I read this thing about the Mommycast leaving Podshow on Mike Geoghegan's blog. That doesn't really matter much to me per se, because the Mommycast aren't my thing. A lot of people like them, about 90 seconds of one episode was all I could take. My personal experience was that it was aggressively unlistenable, but then I'm pretty far outside their target demographic. More interesting to me is how Eric Rice teed off on the subject. Wowza, that's harsh!

I'm always of two minds on this subject. On the one hand, a lot of my friends are involved with Podshow and several make their full living off of it. I don't wish ill to any of my friends, particularly the ones who have put their whole economic well-being in this basket. On the other hand, Podshow the corporate entity has squicked me out from the beginning. Even though I was talked in to riding the limo to mooch off their free stuff at PME, it was a weird feeling. I might feel differently if they hadn't used a black kid dressed up as a pimp for the host of the limo rides. If they had only used mammy and steppenfetchit characters for the hosts inside the suite, they could have had a matched set of demeaning black stereotypes. That kind of stuff always seems associated with their corporate events, something borderline (or past the borderline) disturbing and sleazy.

The way the company always has to set itself apart from the community at large, hold events offsite at PME and generally hold up a middle finger to everyone else is the kind of thing that starts the schadenfreude engines running. I like a lot of Podshow people, but Podshow the company is between hard and impossible to like. In the long run you get what you give in this life, and the company doesn't act like it gives much of a damn about anyone outside their circle. Consequently, there's not much reason to give much of a damn about them. Symmetry is a bitch sometimes. Watch out when that karma is gone.