podcast recommendations?

Posted on by Luis Villa

I find myself with lots of podcast-appropriate car time1, and correspondingly my blog-reading time has cratered. And I was given an ipod on my first day of work.2 So… anyone have any recommendations for podcasts worth listening to? I’ll probably try to catch up on the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum music podcasts, these boneheads,3 and the Redmonk crew, but otherwise I really have never listened to podcasts and don’t even know where to start. Recommendations either technical or non-technical (like the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum feed, or good legal podcasts?) welcome.

  1. So far about 90-100 minutes a day worth of driving. I am looking at ways to make that public transit instead of driving, but it looks unlikely to be fixable over the summer. Hopefully fixable next year. [↩]
  2. sadly a third-gen nano; apparently no rockbox love for that? [↩]
  3. I kid because I love [↩]

Published by Luis Villa

38 thoughts on “podcast recommendations?”

  4. I listen to BBC podcasts of things I used to listen too on the wireles.

    BBC Radio 4 Friday night comedy for laughs: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/podcasts/fricomedy/

    “From our own correspondent” is frequently eye opening:
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/default.stm

    and In Our Time is pretentiously awesome:
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime.shtml

    those are what I mostly find time to listen too, but there’s a bunch of others:
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/podcasts/directory/station/radio4/

  5. There are lots of good NPR podcasts, including: This American Life, Car Talk, and Science Friday. There are tons more too @ http://npr.org/podcast/

    (This American Life is, sadly, only the latest one, published every week… so no archives, only one per week. Still, it’s great and appreciated.)

  11. NPR. Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, Fresh Air, This American Life, Marketplace, Science Friday, Live concerts from All Songs Considered

    I also listen to the Penny Arcade podcast (entitled Downloadable Content) and a bunch of podcasts from KEXP in Seattle (http://kexp.org).

    That should keep you busy. :)

  13. Slate’s Podcast is great–especially their Friday political gabfest.
    Dave Levine’s “Hearsay Culture”–A podcast of probably the geekiest radio show in the history of the world
    EFF Line Noise–only broadcasts occasionally but good stuff when it does.
    The Atlantic’s podcasts
    Don Marti’s LinuxWorld podcast
    Cato Daily Podcast

    And whatever time you have left over you can kill with Bloggingheads.tv’s podcast, which produces an hour+ of audio every day.

  14. The only podcast I’ve more or less consistently enjoyed is Baseball Prospectus Radio’s.

    Econ Talk seems decent, but I haven’t listened to more than two or three episodes, so YMMV.

    I think audiobooks might be a better way to go.

  16. You might enjoy This Week in Law, http://twit.tv/twil, though it’s not a given. I have enjoyed several of the ‘this week in…’ podcasts from Twit.tv, and I believe they are all in the iTunes store.

    If you are interested in movies from a technology stadpoint, you might like the VFX show from pixelcorp, or This Week in Media for even broader coverage of technology in entertainment.

    I happen to like audiobooks, and a lot of authors are reading their books before they even go to the publishers these days. For more on that I would say take a look over at ‘the Dragon Page.’

    Have fun, drive safe.

  18. Hey,
    I don’t listen to any podcasts but I also recently acquired an IPOD 3rd gen Nano. At first it didn’t work but that is apparently because the database isn’t created automatically by rythmbox. I’ve switched to Banshee 1.0 Alpha now and it works there (however, this was after transferring a few songs to it using gtkpod, so it might be that gtkpod created the database and now rythmbox knows how to work with it as well).

    BTW, I am assuming that by rockbox you mean rythmbox, but that might be a complete misunderstanding…

  20. I enjoy This American Life from NPR, BBC’s From Our Own Correspondents, Science in Action and In Our time, and a bunch from the Australian ABC – especially Late Night Live. I’m a really big podcast nerd.

  23. This Week in Django, Astronomy Cast, Lugradio, and SGU make up my { /bi}weekly podcast schedule.

    The new Launchpad podcast called Launchpod is pretty nifty too.

  24. I really like a whole bunch of stuff on ITConversations – TechNation is great, and they have loads talks from conferences. I just take the whole feed and just skip anything that doesn’t grab me in the first 90 seconds, but you can get subfeeds too I think.

    Smodcast can be funny sometimes (if you like Kevin Smith) although to be honest I probably skip as many as I listen to, since it is somewhat rambling.

    All the TED talks are available as audio podcast as well, although for many of those you probably want the video.

  26. Wow, thanks for all the feedback, everyone. I can’t respond to everything, but a couple things jump out…

    1) I must be about the only person in my demographic who is usually bored to tears by This American, though admittedly the episode on the mortgage situation was absolutely tremendous.

    2) Roderik- your answer was exactly wrong and also exactly right. On the one hand, I really did mean rockbox- it is an alternative ipod firmware that (among other things) lets your ipod play oggs- which would mean I could use all my music on it, no need to do podcasts. But I also have had problems with rhythmbox (and the version of banshee in F9), and I bet your suggestion about the database is exactly the problem. So thanks.

    3) Joe: as usual, Brette is awesome, tell her I said hi. :)

    4) Paul: yeah, TED was my first thought, but yes, video is so often a necessity there.

    Everyone else, thanks so much- much appreciated!

  33. I second (or third or fourth?) Science Friday.

    I also listen to the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series. Several of the business schools (Wharton, MIT, Harvard, Yale) have podcasts but I like the Stanford ones best.

    And don’t forget audio books. There’s lots of good stuff at audible.com.

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