Why I don’t listen to podcasts and why they are worse than the written word

There has been a surge in podcasts online. It’s a trend but I tend to shun them. I prefer the written word because I can scan the page looking for answers. I can skim across the article and pick out the relevant bits that I want to read about. You can’t do that in a podcast. You have to wait patiently as the speaker runs through their agenda.

Of course, you can jog the podcast forward, but you are blind to what is coming next. You can scan the written word from top to bottom if you want to. You can start at the end and go backwards if you want to. You can see the whole. That’s impossible with a podcast. There’s far more flexibility in the written word for the reader compared to the listener of a podcast.

For this simple reason, I regard podcasts as a failure in comparison to the written word. And regrettably I do not think that they will succeed. I would like them to because it’s nice to have another form of conveying information and/or entertainment to Internet users. I have done them myself without real success.

However, after many years of using the Internet and writing articles for websites, I know that people skim them. You’ve got to provide the conclusion at the beginning and then add some detail afterwards. People want instant answers.

This desire is reinforced by the fact that, in my case, more than 70% of users view my websites on cell phones. People use their cell phones while travelling on a train or bus or in a public place. This is not conducive to careful and considered reading.

It encourages skimming and “surfing”. It is casual reading. Either a person is dipping into news items getting a feel for the news or if they are looking for specific information they will, as mentioned, look for it specifically which means scanning down the page and finding the answer.

Some people think that podcasts are overrated. It seems that the celebrities who want to express their viewpoint to the world are jumping on the bandwagon of podcasting because they believe it will be successful. I disagree with them.

I think they will struggle to get the listeners that they desire. And there is a tendency for podcasters to produce a stream of consciousness. A lot of what is said is padding and verbiage.

When you write an article you need to be more considered and precise. Ideally, when you write an article it should be as compact as possible. Although, articles can be overly compact which can have a negative impact on their readability.

Separately, and on that issue, when you dictate an article (Dragon Dictate – speech to word) as I am right now it can become too wordy. When you type an article which takes more effort you are more motivated to get the information down quickly to remove that extra effort. There is a distinct difference in writing style between dictating using Dragon Dictate and typing.

I can tell the difference when I read the newspapers. Some journalists such as Matthew Parris of The Times must dictate their articles because they are very wordy. And the sentences are too long. I sometimes think that the editors of the newspapers insist that their journalists fill out a certain amount of space and therefore they use Dragon Dictate to expand what they want to say but it becomes too wordy. I can distinguish between the typists and the dictators.

It brings to mind the ideal length of an article on the Internet. Some website owners write articles which are far too wordy at 2000 words. They are packed with verbiage which people just don’t read or need. They do this for SEO (search engine optimisation) purposes. It is to try and get the page ranked highly by Google and sometimes it works but it doesn’t help the reader.

On a smart phone, a 2000-word article is interminably long. As mentioned most people read articles on smart phones nowadays and therefore around 500 words, I think is correct. This article is 711 words long. Verbiage, right😎.