Too Many Dead Podcasts on iTunes
I was browsing through the iTunes podcast directory today, and came across a large number of dead podcasts: not Grateful Dead podcasts, though there are a few of those, but podcasts that haven’t been updated in a long time. Many of these podcasts have been dead for a year or more, but some of them only had one or two episodes before the producers decided that it was too much work. Keeping them certainly shores up the overall number of podcasts, and allows users to access the programs that were once available, but there seem to be quite a large number of these dead podcasts. It would be a service to existing podcasts to weed them out, so when people search for something they don’t get overwhelmed with search results, only to find that maybe half the podcasts they find are dead. Apple should set up a system whereby a podcast is deleted after a given amount of time without updates. This would not only cull the herd, but might incite podcast producers to think about making more programs to keep their podcasts listed. Personally, I think it’s more likely that there would be culling; creating good podcasts is a lot of work, as these people have discovered, and if they weren’t motivated when they started, they won’t get motivated now.
