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Hugh McGuire, who founded the Librivox project, and his partner Chris Goringe have launched EarIdeas earlier today. I must admit, I don’t currently listen to any podcasts. About 8 or so months ago I did follow a few, mostly Coverville and the RoR podcast. I eventually lost interest, and I don’t really know why.

I was at first reluctant to write about EarIdeas, not having much to say about it. But then I read this post by Hugh on the EarIdeas blog. It’s entitled “why we chose web 1.0 (so far)” and in it Hugh writes:

Earideas is a bit of a throwback to the old one-way web, but it’s like that for a reason. I’m a big fan of bottom-up organization (del.icio.us, digg), like-minded group organization (flickr), user-generated-relevance and all the rest of it. But it seems to me – especially after our experience with Collectik – that part of the problem with that approach is that MANY people don’t have time, or just don’t want to do all that work. There are so many demands on our attention these days, that many people just want something they know is good, or rather: they want someone to make sure things are consistent. When you turn on NPR or BBC, you have an idea of what you’re going to get. Not so with a podcast directory.

This is a great observation and I find it really applies when it comes to podcasts. Podcasts, I find, are incredibly difficult to “skim.” Even videos are easier thanks to thumbnails and the fact that most big web videos (e.g., stuff that makes it big on YouTube for example) are singletons, that is single big hits and not part of a series. Most people don’t follow a series on YouTube, for instance. The podcast format on the other hand implies “series.” A podcast “episode” is part of a bigger long-running show. Because of the boldness of this format (it’s a demanding format on the listener—when we say “Bob listens to podcast X,” what we mean is “Bob is subscribed to podcast X”), I feel I need an editor or curator to make it easy for me, to skim through it and tell me what’s worth my time. Other users similar to me can help here through social features, but I prefer a fixed category classification system such as the one on EarIdeas for podcasts rather than open-ended “tags” like del.icio.us has for bookmarks.

And if there’s one person who listens to a lot of podcasts and knows a thing or two about online community, it’s Hugh. So I trust him as a curator and I trust the currently-12-category taxonomy. Let’s see if I discover something good…

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