I used to listen to quite a lot of music. Nowadays I hardly ever find myself thoroughly immersed in tunes, actually listening and not just hearing music. Why? Podcasts, that’s why.
For a long time I knew podcasts existed, but never thought there’s anything worth my time there. Then several things happened:
- I bought my first iPhone
- I found about Instacast1
- I stumbled upon the 5by5 network
Yeah, I had an iPod before the iPhone. Sure, I had phones that were perfectly capable of playing podcasts. But there was sooo much friction. To download the podcasts. To sync the podcasts to the iPod / phone. To find a suitable player with the ability to display shownotes, remember the position and so on. In this regard, the iPhone along with Instacast changed pretty much everything. Suddenly I could catch podcasts on the fly, stream them online and check the shownotes on my phone. Great!
…until I found myself subscribing to twenty-something podcasts2. Each of them producing 60-120 (or even more, in the case of Hypercritical) minutes worth of material every week. Now I am in the situation that I have more interesting stuff to listen than I can handle! Nevertheless, I regret nothing and can only recommend this to everyone. It’s nice to be able to make use of my spare time commuting, doing errands and so on. Talk radio is dead, long live podcasts!