A discussion about corporate and business podcasting with tips and guidelines

I've started a new category on Biz Podcasting today. It's called "Snake Oil" and I've introduced it to indentify the companies and people that are purporting to be podcasting experts or providers of "required" equipment and services to podcasters.

I've written about snake oil on many occassions on Biz Podcasting and it occurred to me today that I should start a category devoted exclusively to the scams and otherwise questionable cruft out there. These are people and companies that are, in my opinion, bringing nothing appreciable to the table except the desire to take your money. The loose idea of things that fit into this category are:

1. "Expert" podcasters who haven't produced a single show.
2. People and companies selling "required" gear and software. I'm not against spending money on decent gear and software, but I am against convincing podcasters that they need to spend hundreds of dollars for a relatively crappy microphone or software application.

I'm sure I'll expand the list as times goes on, but for my introductory entry, I bring you Jack Herrington's Podcasting Hacks.

As near as I can tell from a review of Jack's bio on his personal site and on the Amazon site, Jack has never produced a single podcast.


I'm sure that Jack is a very talented software engineer, but he's not a podcaster. Why would O'Reilly publish a book about podcasting written by a person with no visible experience in the field?

Snake Oil.

Here's my simple test to determine whether someone is credible in the podcasting field. Google their name. If you can find their name associated with the word 'podcast', or some variant, and it doesn't have to do with the book or product in question on the first page of results, then they're likely actually doing something in the podcasting space.

If you want a book on podcasting, select Todd Cochrane's or Michael Geoghegan's (try my Google test on these guys. On me too, go ahead). I haven't reviewed either of them, but at least these guys are actual podcasters.