There are three types of podcast, from best to worst:

Type 1: Podcasting personality

My new favorite podcast is Speaking of Gay Shows, formally Going South (a South of Nowhere podcast). In a word, this podcast is completely unprofessional. And that makes it amazing! Codey and Sky ramble endlessly about whatever comes to mind, and although they may not have a very high ratio of brilliant insights on the human condition to time, who really does? They’re having fun, we’re having fun, they’re not limiting themselves to a specific amount of time or to a specific subject, they don’t care about ‘keeping things moving’, they giggle infectiously, and they’re just generally hilarious. This is what podcasting is.

Type 2: Podcasting topics

Since this is the last season of Battlestar Galactica, which I rather like, I’ve been listening to Galactica Quorum. Galactica Quorum is about as professional as a podcast can get without getting annoying. They have a specific subject. They edit the longer rambles, and they keep it focused on the topic enough that someone could enjoy listening to the show, even if they didn’t especially like the people involved (unlike Type 1!). And yet, they’re still personable enough, and the format simple enough, that it still feels friendly.

Type 3: Podcasting ego

After hearing about it on Galactica Quorum, I thought I’d listen to the TERMINATOR Podcast. Big mistake. First strike – the title is SHOUTING AT ME, and the website is ugly. The show descriptions are pretentious. And the show itself is like an ordinary radio show, complete with the loud-mouthed hosts who talk too fast, make fun of people, are bombastic and rude, and who are certain that they have the last word on everything. They tell us how to feel, instead of feeling it themselves and letting us listen. And, they’re not funny. At all. This is not what podcasting should be.

Once there were ordinary websites (okay, there were other things first, but that’s beside the point). After a while, the media people caught on, and made sites about their products. But by this time, media pioneers and bored teenagers had started blogging. Blogging was different for a while, but soon many of biggest blogs were written by corporations. So the bored teenagers et al moved to myspace and facebook, but the media companies followed them there, too. Around this time (roughly), online video caught on, and the line between producer and consumer began to blur.

Anyway, myspace wasn’t so cool anymore, or at least was too much trouble. So the bored teenagers moved to text messages and twitter. And now, twitter is being adopted by online and offline mediaish personalities. And the president. Not to mention every celebrity ever. Since I thoroughly hate twitter, this makes me sad… but I guess I’ll have to get used to it.

The latest twist: Anyone but Me, the best web series yet is twittering live from the set. And I’ll bet others are doing it too. Which is… cool, I guess, but I can’t help but feel we’re a long, long way from those ‘making of’ segments on the tail end of VHS movies. Or even from, say, Lord of the Rings special features. Where will it end? How close will the media get to the consumer?

I can see it now:

autowin: @MamaC: thefarmmakeup just said Betty showed up on set. Make them leave!

MamaC: what does everyone else think?

The Entire World: DO IT!!!

Okay, maybe that would be rather awesome…

Idiots.

Everybody’s mad about it. From artists who had their videos removed, to people using WMG music in the background of a video, to the EFF, to everybody else.

Now, I’m not going to say much about the publicity/creativity stupidness of this decision. Everybody else has covered that rather throughly. (I would like to point out – the ethics of ‘content sharing’ and copyright in general is still an open question. 800 years ago, an author would have been honored that someone would want to make copies of their work!)

No, here’s why this decision is so incredibly bad: You don’t delete web content. Especially not mass amounts of web content. By rendering millions of videos useless, either by removal or muting, a large chunk of the web just went dead. And who knew – the Internet is a big place, with lots of distractions. Users who find a dead link, just drop that line of inquiry and do something completely different (Something they can actually find!) In other words, if that Beyonce video, or even, say, the hamster dancing to Metallica goes away, guess what? Ooh… shiny podcast in the next tab. Close this one! That means we’re not going to be listening to WMG content. At all. And I’m pretty sure that’s not what they wanted.

Once again – Idiots.

Random podcast reviews!

2 Homos:

A podcast made by a couple who lives in LA. It is very, very clever. 2 Homos is a typical podcast – short episodes, with one specific topic for each podcast. And while they do usually have interesting things to say, the real reason to listen is for the interaction between Roxy and Virginia. They bounce off of each other in a very funny manner. Sometime they are a bit disgusting and weird, though!

