Touching down in the Land of Podcasts

I personally have never used podcasts before but think it could be something interesting to listen to while exercising, doing chores, or traveling somewhere. After reading about them in this unit think it will be something I'm willing to try.

I looked at all three directories for finding podcasts and liked Podcast.net and Podcastalley.com the best. They were easy to navigate around and provided brief descriptions of what the podcasts would be about. I liked how easy it was to subscribe to some podcasts by just copying and pasting the podcast's URL into my Bloglines account. I was not impressed with Yahoo's Podcasts at all as they didn't have descriptions and were very vague in what they were about.

I had a hard time finding some library related podcasts that interested me but did end up on settling with two which could be very interesting. One was called "LibVibe" and it gives you short podcasts (between 7 - 9 minutes) of headline news from the world of libraries. I scanned some of the headlines and some of them proved to be varied and interesting. I also subscribed to one called "Library Across Cultures". It only has one podcast so far but the podcaster went to Japan and interviewed a librarian there about the 20,000 books written in different languages other than Japanese and how it serves the foreign public.

I did stumble across a few other podcasts that I saved to my Bloglines account for my own personal use too. One I'm especially looking forward to talks about living in Las Vegas and gives a first person account of what it's like to live there. I've been to Las Vegas twice and love the "escape from reality" it provides and how it's larger than life. I've seen it from the tourist's point of view, but I think it would be interesting to see it from a local's perspective. I also subscribed to "Amateur Traveler Podcast - travel for the love it" as it had some interesting podcasts on destinations I'm interested in (Egypt) and some on New York City which I'm planning on traveling to in about a month.

Overall, I think podcasts are becoming more mainstream and I think if I put the effort into actually listening to some I will really enjoy them. As I haven't tried listening to any yet my opinion is fairly vague. I did find that while searching for podcasts to subscribe to, there are a wide variety of topics for every interest and age and I think that there is something appealing out there for everyone.