Things I am interested in…

(or other uses for your iPod besides listening to that awful music)

What is a podcast you ask? The term is derived from iPOD broadCAST, and further defined here. As the iPod dominates the portable MP3 player market (~85% at the present time), the name has stuck, although it is generic, and most podcasts can be listened to on any player (they are just MP3s, or the equivalent, when you get right down to it).

Podcasts are great. I listen to podcasts a lot, on a variety of subjects.

In no particular order, here is a selection:

• This Week in Tech (TWiT) – fairly prototypical, and often very amusing. It is generally about tech news, though the panel has been known to digress from time to time (make that, invariably digresses!) Run by Leo Laporte, who is somewhat of a podcasting personality, and very active in the field. Here is his home page.
• Cory Doctorow’s podcasts – from craphound.com and BoingBoing.net. At the moment he is one of the people I find most interesting to listen to, about copyright, DRM, etc… He also writes some good sf.
• Science information – the best of these is the weekly Scientific American podcast. The host, Steve Mirsky, is from the Bronx, and is also often wryly amusing. I’ve learnt more about beavers and turkeys than I ever thought I’d need to know. Others on my playlist include Digital Planet (more IT technology) from the BBC World Service, and the New Scientist podcast, though the brash intro music is somewhat off-putting.
• Movie and entertainment news – until the end of last year I was a keen listener to Ebert & Roeper‘s podcast, but this seems to have gone on hold (I guess while Roger Ebert continues to recover from his recent surgery). However, I have found a worthy alternative to take its place. Mark Kermode is witty, opinionated, and often quite scathing in his pithy reviews. Another excellent offering from the BBC.

There are a lot more, but this is something to be getting on with… Now I have to go to the gym.

On “the continuing controversy over online file sharing”, and non-scarce resources:

•  Piracy Is Progressive Taxation by Tim O’Rielly.
•  Giving It Away and Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books by Cory Doctorow.

It will be interesting to see how this pans out.  It looks to me like the entertainment and media companies are getting pretty worried, but they do punch above their weight with the legislative bodies in the good old US of A.