With a month’s training lost to illness and travel, I am finally back into the groove prepping to run the January 13 PF Chang’s Marathon (see how much I love running). This means I need heavy distractions, like music, as well as the occasional podcast. I am not subscribed to anything in particular, and mostly cherry pick things from ITConversations.
I almost fell over in joy and laughter today listening to Guy Kawasaki on The Art of Innovation:
He presents a number of examples for each of the steps, using both his own experience at Apple as well as by presenting innovative products and how they were developed. His common sense thoughts are both entertaining and useful.
The irony was he starts out by telling the audience how “most CEO keynote’s really suck” how they go on forever- his approach is always to do a “Top 10” format, so you always know if he is on slide 5, he is “half way through sucking”.
Well I was enjoying hearing about the benefits of mantras over bland mission statements, and his ideas on jumping curves, etc. Ironically, my podcast just cut out on step 7! I think I may not have downloaded the full mp3. It made my laugh just at myself.
But it was a brilliant, sharp edged, and refreshing voice to hear.
I also heard the other day a segment from IEEE Spectrum Radio – theses stores are more like traditional radio news features, but I was opened to some new technology ideas in Car Personalities, Smart Parking & Volcanoes – especially on the concepts of web and mobile technology to deal with the issues of car parking in big cities. And the segment by Bob Lucky on the dreaded Q&A question that starts, “Are You Aware of…” was a gem. And I almost expected on the Volcano monitoring story about Guadelupe to hear the voice of my old geology office mate Jean-Christophe, who I thought had worked at the observatory, but it was someone else. Where ever you are J-C, hope life is good.
See, I can like podcasts….
Alan,
I started training early this year to do short triathlons and couldn’t have done any of my indoor training (treadmill, cycling on trainer) without my iPod. I split the time between music, audio books and podcasts (Edtech stuff and TED talks).
Thanks for sharing Guy’s talk. It’s great.
🙂
Sue
If your looking for a good place for some new podcasts, http://www.oculture.com/ has a bunch of lists of good places. I keep telling myself that I’m going to start listening to more podcasts, but I never seem to find the time. I guess I should just start running. I have some friends that run in the PF Chang’s every year and always talk about how good of a time it is. I can’t imagine running for 13 or 26 miles being a good time. Good luck with it.
Treadmill + podcasts = Sanity…
for two reasons… I get bored listening to podcasts and find myself switching off or finding something more exciting to do…
and
I get bored running on a treadmill… but doing these things together feels like far far less of a waste of time than doing either on their own!
Thanks for the link I am really looking forward to going to the gym tomorrow now!
I admit to struggling with long podcasts. I think I can handle about 30-40 minutes max.
We try and keep ours to about a 5 minute average over a month…mainly to keep me sane!
Good luck with your training!
Good point Craig- I believe in the re-worded adage, “I would have created a shorter podcast if I had more time” – good planning, post production are those things that take time (I admit sometimes doing quick edits myself though). For a conference presentation, there’s not much you can do, unless you edit down to highlights; but for a planned show, you have lots of control.
For our NMC Conversations, aiming to stay between 15 and 30 minutes, we work up an outline ahead of time; not a script, but a map to keep us on target.
Another annoyance is overly long intros, musically overladen coolness, and recaps- get to the stuff. I recall one on PhotoShop techniques where out of an 11 minute recording, there was 5 minutes of up front crap and 3 minutes of closing.
Lastly, and here’s one for Sue Waters, what we are talking about here is making use of audio, and is not necessarily “podcasting” per se- the subscription/auto download approach.
But I quibble as always in semantics.
Actually I was thinking that you Alan probably are listening to more podcasts than me 🙂 . I used to listen when I was driving but I really need so time when I do switch off and smell the roses. So nowadays I listen to more streaming audio and video than podcasts. Semantics 🙂 scientific background.