Segment 10.01

Allow me to break the fourth wall for a moment here and offer you an update, three months into the Vigilante Mind. This is what I've learned so far and what I'm hoping to discover moving forward.

First off, and this should be less of a surprise than it was to me: it helps being topical. Two weeks in particular brought in double the listeners of the others. One was my discussion of Glenn Beck while colorofchange.org was trying to bring him down. Second was my special report on Balloon Boy.

Second lesson, kind of an offshoot from the first one, is that nobody who stumbles upon TVM actually listens to the podcast. So, we're not doing ourselves any favors by being an audio-only site, as we have no way of drawing people in.

Now for what I've learned from your comments. The format thus far, it seems, has resulted in listeners spending more time getting lost and getting back on track than they do listening to the actual content. Parts with relatively little substance (like the opening) run too long, and fairly dense segments move to fast.

The format of the show– that is, that the political philosophy takes the foreground and the current events used as the accent, instead of vice versa. The special segments, such as "The 26" and "Historical Perspective," aren't very well divided out from the rest of the program, and with a weekly show, they're too far apart to be recognizable. For instance, "The 26" has only been featured once in the first three months of the program, so it's difficult to even tell what the segment is.

Finally, audio podcasts are the betamax of the internet. Video podcasts are prominently featured and integrated into Google, Facebook, and of course, are the main thrust of YouTube. There was a brief moment in 2004 when "podcasting" was born that the idea of being able to take a radio broadcast with you was a novel idea. A year later, the iPod video came out, and before audio podcasts had even caught on, the era of audio was over.

Problem is, I don't have the resources for a video podcast yet. Expect to see that upgrade next year. But in the mean time, I'll do the next best thing to bring people into the fold: starting today, there will be brief blog updates to The Vigilante Mind as I write the weekly program, prevalent to the theme of the week.

I'll divulge more about the format change next week. Then on Monday we'll start discussing "Wilted Roses," our discussion on how words have become more meaningful than action.