Thing 17--Podcasts

Again, I am underwhelmed. Why? Well, I wandered around a couple podcast sites, and tried searching a few topics I'm interested in. 'Chocolate' for instance got me a ton of links to sites that were either selling it, selling franchises a la Amway, or selling equipment about it, and the annotations were so cryptic, that nobody could tell. I found a video podcast about, it said, Duck a l'orange, but it ate up so much bandwith loading that I gave up. I can do better on paper in 641.5944. An audio on agnosticism would have been wonderful if it didn't want so much bandwith that it sputtered like a dirty CD. I can do better in the 211s. For something that is promoted as a freebie, I ran into a lot that wanted upfront money to click in, especially music, and an awful lot that were commercial productions. So much for productions of the masses, although the amateurishness of a lot of the ones I eyeballed suggested they were indeed of the masses. Some were awfully slick, though. Perhaps they were like those Committees for the Prevention and Furtherance of Things that sponsor initiatives purporting to spring from the local community and upon closer examination turn out to be funded by somebody from somewhere else with deep pockets and a cause. Many wanted you to subscribe before listening, and frankly I get enough crackpot e-mail for enlarging body parts I don't own, acquiring a real estate empire, or outfoxing the Nigerian finance authorities simply by having an e-mail address, thank you. Oh, and did we mention the ads on the pages? More ads than content--although the ads may be the true content.

I wasn't particularly interested and certainly not inspired to inflict my wisdom on the masses. However, perhaps a program, speaker, or other presentation that a library put on that it recorded and was particularly pleased with might have a use, just as observed in my previous post.