The Podcast Asylum

I’m fast becoming addicted to Carmen Van Kerckhove (rhymes with ‘her stove’)’s podcast about America’s obsession with race. It takes me back to my university days as an honorary member of the black community, getting my eyes opened about things I’d never had to consider as a privileged middle-class white girl. The show suffers some technical difficulties (mostly a need for the Levelator), and I’m not much on the music, but the content is important, thought-provoking, and not to be found elsewhere in the podosphere. www.addictedtorace.com

This marketing podcast is the brainchild of Reid Givens, a dedicated fan of podcasting and new marketing based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. Episodes have entertaining titles like ‘Wii the People,’ ‘Murky Water,’ and ‘The Backlash Episode.’ I like the multicultural marketing discussions.

www.reidgivens.com/roi_blog

Science fiction and fantasy author Michael A. Stackpole does a great job of teaching writers the craft of creating good fiction. Since he’s a prolific writer himself, the podcasts appear somewhat erratically, but I always listen to them right away when they appear. It doesn’t hurt that he’s got a wonderful deep voice. Unfortunately, discussions with listeners are limited to a forum—no listener feedback makes its way onto the show. www.stormwolf.com.

As of March 2007, there hasn’t been an episode for several months. I don’t know whether this is a temporary hiatus or a permanent conclusion. But this is definitely a podcast whose material is timeless, so it’s worth downloading the archives.

This was one of the first podcasts I ever subscribed to, and even though Alan Stewart and Andrew Winter have only averaged one show every six months for the past year, it’s worth downloading the previous episodess for discussions about timeless marketing topics like how the effectiveness of marketing techniques depends on higher-order brain functions. Plus they invented the word ‘epipod.’ And they’re Australian.

In this case, I suspect the show was a victim of its own success: once Alan and Andrew started getting major corporate clients as a result of their podcast, they had less time to produce the show. www.themarketerspodcast.com

The Kickstartnews Revue was a tech podcast aimed at small and home office users. It wasn’t not too geeky, and the banter between Howard Carson and Liane Reiter was entertaining. After listening to a few shows I became a reviewer for the main site, which got me free books and software. To my great disappointment, KSN stopped producing the show in mid-2006:

Some of you may be wondering what happened to the KSN Revue Podcast. After stabilizing at a biweekly download rate of about 11,000 subscribers (Feb through May 2006), subscriber interest began to wane due to heavy competition from literally thousands of other podcasts. We responded by changing our format, tightening the show, introducing harder hitting interviews, producing regular new guest segments and so on. We had a blast and even won a couple of minor awards. But good quality podcasting remains a costly and time consuming sideline with no associated revenue. The last KSN Revue is show #58.

Child prodigy (okay, okay, he’s 25) Greg Galant interviews venture capitalists and entrepreneurs about the challenges of starting, running, and selling a business. It’s fascinating even though I’m not planning to create a start-up and pursue VC funding. Where else can you hear both sides of the Digg/Netscape competition?

www.venturevoice.com