I may have gone mad with power or something, but I launched another podcast today! Crazy, I know.

It’s both more and less crazy than it might sound, though. More, because of what the podcast is, and less, because of what the podcast is. So what is it?

Run With Me is a microcast, with 3–5-minute long episodes about running, recorded while running.

I allow myself an absolute maximum of ten minutes to edit and publish the episodes. (So far, I’ve never needed more than about three minutes.) So, for anyone worried that I’m unnecessarily or unwisely adding something more to my already-full plate: don’t be. Apart from spending some of my relaxation time this weekend building the site, the only time I’ll spend on this will be time I would already be spending running or cooling down after a run.

So far (two episodes in!) it’s a ton of fun. I’ve enjoyed the process of recording it, and it’s nice to be able to talk about running confident that whoever listens is actually interested. (As I explain further on the show, that interest in not boring my audience is part of why I’m doing this, rather than just talking to people I know.)

If you have any interest in running, and especially if you like listening to podcasts while you run, I think you’ll enjoy this. I’d love it if you subscribed!

• iTunes
• Overcast
• PocketCasts
• Old-fashioned RSS

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A few comments on the podcast from a form/genre angle, and a few from a technical angel:

You can think of “microcasts” as being not terribly dissimilar from a microblog post in its own way. I’m happily stealing the idea of a microcast from Manton Reece, whose Timetable show is a delightful little thing. (It’s not original to him; a quick [Google search] will turn up instances of the term dating back several years at least, but he’s where I got the idea, and I think he’s certainly one of the first to be popularizing the form.)

I find podcasting as a medium extremely interesting in general (I’m sure you would never have guessed that), and I think microcasts will proliferate rapidly. As my friend Oluseyi Sonaiya and I have often discussed, brevity is a real virtue in podcasting, and one too-little appreciated by many amateur producers in the space. Stephen and I aim for that balance with Winning Slowly, and it’s always been a part of my consideration with New Rustacean as well. People’s time is valuable. Saying something and then being done is a kindness to your audience.¹

And then, practically speaking, there’s the simple reality that it’s just harder to record a long-form podcast while running. Especially a good one.

At a tech level, producing the podcast is incredibly simple: I use the built-in microphone in the headphones that come with an iPhone to record, and do the recording and (extremely minimal) audio production in Ferrite. When I say minimal, I mean really minimal: I chop off the bits before I start talking, and the bits after I start talking, and I do all of that on my iPhone. Then I export to Dropbox, and from there to my CDN. That’s it.

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1. No comments about the length of my blog posts, please.↩