Addicted to Podcasts

Listen to this week's This Week in Tech.  Leo Laporte, formerly of ZDTV/TechTV, has a really fun conversation with Bill Fernandez, Andy Hertzfeld, Daniel Kottke, Randy Wiggington and Steve Wozniak about the early days of Apple Computers.

I've been pretty much playing catch up this week and listening to all kinds of content I've fallen behind on lately.

I listened to several old C-SPAN Q&A (feed) casts including an interview with Adonal Foyle, founder of Democracy Matters, Glenn Reynolds, author of Instapundit.com and MSNBC host Keith Olbermann. I listen to this show in my car and its an hour long so I get through about half of each episode on a trip to or from work. I couldn't wait to head home and finish off these episodes. Foyle, Reynolds and Olbermann were fun to listen to had some great stories. Its a good thing they're so comfortable carrying themselves through the interviews because host and C-SPAN CEO Brian Lamb really just leads with a question and gets out of the way. For some reason Lamb kept pressuring Reynolds to reveal that his website is entirely funded by nobody as though its schocking that people can release content onto the web at virtually no cost. I've never watched the show as it airs and the audio podcast is a little new to me, but I'm sure this will now make it into my weekly regular rotation.

I also tried to get caught up on all the podcasts in the IT Conversations feed. They release so much content I'm going to have to be a little more selective about what I listen to. Basically these guys record sessions and keynotes from all kinds of IT related conferences and release different tech related series' including some public radio content. There's some really cool stuff on there and they release about a dozen or more a week ranging from 30 minutes to an hour as far as I can tell. Notable casts I listened to include, "Suketu Mehta - Bombay", "Europe's Coming Broadcast Flag", and "Explorers Club." I really learn alot of random stuff from this feed.

Mehta, author of "Maximum City" got me thinking outside my current existence. It was really something to try to envision his descriptions of Bombay a city of 18 million people where two thirds of the poorest people occupy five percent of the city. If you listen to one podcast this week, listen to that one.

In "Europe's Coming Broadcast Flag," I loved Cory Doctrow's assertions that Digital Rights Management doesn't work, doesn't protect copyrights and is based on the assumption that "you can build a safe so secure you can put it in the thief's living room." He echoed some belief's I've heard often lately about DRM treating consumers like criminals and in fact pushing users to turn to criminal measures in order to acquire content to use in the ways they wish or are entitled to.

Carolyn Porco's (Explorer's Club) enthusiasm as she presents images and data on Saturn and its moons collected by the Cassini probe is contagious in the audience of Pop!Tech and the listener . I just wish I could have seen the slides she presented as she spoke. The turn toward the spiritual signficance of space exploration and the Q & A at the the end draws the presentation closer to home.

I sampled a couple of new-to-me podcasts this week also. More on that later.

I listen to alot of podcasts. I write about them. You read what I have to say. Enough said. If you know any podcasts I should listen to and write about drop a comment in the comments section.