Denise and Donna:

Is one of the big name, professionally produced podcasts – and the one of the few of those worth listening to! The Lesbian Lounge is more like a regular radio talk show. It’s two hours long, and they get big name guests, and have regular features. The end result is, that it often kind of boring. So I just recommend listening to the cool guests, and ignoring the everything else. They do seem to have a regular interactive chat community that runs live with the show – participating in that might make it more interesting.

The Lesbian Mafia:

Is usually quite offensive. Sandy (the podcaster) is very opinionated, and spends most of the podcast swearing at people and groups and concepts that she dosen’t like. It’s still entertaining, if completely random. The only part that I don’t like are the prank calls – but that’s because I don’t like prank calls in general! That, and Sandy has an irrational hatred for bisexuals.

The Planet Cast:

The best of the L Word themed podcasts – KC and Elka are very funny, very witty, and have lots of entertaining L Word related thoughts. The also encourage their listener to drunk dial into their hotline – the result is weird, but also lots of fun.

Girls on Girls

Here! TV’s attempt at podcasting. Both of the hosts are excellent comedians, and they manage to cram a awful lot of entertainment into a half hour. They talk about sex far more than is healthy for any human being, though! (And I mean that in the best possible way.)

Surrender Dorothy:

If you are reading this, you MUST go listen to this now. I found it by a random search, and I don’t think they have very many listeners, so LISTEN! And they definitely have one of the best podcasts on the web! They don’t really have a subject – it’s supposed to be about their ‘obsessions’, so they end up randomly talking about TV shows, video games, and musicals. Perhaps I just like them because they have cute Aussie accents (yes, yes, I’m a typical American!), and because I like almost everything that they do. That’s good enough for me, though – Surrender Dorothy is just plain fun to listen to!

SheWired.com launched this week, the new home of all things Jill Bennett and Cathy DeBueono, and… lesbian media destination? It’s like they’re trying to out afterellen afterellen, except all of the non-Jill content is cloned from LesbiaNation! Great idea, folks! (Not)

The site itself reminds me a bit of good old OurChart – it’s really nebulous and busy, but finding the actual content is a big chore. The one (potential) bright spot is the forum – since it’s new, and there is a pre-existing audience, maybe it will turn out to be interesting. (That’s the only problem with afterellen – the forums are really boring!)

Anyway, they tried, but I’m disappointed. When it was announced, I was under the impression that it was something that Cathy and Jill and some of Cathy’s friends (she named names at one point, I think) were putting together on their own. That would have been pretty cool. Instead, it’s an extension of here! network’s existing stuff – and the quality suffers as a result.

Oh, well.

An aside: Why, in the name of professional lesbians everywhere, doesn’t anyone give Tellofilms some love? It’s basically a lesbian youtube – they seem willing to foot the bill for hosting, and it’s easy to use, and fast (youtube clone, like I said) Afterellen and Shewired and TheSmokingCocktail and everyone else should put their stuff on there! (But that likely wouldn’t please the parent companies, now would it?)

Another aside: I just used a record number of parentheticals in this post, didn’t I? (Yes, yes, I did!)

Bridget McManus is really cool. She’s funny, smart, sexy, etc., etc. Brunch with Bridget is cool, she does amazing stand-up shows. She even has a funny blog.

She’s got this new ’show’ - it’s really a sort of infomercial for this site called ‘PeopleJam’. It’s sort of a cross between a social network and a self-help site. It’s really dumb. I can’t even figure out what the real point of the site is – it seems to mostly be reviews of boring self-help books.

I sure hope that Bridget is just doing this ’show’ for money/recognition, and that she’s not actually working on the site itself.

Her segment is pretty funny. She’s got another stuffed animal, and the whole thing seems quite tongue-in-cheek. So, it’s worth watching – because it’s Bridget, after all – but can’t she find something else?

