I continue to put my pennies in a piggy bank towards a future iPod. Until then, in scanning more and more RSS feeds that contain references to the audio enclosures, I am bothered/irked/annoyed by the scant details available to the summary in an RSS Reader:
My Views on the Cheese Curdling Controversy
Today’s podcast on the big stink about cheese.
Download file (6.4MB mp3)
Now regular cheese enthusiasts might automatically listen to my daily cheese diatribes, but if I am casual visitor, trying to make a decision if I ought to subscribe, I would be looking for a perhaps three sentence summary in text form, to accompany the feed.
Not only that, if a visitor wishes to write their own blog entry referral to me, citing my eloquent argumentative style on this important issue, without a good summary for copy/paste posting, they have to try and make up a summary.
Podcasters, take note- you put a lot of time and effort into the recording, but you are not serving a wider feed audience without a decent text summary in the feeds.
I agree that people need to put more in their summary.
I post my script on my weblog for every podcast. I read it word for word, except for the C-SPAN and NPR clips. It all goes in the RSS 2.0 feed.
Charlie