Adventures in Podcasting

My social media instructor recently tasked the class to watch a vlog or podcast and then write about it in our personal blogs. He gave us a short list of suggestions to start with: TWiT, Rocketboom, Web Alert, and Ask a Ninja. I tried watching TWiT, quickly grew bored, and moved on to Ask A Ninja, which, I’m not ashamed to admit, I just don’t get.

So I moved on to Episode 152 of Diggnation with Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht who discussed their ever-growing Twitter networks, shared the top 10 features of Firefox, and outlined Digg’s recent top stories which covered everything from heat sensitive wallpaper to Weezer’s new music video. Rose and Albrecht concluded the episode by dispensing some hilarious relationship advice in response to a fan email. I watched the entire program (which ran over 45 minutes) and I enjoyed it, even though there were a few long spans of tech speak that I barely understood.

During my podcast explorations I developed the impression that most podcasts are targeted to my boyfriend’s demographic – young, geeky male tech types. In fact, my boyfriend regularly listens to Diggnation on his commute to and from his job as a software engineer. So I did a quick Google search on “podcasting for girls” and discovered the Rumor Girls. I watched Episode 142 during which Karla and Karen Gilbert discussed Jimmy Buffet and debated the origins of the phrase “what have you.” I liked that the video podcast was short, snappy, and made me laugh more than once. What’s more, it turned out to be practical podcast viewing because the girls shared a code I can use to buy a discounted domain name – another class requirement.