Yes, this is a shameless commercialization and violation of your trust and loyalty. If you are so inclined, you can subscribe to ID3 Podcast Magazine through the Podcheck Site and get a 40% discount AND and give us a piece of the affiliate percentage. Click the link on the left side of the Podcheck website to subscribe to the ID3 Podcast Magazine and throw us some pennies. Their most recent e-mail says:

• Dave Slusher, CC Chapman and Jonathan Finkelstein have joined ID3 Magazine’s editorial board.
• They’ve lined up several great expert authors for ID3 Magazine’s initial May/June issue.
• ID3 Magazine has launched a brand new id3mag.com that features new content - profiles, interviews, feature stories and podcaster studios. The new id3mag.com also includes video and audio podcasts, as well as “ID3 picks,” which will be a rotating selection of great podcasts. They say that more new content will be added “as frequently as possible.”

NOTE: The creators of Podcheck Review do not wish to receive “pity affiliate commissions” from struggling actors, struggling parents, struggling students, struggling immigrants, struggling children, struggling small-business owners, struggling strugglers, or Gary Coleman

Merlin Mann posted a great response on the 43 Folders site regarding the Wired article about podfading, and he unknowingly created Podcheck’s new slogan.

Raising the bar for quality, and way lowering the bar for frequency.

So, we have a new slogan/tagline, and we’re going to use it until we get bored with it. Thanks to Merlin!

Steve Friess wrote a great little article in Wired Magazine about how “Podcasting Takes Its Toll” I think he provided a good sampling of the reasons that folks experience ‘podfade.’

When Steve called me and asked about what it felt like to “podfade,” I gave him the quote about how “I liken it to losing interest in a hobby and then coming up with the reasons you don’t have time anymore.”

I reflected a bit more on the question on the drive home from work that day, and it dawned on me that I met one of my Podcheck listeners at the Podcast Expo in November, and he told me that he felt “betrayed and abandoned” when I quit doing the Podcheck *Weekly* Review every week in the summer of 2005. I honestly felt guilty, like I had let him and the other 1,500 fans down. Sure, I wished that I could do the show EVERY week, but there was no way that I could devote that much time to a hobby. I have a wife, three kids, and a full-time professional job, and plenty of other more lucrative irons in the fire.

What makes “podfade” different from the “blog abandonment” that has been going on for years? The difference is marked by the higher levels of devotion and intimacy between podcasters and their audiences. I’ve never met someone who actually cried becuase they didn’t have time to blog anymore, and I’ve never met anyone who was willing to pay $1 per article just to read a blog. Podcasts are not audio blogs; they are something more [or have the potential to be something more, if crafted with attention to the medium].

Ultimately, I suppose that is why the word ‘Podfade’ takes on different meanings for different people. If you’re not in tune with the difference, or are a member of the Wikipedia police, the word “podfade” is merely neologistic protologism, not suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia.

To each his own. To you, yours. To you, my podcast. Thank you for subscribing!
–Scott