Podcast Karma - Feb 2nd, '10
1) I have rather a lot of podcasts queued up in the Droid, but the ones I'm most likely to listen to are:
This week in tech
Scientific American Podcast
PRI: The World
On the media
MetaFilter podcast
The Economist podcast
BoagWorld podcast
Buzz out loud
Radio lab
Slate daily podcast
PC gamer podcast
NPR: Most emailed stories
IT conversations
For those wondering, I use DoggCatcher as the podcast client on my Driod. Highly recommended. Fully automated, and it plays nice with my bluetooth headset.
2) One of the problems with getting this stuff via podcasts rather than radio is how to pay for it. With the NPR sorts of programs on the radio I pay a donation once a year and I'm good. Or not, since it's technically free. But podcasts are all over the map in terms of my karmic obligations. Some podcasts, such as the MetaFilter podcast, are suppose to free and you can't pay for it if you wanted to. Others, like the PRI podcasts, are explicitly asking for donations. And a few, like The Economist podcast, are basically stealing if I don't pay.
The core problem is coordinating how to pay what's fair. Even if I can figure out what I *should* pay it seems a little silly to track down a payment page (Once a month? Once a year?) and pay a few dollars. And some, like the NPR, make it impossible to pay for the programs directly. Most mystifying are the podcasts that aggregate a variety of shows, such as the Slate daily podcast. How am I suppose to pay for those? So just keeping track of where and when to pay is a complete pain.
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. With print newspapers slowly dying (as they should), and more and more radio style programming being shifted to podcasts, there should be an emerging subscription or micro-payment system. People want to pay for this stuff, it's just too complicated right now. My hope is that there will be an easy way to directly pay the people doing the podcasts. My worry is that it will end up being like cable TV where an otherwise useless company rips off both customers and content creators.
4 Comments
Comments:
http://www.publicradio.org/columns/futuretense/
CNET's daily podcast is also good
http://news.cnet.com/daily-podcast/
Meanwhile we have plenty of flotation devices handy if you need them. Which is my silly way of saying, hang in there, the drowning feeling will eventually pass. Personally I think a big bowl of guac helps, but that's probably because I've become addicted to the stuff.
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