16 April 2006

Discovering podcasts

Podcasts have been popular for a while (the last year or so), but I had yet to give them a try myself.

I find that hobbies are much more satisfying if you do them consistently. They become a kind of familiar ritual and you can build upon what you've learned. I'd rather follow one hockey team then be superficially up-to-date on baseball, basketball, football, etc.

So of course, the first thing I had to do was find some podcast aggregation software (very similar to RSS readers). During my cursory experiment, I tried Odeo.com and the open-source Juice (formerly known as iPodder). Odeo is a web-based podcasting aggregator (the analogue of Bloglines). It seemed kind of slow, so I opted for Juice. The Juice software is installed directly on your computer (Linux, Mac and Windows are supported) and it downloads podcasts onto your hard drive, which seems more efficient since a podcast can be in excess of 10 MB. The neat thing is that it automates the downloading process so all you have to do is "subscribe" to some podcast feeds and whenever they post new podcasts, these will automatically be downloaded to your computer where you can watch them at your leisure.

Here are some podcast feeds I've been trying:

I like the idea of listening to radio/podcasts. It's a good way to practice focusing on one thing and listening carefully. The computer makes me too much of a distracted, multi-tasking, visual-oriented person.

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