Fringe:

Fringe is a new show on FOX. it’s made by JJ Abrams, who did Lost. This might or might not be a good thing. I personally don’t care for Lost, but hey…

Fringe show is kind of like the X-Files, but with a female lead, and a mad scientist.

It’s really pretty cool. The basic premise is: Weird things happen. Olivia tries to figure out why. The scientist guy helps. His son get mad at him. There may be odd plot twists in the future.

It does seem strange that the mad scientist is personally responsible for almost all of the problems – but they may have fixed that with the latest episode. The angry son is annoying, so I don’t really like him. The mad scientist is pretty cool/funny. They need to give the sidekick/agent-in-training more lines.

I like that Olivia never has any backup (the son is only really there to take care of Dad) – it’s the individualist in me, I suppose. I like that every episode ends with a big chase scene, and that those scenes never seem difficult or problematic for Olivia – they just don’t make a big deal out of it. If they keep doing chase scenes every ep., though, it might get a bit boring.

I also like the 3D screen text – I’ve never seen anything like that before.

So, Fringe is fun, but not completely amazing, not yet. It does have potential.

I’m sure that anybody who cares will have seen this, but Lucy Lawless is going to be on the L Word!

It’s going to be so cool. (How can it not be?)

And once there, you MUST click the ‘here for more messages‘ link. It’s absolutely the funniest thing I’ve read in a month.

That’s all.

Now, I don’t really mean that. Search engines are great for some things – looking up facts, for instance, or finding a site you already know exists. For anything else, they are essentially worthless.

Let’s say you like bald eagles. If you want to know, say, the wingspan of an average eagle, a search engine is the perfect tool for the job. A few keystrokes, one click, and you’ll probably find the answer. The reason? That information is available on many, many websites. Finding it is easy for the search engine.

The internet is a great way to find information. But most information is not unique to the internet. If you want to know about eagles, you could look in an encyclopedia, or in a book. The internet is simply faster.

But what we really want (or at least, what I want!) are the unique sites. The communities that are concerned with our interests. The website containing information that is found nowhere else. For the bald eagle example, how do you find the site with the the raw data from eagle observations, or the site with the latest information on breeding of captive eagles? (I don’t have any particular sites in mind – I’m too lazy to do any real research, but you know the type) You might be able to find sites like these using google – and if you spend some time at it you almost certainly will. But it is much easier if you can find a site with links to other sites worth looking at.

By now you’re probably saying, “But we know this already! Hyperlinks are the idea that started the world wide web!” Here’s the thing – I think many sites are becoming search-obsessed. Big corporate sites are the worst. Some sites force you to use search – there is no index or other useful navigation. Even when there is other navigation, there are often many older pages that can only be accessed by search. Some blogs are like this too, the worst of them having no ‘previous/next page’ function available. If a category or date button returns more posts than fit on a page, you are out of luck!

Some people do their browsing this way too. They don’t have bookmarks and they don’t remember domain names – if they want to go to a site they like, they just google it! I suspect this causes people to be biased toward using large, popular sites more – after all, the big sites turn up first on search results.

In my personal experience, though, some of the best things on the internet are those that I’ve found through following links. An example:

I am a huge Buffy fan. One day I was browsing through Amber Benson’s site and noticed she was in a web series called Girltrash. This seemed interesting, so I looked it up. (search is great when you know exactly what you’re looking for!) This brought me to the ourchart website – I thought it looked cool, but a big mess. There was, however, a link to ‘afterellen’ on the navigation bar. I clicked on a whim, and once I found my way to the main afterellen.com website, I knew I had found something amazing (and now I waste way too much time there!). But I’m not done yet. I found a reference to Dorothy Snarker’s blog on afterellen, and from there clicked a link to feministing.com, which in my opinion is the best feminist website out there.

Of course, if I have searched for “feminist blog” I would have found feministing.com (it’s the first result, in fact) – but I probably would never have thought to do that if I hadn’t gone through the links first.

So, everybody, keep linking! Don’t assume that the search engine is the best way to find things! And don’t have 5000 links to sites you don’t care about or that are no longer there (and don’t do that stupid link exchange thing!), but link to a few really good sites – maybe someone will find something they really like. To that end, I am now following my own advice …