When people see my mp3 player around my neck, they often squint and ask, "Is
that an IPOD?" My usual answer is this, "Sort of. It's an mp3 player. An iPod is
just an mp3 player with an advertising budget."
My player, shown on the left, is an iRiver flash player. It lists at $179, but I got it at our local Best Buy for $142. It has one Gigabyte of memory, plays FM radio, records from radio or your own voice through a very good condenser mike. But my favorite thing to do with it is listen to podcasts!
A podcast is simply an audio program created for download that you can listen to anytime you want. It can be on any conceivable subject from marketing advice to oil industry news. It's all the stuff that large media companies don't have the time or inclination to air! There are thousands and thousands of podcasts created by every kind of producer from media companies like the BBC and NPR to individuals with time on their hands and a microphone hooked into a laptop. They range from the truly inspiring to the supefyingly awful.
Some of my favorites are The Daily Breakfast, The Savvy Solocast, This Week In Tech, Podcast411, and the Wired Jesus Podcast. When you click on these links, they will appear in the window below! Some other podcasts I am fond of are the following: The Cubicle Escape Pod, Addicted to Race, The Word Nerds, Chris Pirillo, The Working Podcast. You can even get 1st Assembly of God's Mike Patz, our pastor.
I found them at a couple of different podcast directories: My Yahoo, and Podcast Alley. I tried a podcast aggregator called Juice that tracks all your subscribed podcasts and downloads them while you are away (if you have a broadband connection like DSL that is on all the time), but it only worked once. I went to a support forum for the software, and other people had the same problem who got no answer from the developers. Well, it was a free download, so I guess I got what I paid for.
