Podcasts

February 7th, 2006 | Comments (1) | Trackbacks (0) |

No, this post is not an announcment of a new Jake & Tom Podcast. No, we haven’t quit doing them. Yes, we’re still friends. No, I don’t know when the next podcast will be.

For the past week, I have been searching for and compiling a select list of podcast subscriptions. Listening to and subscribing to podcasts is convenient because I can listen to them while sitting at my computer or on the go (via iPod), and I don’t have to be looking at anything as with television. They are several criteria a podcast must meet in order to be deemed worthy of a subscription by myself:

1. Good sound quality. Sounds obvious, but after listening to a Des Moines news podcast, I decided not to subscribe because the sound quality was so poor.

2. Quality over quantity. My 7am NPR news summary is 5 minutes long and is more valuable to me than an hour-long Democracy Now! podcast. I can listen to the former while I am getting dressed in the morning… the latter just takes up too much time.

3. Personalized. I’d rather listen to a Cubs podcast than a podcast about all of Major League Baseball, you dig?

With those criteria in mind, here are my current podcast subscriptions (links take you to iTunes Music Store):

• Cubscast: Chicago Cubs Podcast: A semi-daily talk show about the Cubs baseball team that is a little over 10 minutes long on average. My favorite tagline of theirs is “One more thing invented since the Cubs won the World Series.”
• Adobe Photoshop Killer Tips: A daily video podcast with (obviously) Photoshop tips. I’ve already learned several really helpful things.
• CNETnews.com daily tech news podcast
• CNN News Update: An hourly updated podcast with the current U.S. and world news. Very convenient.
• NPR 7am News Summary: My favorite podcast because it is short and sweet (5 minutes), and because I can listen to it every morning before my classes and feel like I know what is going on in the world. They offer several other summaries throughout the day, also.
• The RELEVANT Podcast: The official podcast of Relevant Magazine. Weekly.

Is anyone listening to an awesome podcast I might not know about? If so, please let me know. I’d love to find a couple of really awesome Christian ones but haven’t yet.