#19 (23 Things)

Which podcasts did you find interesting?

I found the video-enhanced Colonial Williamsburg podcasts most interesting! The use of live action to support the spoken text, interspersed with expert testimony from the people in period costumes describing their work is informative and entertaining. (http://history.org/Media/podcasts.cfm)

Sadly, many of the others seemed slow, boring and tedious. Production values and good writing are the keys to a successful podcast. Those, and targeting your audience with a useful message

Identify one or two podcasts and describe how you would use them in your work. (Be sure to include links in your blog entry to the podcasts mentioned.)

This is a medium at birth, with a lot of people experimenting. Rather like airplanes back in the day of Wilbur and Orville, there are a lot of crashes.

Not to be mean, but, with notably few exceptions, I find podcasts to be the poorest of information transmission methods. I can read faster than a person can speak (and would prefer to do so), and with podcasts, there is no option to "skim" for salient points before comitting time to them, so, often, it is a complete waste of time.

Sadly, offerings of quality such as the Colonial Williamsburg 'casts are few and far between and many that are out there suffer from poor organization, dull presenters, weak graphics and so on.

It is rather like publishing a book. Podcasts allow anyone to publish their 'book', but there are precious few first-class writers, and even fewer with a story that I need or particularly want to see/hear.

I think I prefer professionals with credentials to the amateur hours of boredom that represents the vast majority of podcasts. Too many are just 'bad radio'.

I wouldn't subject a class or a friend to most of the podcasting world.