Four Interesting Podcasts

Now that I have a pod upon which to catch the casts, I’ve been listening a lot as I walk home, or as I fall to sleep. Here are three podcasts from IT Conversations that I really enjoyed:

• In Bill Gross: Snap, the founder of idealab! discusses their new [in October 2004] snap.com search engine. The podcast is interesting mostly because it provides a quick overview about the rationale for the new site; I was most intrigued by the references to “transparency,” which include this statistics application that lets you look at everything from what snap.com advertisers are paying per day to what keyword are popular.
• Merriman and Fitzroy: Real-Time Filmmaking on OS X is an extended-play session that walks through the process of creating a film in 48 hours as an entry in the 48 Hour Film Project. The speakers, Sean Fitzroy and Vikki Merriman, winners of the 2003 contest for their film Pie In The Sky are interesting and tech-savvy. The film, which you can watch here, is played on the podcast, so I heard it before I watched it. Interestingly, it was much, much better than I thought it would be once I actually saw it.
• Stewart Copeland: The Think Different Drummer is a presentation by the former drummer of The Police. Copeland is a good speaker, and he covers a lot of territory: digital music, MIDI, scoring films, upgrading to OS X. There are some interesting questions from the audience.

Another podcast I really enjoyed was the March 2, 2005 Daily Source Code from Adam Curry. The podcast was recorded “live” as Curry took his daughter to school. I’m a big fan of “live radio in odd locations” (I once wrote a letter to Pierre Trudeau, Joe Clark and Ed Broadbent asking them to appear in a radio series I called “Radio by Canoe;” they all said no) and so I found this interesting. Curry and his daughter are both compelling personalities, and the character of their father-teenager relationship is enough to give any parent hope.