week 9, thing 21 ~ podcasts

I wanted to explore the "podcast services" winners of the Web 2.0 Awards. Odeo was the 1st place winner but I just didn't enjoy the site. I just couldn't navigate it easily and didn't quite get it to be quite honest. I must be missing something because it did win the award and all, but I want to finish my blog before the 30th so I decided to move on to another podcasting service.

Unfortunately, the 2nd place winner PodShow requires a Quicktime download so I couldn't access anything on that site.

podOmatic was easy to navigate and use and didn't require a download as far as I could tell - I think it uses RealPlayer. One thing I didn't like was that you couldn't narrow down the subject categories very much. For example, after clicking on "Games and Hobbies" the only narrower options were "Automotive", "Aviation", "Hobbies", "Other Games", and "Video Games". Also, it would be nice be able to see links to podcasts similar to the one you are listening to.

Since that was completely unproductive, I moved on to the three services listed in the 23 Things website.

Unfortunately, Yahoo! Podcasts is closing their site on September 30 so I didn't bother exploring there.

I liked Podcast Alley because it seemed easy enough to navigate, and if you click on the title of a podcast it gives you a brief description to help you decide if you want to listen to it. I picked the Childrensbookradio podcast at random and added it to my Bloglines feeds. Unfortunately, it's still buffering after about 5 minutes so I haven't had a chance to listen to it yet...

Out of all of the podcast directories I looked at I thought that Podcast.net was the easiest to navigate. It was easy to use and gave very useful breakdowns of its subject categories (i.e. Home > Arts > Books & Poetry). However, I may be wrong, but it appears that the podcasts are really old, with the newest in the Books & Poetry section being from December 2006. Also, I attempted to listen to a podcast from the Charlotte, NC library system but the whole thing crashed and Internet Explorer shut down.

All in all, I didn't have the greatest podcast experience. I think Thing #21 would have gone more smoothly on a faster computer with iTunes or at least the latest version of QuickTime. No offense to our good old library computers, of course.