I don’t know about you, but I’ve been through three distinct phases of tethered listening. The first was all about music subscriptions. I had Rhapsody. And Yahoo! Music Unlimited. Mostly I wanted to discover new music, and listen to it wherever, whenever. I ended up with my iPod and iTunes at the end of this phase (because of ease of use), but I really miss the music discovery features of Rhapsody and Yahoo! Music: iTunes isn’t a complete rip-off but I always feel cheated when I listen to one of their 30-second previews.
Phase 2 was Berkeley podcasts. Berkeley and some other universities are piloting programs in podcasting. Commuting to work (by car or by train) really made this a compelling proposition. A 39-year-old on BART at 8am is capable of processing and retaining so much more than a 19-year-old in a lecture hall at any time of day. Listening to these podcasts, I felt so….smart. Check these out. My favorite is “Foundations of American Cyberculture”. Don’t wait too long to listen; the shelf life on this type of material for dinner party conversation is about six months. (But this course, like others, seems to be rebroadcast each semester so that it’s kept fresh.) I even corresponded with the professor, Greg Niemeyer, who is an interesting guy. By the time I was done with that one, I was working in Paris so naturally I loaded up my phone/MP3 player with “European History from the Renaissance to the Present”. Then I tried really hard to get some of the material from the law schools on intellectual property but this didn’t work so well. And the Social Psychology podcast was extremely lame. Now I’m listening to a course from last semester called Open Source Development and Distribution of Digital Information. This semester’s crop looks good too–I would listen to microeconomics and macroeconomics if I hadn’t done so much tutoring for these courses in college.
I go in and out of a third phase: listening to technology podcasts. The one I keep up with is This Week in Tech: think sports commentators talking about high-def television screens. Since I got the Mac I’ve been dipping into the backlog of Mac podcasts on the TWIT network periodically, just because it’s easier than trying to read the manual and reverse engineer some of the nerdier features of OSX.
I’ve tried to timeshift my podcast diet back into ‘regular’ hours such as work, or running, but it doesn’t work. If I try to listen to a podcast while doing email I find that I get frustrated trying to write and have to turn it off. If I try to listen while running I zone out until I hear the end of something that catches my attention. By the time I slow the pace and rewind, I’ve forgotten what I wanted to hear. My peak podcasting times are in transit, cooking and washing dishes.
What’s on your iPod?