Podcaster’s Lament

October 9, 2008

I’ve caught up with all my podcasts. That accomplishment, after years of listening to a seemingly limitless supply of these personalized (or at least super-niche) shows, has allowed me to reevaluate my selection.

From Answers for Freelancers (which has morphed into Creative Independence) to the randomly occurring M Show to the regular as daylight Buzz Out Loud, I’ve been listening to a lot of information and making use of very little.

Even one of my favorite shows (TWIT) has been regularly skipped because it’s turned into a gathering of insiders who can’t pay enough attention to their audience to move closer to the microphone or to discuss topics that might actually affect us.

In the last show I listened to as I was performing this iPod cleaning, TWIT featured a hacker-turned-security-expert. This guy is famous in the tech community and definitely qualified to perform his job. What he wasn’t qualified for was telling an interesting story.

For 20 minutes he droned on about his experience with airport security and customs on a return to the United States from Colombia. While the panel listened fairly patiently and asked some helpful questions, only John Dvorak had the intelligence to just mute his microphone and do other things.

What was billed as a glimpse into how the TSA and Customs might take anything you have and impound it under the guise of searching for porn, illegal movies and pirated music was a joke. This guy was stopped presumably because he goes back and forth to Colombia every 45 days and had more gadgets with him than a Brookstone mall kiosk.

I’ve probably said it before, but until I find some more intelligence in the podcasts that are available, I’m going to stick with Randy Cohen’s The Ethicist, Scientific American’s 60-Second Science and 60-Seconds Psych, and Jeff Cutler’s Bowl of Cheese*.

*I haven’t recorded a BOC episode in a month, so I may be part of the problem in good content not showing up frequently enough.

Please leave a comment and share your favorite two podcasts. Maybe I’ll be able to find some great things to listen to based on your suggestions.

More to come…