I’m completely addicted to podcasts. Being able to board a packed subway and still get your daily fix of news or entertainment relief makes the 40-minute commute back and forth feel like a walk in the park. iPods and other MP3 players are so pervasive now, and most of us have no time to watch TV or listen to radio.
My podcast listening pattern mimics my old radio listening habits: I created a playlist with everything that’s recent and let it play continuously. This leads me to keep having senile moments when I can’t for the life of me remember what the source was for my references. I also wanted to tell Andy and the Michaels that I’m now subscribing to Dogear Nation, but my recollection of the shows is all mixed up with Buzz Out Loud and net@nite, so I’d better stay quiet 😛 .
An annoying side effect of having the so-called wisdom of crowds surfacing what’s worth talking about is that most of the tech podcasting tend to cover exactly the same things. They all seem to go to Digg, Reddit and Engadget as their main inspiration for news, so I’m getting increasingly more fond of listening to non-news radio shows from BBC, CBC and NPR. The TED Talks are also top in my list, but I can only consume videos when I manage to get a seat, so there’s a lot to catch up on the video podcast front. Yesterday I listened to Ken Robinson talking about education and creativity. Fantastic talk, if you ask me.
I keep changing my subscriptions, but this is my full current list. Looking at it now, it seems obvious that I need to shrink the techie talks and get more of other stuff urgently there.
- Best Ads on TV
- Best of Today
- Best of YouTube (Ipod video)
- Boing Boing TV
- Book Review
- BusinessWeek — Technology & You
- Buzz Out Loud
- CBC Radio: Ontario This Week
- CBC Radio: C’est la vie: Word of the Week
- CBC Radio: Dispatches
- CBC Radio: Editor’s Choice
- CBC Radio: Quirks & Quarks Complete Show
- CBC Radio: Search Engine
- CBC Radio: Spark
- CBC Radio: The Best of As It Happens
- CBC Radio: The Best of Ideas
- CBC Radio: The Best of Sounds Like Canada
- CBC Radio: The Best of The Current
- CBC Radio: Toronto This Week
- CBC Radio: Words at Large
- CNET News Daily Podcast
- CanadExport podcast
- Cranky Geeks for the iPod Video
- Digital Planet
- Dilbert Animated Cartoons
- Documentaries
- Dogear Nation Podcast
- Engadget
- ExtremeTech.com
- From Our Own Correspondent
- Front Page
- GeekBrief.TV | Video Podcast (iPod)
- Global News
- Harlequin Author Spotlight
- Harvard Business IdeaCast
- IBM – Powered by PodTech.net
- IBM DEMOzone:en Accelerating Web 2.0 for Government
- IBM Innovations Podcasts
- IBM Institute for Business Value: Insights and Perspectives Podcast
- IBM News Center – Audio Podcasts – United States
- IBM Small Business Podcast
- IBM WebSphere Technical Podcast series on SOA
- IBM and the Future of. . .
- IBM developerWorks – Powered by PodTech.net
- IBM developerWorks podcasts
- In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg
- Inside Mac Radio
- Java News Podcast
- Learn French by Podcast
- Learn Spanish with Coffee Break Spanish
- Mac Tips Daily!
