"You guys suck!"

Sometimes I feel like Quagmire playing "I Never". Particularly, I'm talking about podcasts. I listen to more podcasts than anyone else I know: Soccergirl, Incorporated, All Games Considered, In the Trenches, Diggnation, This Week in Tech, dl.tv, Yog Radio, and PaulDotCom Security Weekly, just to name a small handful. I haven't even mentioned the ones whose topics center on science fiction, girls what got no clothes on, or Joss Whedon's Firefly. (Some people may point out that Soccergirl discusses all of these topics, frequently, at length, and with great vim and vigor. If I were to only mention things that don't overlap with Soccergirl's stream-of-consciousness monologues, I'd be limited to a podcast called "The Not-Having-Sex-with-Smurfette Files".)

The point of the matter is that I listen to a lot of podcasts, and sometimes I feel inundated by them. I listen to them at work, when traveling, and whenever I get a spare minute to work through the positively huge amount of audio data I download each night. There are so many podcasts on my regular rotation that I ended up putting them into their own SQLite database so I wouldn't have to keep alphabetizing them in BashPodder anymore.

The upside of this is that I'm getting news, sports, weather, and pornography delivered straight to my tympanic membranes on a daily basis that's so up-to-date it's almost a substitute for not working until after sunset almost every day. Last week I tried to take it easy and only put in 47 hours and succeeded in getting out early enough to walk home into a setting sun twice. I'm going to miss that feeling after we switch back to Eastern Standard Time. The downside is that I'm starting to get seriously, seriously behind on them and the sheer quantity of podcasts is beginning to become a liability.

It's important for me to remember that I control my podcast listening habits, they do not control me. The other night I flat-out erased an un-listened-to episode of .NET Rocks, just because I knew it didn't have a high-enough ROL (return on listening) to warrant the effort of moving it to my iRiver. Ditto a recent episode of After Serenity.

It's not all doom and gloom. The people who swear up and down that podcasting is a fad are, I feel, quite correct. This isn't to say that podcasts will ever go away, but rather that the huge majority of podcasts are made by people who don't have broadcasting backgrounds and don't have the commitment to keep feeding fresh content to the Great Unwashed week after week. I predict that it won't be more than a couple of years before "Yeah, I used to have my own podcast but...," becomes common blogger parlance and a slightly self-deprecating joke made by the Adam Curry wannabees of the world.

For now, I take honest-to-God solace in the fact that podcasters are slowing down and taking things into perspective. In the last few weeks both Rope Weekly and Technorama have announced their move to less-frequent release schedules. I couldn't be happier. I don't need to hear all of this, and I haven't found a good way to filter the junk out on my end just yet. Having the content authors realize that it's getting a little out of hand is even better.

Next up? Some sort of restriction on podcast length. I've got some ideas. Maybe I should start my own podcast to elaborate on them.