20 Minutes
In my post pointing to the Pieces of Eight review on Pulp Gamer, I took the hard line position that no podcast should exceed 20 minutes. I stand by it. Boils down to two reasons:
1. If it runs longer than 20 minutes, it's highly likely that you're repeating yourself, failing to edit out the boring parts, being needlessly self-indulgent, or combining too many things into one show.
2. Twenty minutes is about as long as I can listen at once. Neither a drive nor a walk are reliably longer than 20 minutes, which means that I'm going to have to stop in the middle. If I do that, when I'm ready to finish, I'm either going to have to remember by time where in the file I was, hunt manually for the place I left off, or not use my iPod for anything else (and not accidentally hit any of the buttons on it) until then. Not bloody likely, as they say.
On the other hand, the downside of keeping it to 20 minutes is... nothing, more or less. If your single subject really is so engrossing, split the 'cast into parts. If Terry Gross can do it ("In the second part of Fresh Air..."), so can you.
Comments
I regularly take in Elvis Mitchell's The Treatment which is almost an hour long. He's a pretty good interviewer. You might dig it.
The Treatment is actually a perfect example of a program I'd listen to on my iPod if it weren't so long. I tried it a couple of times, but it always fell down when I got done doing whatever I was doing, but there was still more program left.