Dear MBW: I just want things to be like they used to

I used to love MacBreak Weekly. But I finally gave up and unsubscribed. Why? Here's an example. And keep in mind, this is not an isolated incident. This is a representative sample:

Episode #117. They've got Wil Shipley. Great guest. Should be a great show. Wil is (trying to) talk about scanning barcodes with a cellphone camera. Andy Ihnatko interrupts with a digression about how he takes pictures of books in the store and later buys them online. Leo LaPorte interrupts Andy with a digression about how buying books online is just so much more convenient. Andy interrupts Leo with a digression about how he's finding more and more books scanned into Google. Alex jumps in to defend the value of the printed book. The whole thing devolves into a discussion about which books are worth owning in physical form. (Answer: books with lots of pictures.) Total time before Wil even speaks again: six minutes. And he never did return to exactly the point he was trying to make before he was interrupted. It was just lost.

So okay, six minutes out of a 90 minute show, no big deal, right? Couple points. One, the thread of the meaningful conversation was destroyed by the interruption. Two, it happened again. Wil started to talk about using your mobile device for comparing prices, and the group launched into another digression about some camera store down the street that overcharges for everything. Elapsed time between the end of the first interruption and the start of the second: Forty-five seconds.

The conversations used to be more coherent. The digressions were fewer, and more interesting when they did happen. Remember the Rat Hole music? They don't even bother to play it anymore, because if they did, it would run non-stop.

It's not too late to right the ship, MBW. I miss the show you used to be.