My Favorite Podcasts
Since buying my Toyota Scion last fall, my daily commute has turned into a learning experience. Before leaving the house in the morning, I spend 5 minutes or so building my daily list of podcasts. I create a playlist named “-Today” (the – makes it show up at the top of the list), sync it to my iPod, and then plug the iPod into the in-car adapter. Instead of flipping between stations in search of good music or fresh news, I get to decide what I like. Here’s what’s on my playlist right now (these are all direct links to the podcast feeds):
- Daily Source Code.
- Business Jive Podcast.
- Distributing the Future.
- FuzzyBlog.com.
- IT Conversations.
- ScienceCast.net.
- Scientific American Podcast.
- PodTech.Net: Silicon Valley, Technology, Media Infotalk.
- The Web 2.0 Show.
Some of these are very polished and heavily produced; others are a bit rough around the edges. Scott Johnson’s Fuzzy Blog is a great example of the latter. Scott is clearly very busy and very focused, and has decided not to spend a whole lot of time on post-production editing or cleanup. He records while driving or cooking, so there’s background noise, the occasional phone call, and whatnot. I enjoy listening to Scott, even though I don’t agree with everything that he has to say.
The Business Jive Podcast is at the other end of the spectrum. This podcast successfully combines interviews with up-and-coming CEOs with the occasional snippet of rock and roll. I realize that this sounds like it could be annoying, but Judd pulls it off in spectacular fashion.
I don’t listen to all of these every day, and I add in some occasional randomness for variety.
By the way, we’ve been tagging podcasts with the “podcast” label over at Syndic8. Here are the Syndic8 podcasts. I also have some metadata that I could use to automatically identify podcasts, but I don’t do that yet. Each time I update the Syndic8 crawler visits a feed, I calculate a “dominant media type” for any feed that has enclosures. I could also use this to identify video blogs, or vlogs as they are sometimes called. We also use pings to update the Syndic8 podcasts page.