chrispederick.com

“Pod­casts? Meh.” That has been my typi­cal res­ponse to pod­casts up until now.

For something that see­med to me to be a rather niche tech­no­logy I have been sur­pri­sed by the num­ber of com­pa­nies embra­cing pod­casts. From it’s pro­mi­nent pla­ce­ment in iTu­nes to Tivo inte­gra­tion and sites such as Odeo, pod­cas­ting is appea­ring in rela­ti­vely mains­tream areas. Howe­ver, I did not see it as a com­pe­lling technology.

I think a major rea­son for my skep­ti­cism is the fact that many of the pod­casts them­sel­ves are not really inte­res­ting to me. A large part of this is the fact that many pod­casts do not seem to make a lot of sense in the audio medium. For exam­ple, one of the most popu­lar pod­casts is the movie reviews of Ebert & Roe­per, but their reviews work much bet­ter when accom­pa­nied with clips from the movie.

Ricky Ger­vais

Howe­ver, this wee­kend I subsc­ri­bed to the Ricky Ger­vais pod­cast on Guar­dian Unli­mi­ted after rea­ding about it on the BBC and Meta­Fil­ter. Subsc­ri­bing through iTu­nes and syn­cing to my iPod was straight­for­ward and I lis­te­ned to the first epi­sode during my com­mute this morning.

Now San Fran­cisco has it’s fair share of men­tally dis­tur­bed indi­vi­duals who cac­kle to them­sel­ves, but this mor­ning I was laughing out loud and recei­ving some very strange looks while lis­te­ning to the pod­cast. It is abso­lu­tely hila­rious and I highly recom­mend it — you can even just down­load the MP3s rather than subsc­ribe to the pod­cast. Epi­sode two came out today so I can­not wait to sync it to my iPod tonight and emba­rrass myself on public trans­port again tomo­rrow morning!

This is not to say that I am now sold on pod­cas­ting as a mains­tream tech­no­logy, but it makes a lot more sense when the con­tent is compelling.