... not finding it to be as important to be a twit anymore

Last week I talked about Wait Wait Don't Tell Me and how that was normally the first podcast of my week, the one that made the Monday commute to work that much better.

Well, it wasn't always that way. There's one podcast that used to be my Monday morning...and then it was Monday evening podcast. Until this week it was my Tuesday morning podcast, but it's becoming a "when I get to it...maybe at the gym, I dunno..." podcast.

That podcast is This Week in Tech, or TWiT. I've been listening to it for over a year now, and
maybe I just need a break, but I find I'm getting less and less out of it each week.

First of all, it's too long. For me, an hour is a good length for a podcast. At that length I can either get all the way into work, or all the way home from work, or a good workout. The shortest TWiT I can remember in the past year was about 45 minutes long. They tend to clock in regularly at 1:30 to 1:45, and some have come close to two hours. Two hours of pure information would be a lot to take, but it's rarely two hours of information.

TWiT does not present itself as a news show. Host Leo Laporte likes to present it more as a roundtable discussion or a bull session. The problem is that more often than not, any topic quickly descends into either sophomoric jokes, people doing poor accents, unsubstantiated opinions and retractions of those a few minutes later, and reminiscing about the times they used to work together. At its worst, it becomes a platform for one of the hosts to complain about some way that they are getting to short shift on something (like Twitter, or invitations to an event). Occasionally they stray into the territory of condemning an entire industry (like record labels or newspapers or even branches of government) for doing something that they don't agree with. Spread over 1:45, with three commercial breaks that often also descend into irrelevant tangents, the lack of focus, poor humour and attitude towards anyone not on their side of the technological equation gets very frustrating. Often I don't feel as much like a listener but someone on the outside looking in, hoping to learn a little something from a conversation at the next table.

These things only bothered me a little bit, but recently they've become worse in the light of another podcast that I listen to. Slate magazine has a couple of weekly podcasts under their Gabfest banner. One is political and the other is cultural. They both feature a panel that discuss the week's events in a half hour (approximately). The difference is that the Slate podcasts are prepared, have a list of topics, and are focused. TWiT, on the other hand, meanders all over the place before touching on a topic until someone gets tired with it and asks to move on to the next one.

The main difference between the two is not just subject matter, but attitude. The Slate podcasts features intelligent people having a conversation about the week's events, disagreeing at times, but very confident. TWiT features intelligent people having a conversation about the week's events, but also focused on promoting themselves and being very defensive about their opinions and what they do.

TWiT is one of a series of podcasts put together by Leo Laporte, some of which are quite good (MacBreak Weekly will be discussed here very soon). Their flagship show, however, has become more and more frustrating to listen to. I won't drop the podcast, and would never tell anyone else to do do, but it won't be as important me for to listen to it on Tuesday morning as it used to be.