Hide the sketches?

Ok, I have a love/hate relationship with Apple products.

I love the concepts behind them – style, functionality, more style.  (As anyone who has ever seen an iPod commercial knows, style is very important with an Apple product, much moreso than functionality.)  Generally, though, I hate the execution.

I won’t sidetrack into the usual tirade about how iTunes for Windows is a terrible piece of software, or how Apple’s policies towards software upgrades are tantamount to criminal extortion, or how the first generation of the iPod Touch is missing key features that have been available on portable music players since the 1970s.  If you are an Apple fanatic, those things don’t matter to you.  Apple isn’t just a brand, it’s a religion.

But, I digress.  I must give credit where credit is due:  Without Apple, podcasts as we know them would not exist.

If you have been living under a rock for the entirety of the 21st century thus far, perhaps you are unfamiliar with what exactly this whole podcast thing is about.  Basically, a podcast is a series of audio or video files that are distributed over the internet and can be subscribed to by listeners and automatically downloaded to those listeners’ computers and/or portable media players.  The iPod is, of course, the most famous of these portable media players (the term “podcast” itself being a portmanteau of “iPod” and “broadcast”, according to the all-knowing Wikipedia).

Here are a few of my favorites right now:

The Bugle – Audio Newspaper for a Visual World – John Oliver and Andy Zaltzman talk about the news, and it’s really funny.  John Oliver is “the British guy” on the Daily Show, and Andy Zaltzman is a comedian who was done a lot of comedy writing for the BBC.  The show is literally organized like an audio version of a newspaper, including “sections that you immediately throw in the bin.”  The Bugle is broadcast weekly, and recently hit its 53rd episode (not counting a couple of inter-episode specials).  If you like the Daily Show, you probably would like The Bugle.

You Look Nice Today - A Journal of Emotional Hygiene — Merlin Mann (of 43Folders fame), Adam Lisagor, and Scott Simpson talk about funny things in a very “Web 2.0″ way.  Snare!

Librevox — Not a single podcast, but instead a vast volunteer-powered archive of free audio-books that are available for download as audio-files or podcasts.  Currently, I am listening to Mark Twain’s “Life on the Mississippi” (which clocks in at 14.8 hours) and I have several other classic books lined up for my listening enjoyment.  I love to read, but it’s hard to turn the pages and steer the car, which is why I love audio-books in general.  Having new books automatically sent to my iPod makes it even better.

Writing Excuses — “Fifteen minutes long, because you’re in a hurry, and we’re not that smart.”   If you enjoy writing (or are a creative person in general) and are interested in hearing advice from three working writers as they discuss their experiences in creating and publishing their work, then this is the podcast for you.  Each episode is only 15 minutes long, but the topics covered are interesting and insightful.

Of course, there are literally thousands of podcasts out there nowadays.  Most of the good ones are available through iTunes (*shakes his fist at Apple*), but you can find more on the internet by googling “podcast directory”  — PodcastDirectory.com, NPR’s podcast directory, and Podcast Alley are all great resources.  One directory that looks quite intriguing is Learn Out Loud, “the Internet’s first directory for podcasts you can learn from.”

I’m not ancient, but when I grew up, a floppy disk with 1.44 megabytes of storage was pretty sweet.  Right now, I have about 4 gigabytes of podcasts on my iPod and about 12 gigs on my hard drive.  I loves me some podcasts.