In traditional radio, an interviewer had x-minutes to get the job done. The duration of the time slot was the hard limit they were working against and it ensur

In traditional radio, an interviewer had x-minutes to get the job done. The duration of the time slot was the hard limit they were working against and it ensured a tight focus on the content. You received a lot of information in a short burst of time. Amateur podcasts by contrast can go on for however long the interviewer would like. The result seems to be an unstructured rambling chat rather than a to-the-point discussion, and you can’t skim it like a blog post or text article to pull out the valuable points – you have to listen to the whole danged thing. Perhaps if podcasts were set to have a hard limit of ten minutes we’d see a spike in quality? Much as Twitter forces a condensed to-the-point blog.