The Last Podcast

I have always had a thing for the old Gillmor Gang. After Gillmor split with Podshow, he went dark for a while, but then he resurrected the Gang as the Gillmor Group.

I always liked the dynamics of the group, but in the last few episodes, Gillmor got more and more edgy, Calacanis‘ rather annoying antics slowly took over, and the old dynamic just wasn’t there anymore.

From Steve:

The format of the show grows out of the most recent Gang episode, where Jason Calacanis gave out enough of the dial-in information on Twitter to attract some 20 additional callers, one of which, Larry Miller, joined the show and contributed both to the interesting aspects of the show and my gathering perception that the show is not working effectively to capture and nurture those aspects of The Gang and its predecessor The Gillmor Gang that endear it to both participants and listeners. Today’s NewsGang suggests that a careful mixture of various elements may produce a product that will justify continuing this work, though it is not clear to me that the members of the core Gang can work effectively together in the original structure.

Now, Steve is back with a daily show, Newsgang Live, that actually captures a lot of the old excitement. In the first two episodes, he got a number of different people on (Dave Slusher in Ep. 1 and Dave Winer in Ep. 2 (I am sure Dave wouldn’t come on if Calacanis were within a mile). Topics ranged from presidential politics to RSS - there were “Ferraris” and “mufflers”.

I for one always loved the Gillmor way of doing things. Somewhat chaotic, but always entertaining and I always felt that even though there was a lot of nothingness (=crap) sometimes, I always took away some nugget of gold that made up for it.

The Gillmor Gang in all its variations always exemplified what podcasting could do to me. This is stuff that would never make it onto the radio, stuff that most people would hate and that really only targets a small number of people.

I just hope he keeps this up. If anything, it might bring some new energy to the main Gillmor Group podcast.