#17

Podcasts are one of my favorite internet things, and I still feel like sort of a nerd when I tell someone about something I heard from a podcast and they'll say "Podcast? What's that?" It definitely hasn't reached the saturation point that so many other kinds of internet technology has, or at least it doesn't seem that way.

I listen to a lot of podcasts, such as:

• Comedy Death Ray (comedians goofing around and doing characters)
  
• The Sound of Young America and Jordan, Jesse, Go! (interviews with comedians, authors, and musicians, and more goofing around and digressive conversation)
  
• Filmspotting (thoughtful reviews of both newly released movies and older selections)
  
• Radiolab (great stories about science and how it relates to actual people)

...and many others.

I don't agree with the NEFLIN definition of a podcast as being "non-musical" because there are plenty of podcasts around (Resident Advisor, FACT Magazine, and Digitalis just to name a few) that consist of just music mixes. Kind of a weirdly boneheaded thing to claim...

The fact that many podcasts can be subscribed to through iTunes makes it really easy to keep track of everything. Also, for me, iTunes beats all of those different directories. The recommendations for similar podcasts are fairly on point, and browsing is quite easy. Some of those directories (at least from the NEFLIN blog) have pretty terrible design, so it's a chore to go through them.

I'm not going to rush to make my own podcast (it's hard enough to convince myself that the world needs me posting in my blog). I feel like if a podcast is worth listening to and if it is going to reach a wider audience it has to have a pretty high standard of production quality, the content has to be consistently engaging, and it should be released on a fairly regular schedule. I'm fairly certain I would fail to deliver on all three fronts.

It really seems that only libraries in large metropolitan areas have regular podcasts (or, as far as I can tell, the only ones worth checking out), due in part to the frequency of well-known authors visiting and appearing on the podcasts. I'm not sure how useful it would be for small local libraries to try and put a podcast together, or a specialty library on a campus, because I'm not sure if the audience would be there and I don't know how much there would be to talk about that couldn't be communicated via other avenues.