Open Thread: Tell Us About Your Favorite Podcasts

By Jan. 27, 2007, 2:13pm PT 20 Comments

For me, the best part about being a web worker is that I can listen (and watch) podcasts and videos on my second display as background noise while I get work done and no one complains. While it’s easy to have hundreds of feeds in a text-based aggregator, you do have to be a bit more selective in selecting audio/video feeds. There’s only 24 hours in a day, and you can’t skim it over like you can do with text. But on the other hand, you can’t read a text feed while you’re driving to a client meeting.

What’s worth your listening/watching time? A few of mine are after the jump…share yours in the comments.

I have 50 or 60 podcast feeds in iTunes, but I maybe get to 5 or 6 a day. I have iTunes set to only keep the latest episode. If I miss one, I miss it. It’s the only way I can keep up…by not trying too hard.

Here’s a few of my favorites.

For tech, I like most of the TWiT podcasts, or should I say “netcasts” as TWiT founder Leo Laporte calls them. I like the original “This Week in Tech,” a roundtable of former TechTV personalities talking about the week’s tech headlines.

Yes, some women do watch Diggnation. For the more high-brow geek, NPR packages the best of their tech content into a weekly podcast.

Another favorite is Om and Niall PodSessions, a podcast by Niall Kennedy and our very own Om Malik that listens like an audio version of GigaOm.

I spend a great deal of my time in Adobe applications, so I enjoy Terry White’s near-daily Adobe Creative Suite Video podcast. White is an Adobe employee. He doesn’t cover the new Macromedia-inherited applications, but I’ve learned a great deal about Acrobat 8 and InDesign by watching his podcast.

Also focusing on Adobe InDesign is the InDesign Secrets podcast, hosted by David Blatner and Anne-Marie Concepcion. No one knows InDesign better, but the lack of video demonstrations makes it a bit hard to follow if I’m not giving it 100% of my attention.

On the lighter side, Battlestar Galactica is one of my favorite TV shows so I enjoy creator Ron D. Moore’s weekly commentary podcast. Likewise, the producers of ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy and Lost have weekly (when the shows air) podcasts. In short, if it’s on TV and it’s popular, odds are the folks behind it have a behind-the-scenes podcast for it that are often more entertaining than the shows themselves.

What makes the cut for time with your ears? Do you juggle them while web working, or are they strictly for off-line time?

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