I am rediscovering the podcasting world as I write this. Although I’ve been listening to a couple of podcasts for the last nine month or so, and even produced three episodes of my own podcast, I just realized that I am a total newbie to podcasting.
You see, most of my podcasting experience was around Adam Curry‘s show Daily Source Code. Adam Curry is a bit name in the podcasting world, so I just had to listen to what he is doing. I then made a couple of attempts to listen to other people, but I didn’t push myself enough to study the diversity of podcasting.
As a result, my view of good podcasting was something along the lines of: a 40 minutes to an hour show, daily or almost daily, a mix of speech and music, a couple of sound effects, audio comments from the listeners. You get the idea.
How stupid of me! With all the variety of topics and formats, how did I ever arrived to that view?
Anyway, I am happy to report that that has been changed. I am downloading about ten podcasts at this very moment. Some are about technology, others are about photography, one or two about productivity, and a couple of music ones too.
Obviously, not all of them fit my previous view of a good podcast. Some are as short as three minutes, speech only. Others are longer than four hours, full of music. Some don’t have large enough audience to get the audio feedback. Others, just don’t include it in the shows.
And while we are on the topic, I have to say that I ditched amaroK. It’s a beautiful piece of software, but it just doesn’t fit my habbits. I don’t need most of the bells and whistles of it, and what I really need is a simplier interface. Plus, amaroK doesn’t work too well with podcasts just yet. It never downloads them itself, although I have the program running all the time. It needs a kick in the butt to actually go out there and grab new content. That’ll probably get fixed in the upcoming versions, but I just don’t care.
For now, I’ll be using BPConf, which is a simple KDE interface for bashpodder. Content-wise, I’ve found a lot of good shows at Podcast.net podcast directory. I’ll post my favourite ones, when the dust of choice will settle.
And with all these changes, who knows – maybe I will start podcasting again…