Podcasts

I'm listening to an interview with Bruce Coville on a podcast called "Book Voyages," which is children's lit book reviews and stuff. Cool! There's no way I can listen to it for its full half hour, but it's kind of interesting. I need something else to do because the voice alone is not enough to keep me from getting bored--like radio and audiobooks, maybe these are best used in the car or at the gym. I guess we could use it in the library if we had a program with someone, an author maybe, speaking and people could listen to it anytime. Or we could highlight new books or do book reviews, or even storytimes (but then are there copyright issues?) on a podcast.

I checked out Podcast Alley (it wanted me to download a "podcast aggregator"), Podcast.net (apparently I needed to download Quicktime), and Yahoo podcasts (which was the only one I could use without downloading anything, so by default that's where I am listening). Plus which, it seems to be the nicest to browse around. Podcast Alley seemed awfully slow. And I got pretty similar results on all three sites when I searched for book reviews. I also looked at the most popular podcasts and most highly rated, and listened to a couple of other things. One I wanted to hear is called "Mugglecast," and I couldn't get it to play on the Yahoo site (there were several that didn't work), but when I went to its home site, Mugglenet, it played fine. But it was an hour long and juuuusssstt ssssoooooo sssllllooooowww. I couldn't stand it. I guess I'd rather read the content than listen to it on a podcast. I don't listen to the podcasts for the "things" on Learning 2.0 for the same reason. I can speed up or slow down the podcast (at least with the Yahoo player), but sped up, it's a little hard to understand. So, podcasts aren't my favorite.