position they're in for a very good reason - because they've spent ten, twenty, thirty years behind a microphone, honing their on-air personalities and understanding in this deeply nuanced way of just what works on an audio program and what doesn't.

It's astounding, I think, just how much time I waste during a typical podcast, simply waiting for the hosts to say something worth listening to. I mean, to be fair, all three of the examples I'm using today did have moments of humor interspersed in the episodes I sampled; but Jesus, people, I don't want to listen to you giggle for 30 seconds at a joke your boyfriend made, that wasn't very funny to begin with. That is 30 seconds of my life I will never get back - 30 seconds I could've been reading a blog instead, or listening to something legitimately interesting on NPR. Podcast hosts need to understand this, need to understand just how incredibly fucking annoying it is as an audience member to deal with dead air, and minutes upon minutes of hosts saying, "So what do you want to talk about?," and hosts singing the entirety of television theme songs, and hosts trading inside jokes that mean absolutely nothing to the rest of us.

Now, let's not get confused over what I'm saying here, because I think this informality and attention to unimportant subjects is also the very thing that makes podcasts so potentially powerful as well. But podcast hosts need to understand that this potential will never be achieved by trying to exactly duplicate what can already be heard on talk-radio stations. If you try to make a podcast that sounds like a radio show, you will lose. It's just that simple, because a podcaster's on-air awkwardness and non-existent production values will simply never be able to stand up to a professional radio station. And in fact, even the attempt alone does nothing but voluntarily point out how much more your particular podcast sucks than a typical show on a typical talk-radio station.

"Well, okay, Pettus," I hear you saying. "If all these podcasts suck so much, how about an example of someone doing it right?" Okay, then let's take what has so far been the one and only podcast I've listened to now that I've truly enjoyed, and truly look forward to whenever a new episode is released. It's called Catholic Insider and is the sole production of this youngish, tech-savvy priest in the Netherlands named Father Roderick Vonhögen. The show really couldn't be simpler - basically, this priest owns a Sony Minidisc recorder, and he just carries it around with him all the time, recording whatever random interesting things that just happen to come into his life. So for a good example, last week Father Roderick was in charge of chaperoning a group of Dutch and Canadian teens to that World Youth Festival or whatever it was called, that the Vatican just got done hosting in Koeln (Cologne), Germany. And so all week Father Roderick was simply posting half-hour shows each day, with stitched-together recordings of the everyday stuff that had happened to him over the previous 24 hours - the train ride to Germany, choir concerts he attended, interviews with teens at the hostel they were all staying at, even a play-by-play commentary at the actual appearance by the pope on the last day.

Father Roderick understands what a lot of other podcasters don't, which is there are things he can do with his podcast that radio stations simply can't. One of the most charming things about "Catholic Insider," for example, is simply hearing the background noises that take place during his field reports - drunken Italians breaking into song on sidewalks, church bells ringing during an evening stroll in Amsterdam, all of them punctuated by Father Roderick providing occasional commentaries on what he's looking at while all these sounds are going on. It's such a powerfully intimate experience, in fact, that even a new term is starting to appear on the web for such recordings - "soundscapes," as some people call them, "audio portraits," and a host of others.

In this context, then, the amateur professionalism and low production values of a podcast actually work in his favor, and in this case actually make the show more enjoyable, not less. Like, one of the experiences Father Roderick had in Cologne last week was an accidental chance to actually stand 20 feet away from the pope himself during one of his appearances, albeit in this tiny little church courtyard that just had tens of thousands of people pushing from behind, trying to get in themselves. And man, let me tell you, there's nothing quite as funny as a Dutch priest getting stuck in a pushing mob while his recording equipment is on, and hearing him say in that unflappably optimistic way that all the Dutch seem to embody, "My Goodness, I do believe we might all die today! If I get trampled to death today, I do hope that one of my readers will find my Minidisc and post this last-ever episode to my website!" Dead air, awkward pauses, unexpected circumstances - these all become assets in a "soundscape" style podcast, because they make us even more profoundly feel that we're actually there with the host himself, actually going through the things that host is going through himself. And this is something that professional DJs in a hermetically-sealed broadcasting environment will simply never be able to achieve, which is what makes it even more entertaining and more unique.

I hope I've gotten my point across here today adequately, although I have a suspicion that I haven't. There's nothing inherently wrong in and of itself with low production values and unprofessional banter in a podcast; that's what makes the good ones so enjoyable in the first place, after all, just as the unprofessional qualities of a blog can often be the most enjoyable thing about them as well. But podcasters are making a big, big mistake by modeling their shows after traditional radio shows, because radio already does radio pretty well, and I don't need a bunch of amateurs thinking they can do better. Instead, I encourage podcasters to spend some time really thinking about the concept of podcasting, about what can be done in a podcasting format that simply can't in a traditional radio environment. And by "can't" I don't mean "the same crap you hear on radio but with dirty words" - I mean the places you can go that radio can't, the things you can record that radio can't, the intimate and personal experience you can convey to your listeners, that radio by its very definition can't pull off itself. I'll become a much bigger fan of podcasting, and believe in the hype much more, once more shows start understanding all this.

Okay, so speaking of podcasts, the other day I did indeed get a second Blogspot page set up exclusively for the personal audio reports I seem to be doing more and more these days. I couldn't come up with a good name, so just called it [random audio]; and just to warn you, I haven't gotten much done on it yet besides simply getting it created. Its feed is now live, though (pettusaudio.blogspot.com/atom.xml), and should work just fine with such automated software as iPodder and iTunes, so go ahead and try it out if you want and let me know if you had any problems. (For those who are curious, I record these using Audioblogger, which is a free service that comes with every Blogspot account; you basically call a phone number here in the US, record a voicemail like you would on an answering machine, and then Audioblogger automatically converts the recording into an MP3 file and posts it to your blog, not even 60 seconds later. And did I mention that it's free? Free, I tells ya!)

I have no idea at this point, frankly, how often I'll be updating there - once a day maybe, or perhaps once a week, which is why it's much better to simply subscribe to the feed and let it tell you when it's been updated. My first recording there, for example, is an interview with my ex-lover *Bettie, a dominatrix here in Chicago and founder of the notorious Mud Queens of Chicago. I was over at her place yesterday, in fact, helping them build this huge-ass stage for their upcoming appearance at the Around the Coyote arts festival in Wicker Park, coming up September 10th. And why, yes, the photos above are from yesterday as well; that's Bettie herself you're seeing there, wielding power tools and kicking ass.

You can definitely expect reports like this on a regular basis - little five-minute interviews with friends and other interesting people I meet, during the various day-to-day things I do here in Chicago in my everyday life. And then I'm also thinking of occasionally recording some soundscape posts myself, where I simply walk around sections of Chicago recording the sounds going on around me, and providing commentary on what I'm looking at while it's going on. But since I'm recording these on my cellphone, I'm not sure if I'll have the quality needed to pick up these background noises; I'm going to try a couple anyway, at least, and see how they sound.

Anyway, so that now makes, what, four websites now that I'm updating regularly - the one you're at now, the podcast one, my business blog [metafeed] (which, yes, I swear, I'm going to start updating daily again soon), and of course my Flickr account. Behold the rise of the Jason Pettus Empire! I mean, sure, the Gawker Empire can still kick my ass...but at least my empire is a hell of a lot less pissy and pretentious.