- MacBreak (iPod video)
- NPR: 7AM ET News Summary Podcast
- NPR: 7PM ET News Summary Podcast
- NPR: Books Podcast
- NPR: Business Story of the Day Podcast
- NPR: Environment Podcast
- NPR: Foreign Dispatch Podcast
- NPR: Fresh Air Podcast
- NPR: Health & Science Podcast
- NPR: It’s All Politics Podcast
- NPR: Koppel on the News Podcast
- NPR: Movies Podcast
- NPR: Pop Culture Podcast
- NPR: Shuffle Podcast
- NPR: Story of the Day Podcast
- NPR: Technology Podcast
- NPR: Tell Me More Podcast
- NPR: World Story of the Day Podcast
- NYT Op-Ed Podcast
- NYT Tech Talk
- Nature Podcast
- New Yorker: Fiction
- New Yorker: Out Loud
- NewsPod
- Nickjr: Diego (VIDEO)
- Odeo
- Onion News Network (Video)
- PCMag Radio
- PRI’s The World: Technology Podcast from BBC/PRI/WGBH
- Productivity @ IBM
- Rough Guides iToors
- Science Talk: The Podcast of Scientific American
- Science Times
- Sesame Street Podcast
- Slashdot Review – SDR News
- Spanish Podcasts for Beginners
- Steve Jobs and Bill Gates at D5 Conference
- Storynory – Stories For Kids
- Stuff You Should Know
- TEDTalks (video)
- The Economist
- The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos Video Podcast
- The Java Posse
- The Sarah Silverman Program (Video)
- The Web 2.0 Show
- The latest news from IBM in the US
- TimesTalks
- Tourcaster
- Travel with Rick Steves
- Wake Up To Money
- Walks of a Lifetime
- Weekend Business
- Weekend Explorer
- Wired Science Video Podcast
- World View
- net@night
- this WEEK in TECH – AAC Edition
- todmaffin.com
If you managed to get to this line of this long post, you may be wondering why the heck I carry Harlequin Author Spotlight, Diego and Sesame Street in my iPhone. I attended Jenny Bullough’s talk at the Canadian Institute Social Media event last week and was curious to see how them are using podcasts to drive revenues. As for Diego and SS, those are life savers when your 2-year old is having a tantrum in a crowded restaurant.
I would love to hear recommendations for good podcasts, as I keep tweaking this list, so please let me know what you’ve been listening lately.
The bamboo raft 
No smarter planet? May not be on itunes yet…
Just ran a search for “smart planet” and “smarter planet” and nothing came back 😦
Hey, no need to explain your desire for hot tips and insider info on our bestselling romance novels! 🙂
Thanks for the shout-out — glad you enjoy the podcasts! And thanks for the tip re: diego — will have to try that on my 4-year-old. 🙂
Jenny, oh no, you found my dirty secret! 😛 Seriously now, the episodes I listened to were very well produced and I think we’ll be seeing more of that in the future. A book experience should extend way beyond the reading act.
[…] 10, 2008 by bartman905 Similar to Aaron and his recent blog post, I have been enjoyed viewing video podcasts during my long daily commute to work using the Tokyo […]
Aaron, Thanks for the shout out for Dogear-Nation… We podcast because like you we are fans of listening to Podcast. I think DiggNation was one of the first ones I listened to, hence our name – in honor of Kevin and Alex’s great podcast … oh yeah, and I like beer.
Michael
Aaron, I keep feeds from various podcasting sources in my feedreader, but don’t have automatic downloads because my priorities and interests change. I’ll read something in the newspaper or hear about a new book, and want to pop that up more quickly in the playlist, so I try to keep less than 16 or 20 hours in my queue.
Since I had a blog set up on wordpress.com before I migrated content onto my own domains, I repurposed it as the Media Input Queue –> Coevolving Innovations. You can easily follow what I’ve listening to … which has some impact (probably indirectly) on the content that I blog in my professional persona.
I follow the sequence of content on my playlist, which leaves me sometimes bewildered about why I chose to listen to something … but I usually figure it out. As one mental cue to remember where I am, I intersperse “song of the day” podcasts of interesting musicians so I can remember whether I’ve listened to a talk or not.
[…] on my way back home I was listening to random podcasts in my overgrown playlist, and serendipity showed its face. Spark episode 64 came up, and the great Nora Young (CBC again, […]
[…] “frugal” Philips headphones 12 08 2009 I blogged before about being an avid podcast listener. In my new job at RBC, my commuting time is longer (about 50 minutes door-to-door), so now I have […]
[…] TV? Not so much. Coincidentally, on my way back home I was listening to random podcasts in my overgrown playlist, and serendipity showed its face. Spark episode 64 came up, and the great Nora Young (CBC again, […]