I'm pleasantly surprised with how my podcast is shaping up. The Google hits are coming in as they should, and my family seems to be doing a good job of passing it around. It's sounding more professional with every episode, and it feels like I'm doing something worthwhile.

I'm working on the next episode now, and I really have too many ideas for show topics. So I kind of shift them around depending on what kind of questions I'm being asked. I think I'm going to try to get some of my fellow exchange students to come on with me. I admit that 30 minutes of just myself could get pretty boring.

I want there to be another person, but I have no idea what sort of questions I'm going to ask them or what they would want to talk about. So, there probably won't be a guest on episode 003, but probably episode 004. I just need to work out some of the kinks in the production. Garageband really doesn't like to poll from multiple USB audio devices. I had big trouble last time I tried, but it might be due to this USB issue. We'll see.

I really enjoy doing the podcast more than I ever enjoyed writing a blog. That's not to say that I dislike writing, but that it's more of a struggle. You're rendering natural speech and emotion into something that has very rigid syntax and signaling because people can't see your face or hear your tone. With audio, there isn't any of this problem. You don't really have to worry about punctuation. It's a performance rather than something that's sort of smithed and worked over time. It's a more binary experience. You were either good and smooth at explaining whatever it was, or you weren't. There isn't this nagging feeling surrounding every comma, hyphen, or semicolon.

There's something freeing and natural about hitting record and posting whatever comes out of your mouth in the next 30 minutes. It feels like I'm cutting out a middle-man. I'm speaking directly to my audience rather than through a code, and it feels more intimate. I've always felt this way about radio because I've always felt very close to the personalities I've gotten to know through radio. I don't think I'm alone in this. Marshall McLuhan identified this precisely when he said that radio was a hot medium. Radio is more interactive and engaging on an intellectual level than television. It stimulates the imagination rather than lulling it into submission in 20 or 40 minute chunks.

I like radio as a medium, and it's really fun to be creating some of it rather than just consuming it in en masse. To give you an idea, I listen to about 6-8 hours of talk radio per day. I think it's time to give back.

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