My local friend Dawn Foster has a podcast listening obsession and has followed up a list of her favorite podcasts with a request that some other people share their own lists.  I’ve never participated in one of these chains of blog posts where you tag me to write something about myself and then I tag other people – but this is a good one.  Making a list of clearly identifiable items already being produced by someone else?  No problem.

What is a podcast?  The term has been defined as serialized, shortform audio delivered by RSS – but they aren’t always short, they aren’t only audio (video podcasts are big) and a high percentage are viewed on web sites instead of by RSS anyway.  Serialized online media might be key concept.  It’s an unfortunate misconception that an iPod is required to consume podcasts.

To be honest I used to listen to far more podcasts before I got a good web enabled mobile phone, an EVDO card and the excellent services of the City of Noses dog walkers here in Portland.  All caveats aside, here’s my list and a SplashCast player so you can check out my favorites right away.

IT Conversations – not all episodes are of interest to me, but many of these interviews and tech conference talks are not to be missed.

Democracy Now – a daily audio and video show about current events that delivers some of the best investigative journalism and world news you’ll find anywhere.  This show is an international media phenomenon of mind-blowing proportions.  It’s broadcast on over 500 cable access and community radio stations in addition to being available as a podcast.

The Vloggies Show – Irina Slutsky’s comedy and commentary on the state of the video blogosphere is fun and informative.

Rabbit Bites – two sassy bunnies, with subtitles.  This one isn’t in the SplashCast player because something funky with the RSS feed prevents it from being included.

Textra – If you can get over the assumption that Natalie Del Conte is little more than Beauty Myth eye candy, you’ll find that she actually does some good research into the tech stories you might not have read closely over the week.

1938 Media – Loren Feldman is not a nice man but he’s smart and I can’t stop watching his show about people on the internet.

That’s about the extent of my current list of favorites.  Here are some shows I used to listen to a lot that you might enjoy as well.

The Gilmor Gang – Rest in Peace.  Ever since this weekly two-hour tech round table stopped publishing, podcasting has felt far less meaningful to me.  I mean that literally.

For Immediate Release – Another long show about online communication – PR especially.  Always timely, if a tad uninspired in its analysis (sorry guys).

Diary of a Shameless Self Promoter – Heidi Miller speaks at trade shows but also does a great podcast about promoting yourself as an independent professional.

Those are my favorites!  I’ll be putting this SplashCast player back in my redesigned blog sidebar here and adding individual videos I find and want to share in there as well.

What are your favorite podcasts?  New ones I like can be really hard to find so please let me know.  The practice of tagging people and asking them to blog about something in particular isn’t one I’ve ever been very comfortable with.  You’re reading this post – would you like to participate and list some of your favorite podcasts?  Go for it, link here or to Dawn’s post and we’ll all get to discover more content.

I just wrote a review over at SplashCast of speech-to-text search engine Podzinger‘s new feature to search YouTube. It’s very impressive and wanted to make sure readers here knew about it too.

Results are different from searching YouTube metadata, so subscribing to feeds for both searches would probably be a good idea. There are a number of ways to do that, including Vixy’s YouTube RSS generator or through the official capacity with an URL like this: www.youtube.com/rss/tag/monkey.rss That’s of course most useful if you want to subscribe to YouTube videos tagged “monkey.”

How many people are going to want to subscribe to searches for words used in YouTube? A whole lot, I think.

It’s all the rage on Tech.Memeorandum today. Sphere.com. Pretty good. I wrote more about it early in the day at Social Software. Having used it some more and listened to star-maker Mike Arrington interview the founders – I feel even better about it at the end of the afternoon. You might want to check it out too, and if you have an hour you might want to listen to the podcast linked to over there on Social Software.

Tim O’Reilly’s talk at eTech this March just got posted on ITConversations. Called “Watching the Alpha-Geeks,” (link is to more info and download) it’s a great 30 minute overview of the trends underlying the bleeding edge of new tech. Very cool, very listenable. A great way to catch up or brush up on some of the most exciting things going on in the space. The world really is changing and this talk does a great job of explaining the upsides and some reasons to be concerned. O’Reilly is fantastic, as are many of the speakers in the ITConversations podcast series.

If you’re in the mood for podcasts, the most recent edition of the Gillmor Gang is not to be missed if you’re interested in new media vs. old and the changing advertising landscape. Amanda Cogden from RocketBoom, Jeff Jarvis from BuzzMachine/About.com/NYTimes and Richard Edelman, head of the PR firm that represents Walmart and is smart enough to employ Steve Rubel, are all the guests. And it’s only 30 minutes long! So if you are put off by the usual hour length of one of the best podcasts online – this could be your big chance to check it out. Very forward-looking stuff in this one.

Tags with selected links elsewhere: Podcasts, advertising, Web2.0, change

Oxfam maintains the tradition of European NGO’s using witty online video to build support for their campaigns, this one highly interactive and about economic class: Bit Unfair.

My co-worker at Net Squared Britt Bravo has posted an excellent list of 10 Ways Nonprofits Can Use Blogs. Check it out.

Possibly even cooler than that is Britt’s 7 Ways Nonprofits can use Podcasts.

I’ve been listening to some pretty good podcasts lately and thought I’d point readers here to some of them and the resources around them.

• Who’s the #1 blogger amongst people who have identified their favorite reads in the new Technorati Favorites system? Steve Rubel, a prolific blogger who covers the new PR at MicroPersuasion. He did a great interview with Brian Oberkirch of Weblogs Work, just posted today. He talks about blogging his brains out and the emerging roll of blogs in PR. About 30 minutes long, it’s a good listen.
• After being told by Dave Winer in comments here to stop worrying and listen to his most recent podcast on OPML 2.0 explained in an understandable way – I admit that I do feel a lot better. I don’t think his explanation is as accessible as he thinks it is (I’m going to try and write up an even more straight forward one here asap) but if you are interested in OPML it’s a great thing to listen to. It’s at this link: OPML 2.0 Podcast

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I’ve been wanting to put together some good OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) files all week, inspired by Anne Zelenka’s giant Blogher file and the conversation I had with legal blogger Dennis Kennedy about the incredible potential for this medium.

An OPML file is, in this case, a single file you can use to subscribe to a number of RSS (definition) feeds all at once. This means that with one link you are subscribed to all future content from selected sources. I think that selecting a handful of key feeds in certain topic areas and offering those to other people is going to be a powerful way that information-overload gatekeepers help the rest of the world find and easily subscribe to the best news sources available. In this sense everyone who puts together OPML files is like an editor of anthologies; only the authors that the editor selects provide ongoing, dynamic contributions.

Without further theoretical ado, I’ll tell you how to use these files and then tell you what I’ve put in them.
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