I don’t expect those of you who are doing podcasts to be extreme professionals, but I do expect that you would want to make it as easy as possible for people to listen to your shows…

There are a couple of you out there that change the naming convention of your files every day; sometimes you put the date in the show name, sometimes you don’t; sometimes you put the date in DDMMYY, sometimes DD-MM-YYYY, and sometimes even Mmm DD when you’re feeling exceptionally artistic. Some of you simply name the SAME THING every day, leaving my iPod with a handful of files all bearing the same information – which one is the new one? Nobody knows…

I try using smart playlists, I try putting up with it, and I try to keep on top of deleting your old shows, but sometimes I have a dozen of a single show on there, and I spend more time finding the show I want to listen to than I do listening. It’s not an iPod interface issue; it’s human error. Pick a naming convention and stick with it; ideally something along the lines of “YYMMDD – Show name”.

I’m not saying that you have to put the main podcast name in the file, but the subject or main topic of the show would be great. I have a playlist for your show, so I really don’t need to see the name of your show there.

To look at my iPod’s display of my Coverville (not to pick on Brian) playlist, and I see the following;

Coverville-2005-01...
Coverville-2005-01...
Coverville-2004-12...
Coverville-2004-12...
Coverville-2004-12...
Coverville-2004-12...

I can guess that the top one is the latest one I have on the unit, but if I want to easily pull up the December 26th show, I have to guess, and then may have to skip tracks to get to the right one. I do appreaciate that he’s using a sensible date system so that the tracks sort newest at the top.

Air America has a consistently bad naming system;

aamr011005br32
aamr010705br32
aamr010605br32
aamr010505br32
aamr010405br32
aamr010305br32

It hurts just to look at those strings of numbers. Have we learned nothing about 2 digit years in the past? I find it difficult to read a number like 030701 as a date anytime, not just in the case of podcasts; which is the month, which the year, and which the day? Is it a European date, an American, or a coder that likes to sort by date? This really bugs me on food products – is a product with “best before 030701″ still safe to eat in September, 2003? Take a bite and find out.

I don’t care if all of the podcasters use the same format, but I would really appreciate each of them picking a format and sticking to it – don’t decide to change it from “title – date” to “date – title” at random points during the run of your show.