Voices of America

>Podcast listening carries with it a faint aura of cultural snobbery, a notion that to cue up an episode is to do something highbrow and personally enriching, whether it’s a history lecture broadcast from a university, or an amateur talk show recorded in someone’s garage. Both types of show are somewhat educational, in the sense that they expose listeners to unfamiliar subjects and subcultures.

This is only true if you ignore any podcast that doesn't fit in those two random buckets that the author made up. There are plenty of big sport podcasts that are taking the place of sports talk radio. There are also a huge number of successful comedy podcasts if you start scrolling down past the top 25 on iTunes.

If you are looking for great examples that fly in the face of that "aura of cultural snobbery", I can't recommend enough the podcast network of Maximum Fun [1]. It is a network created by the host of the NPR show Bullseye, Jesse Thorn. Most of the podcasts on the network are silly and stupid in the best possible ways. Even the shows that talk about serious issues don't take themselves overly serious.[2] The network is currently wrapping up their annual NPR style pledge drive and most shows are putting out their best episodes this week so it would be a great time to try some. My personal favorite is Jordan Jesse Go which is one of the oldest podcast around and is anything but snobby and highbrow. [3]

[1] - http://maximumfun.org/

[2] - A great recent episode in which Jesse Thorn, the host of NPR's Bullseye interviews Guy Branum, the host of Max Fun's Pop Rocket about his new TV show, growing up different in a small town, and coming out in graduate school. -http://maximumfun.org/pop-rocket/pop-rocket-episode-116-bonu...

[3] - http://www.maximumfun.org/shows/jordan-jesse-go

tl/dr: Thanks to Serial, podcasting has acquired a snobby cultural cachet among the NPR set, but it has surprising origins 10 years earlier among nerds. Still, it can't entirely replace public broadcasting.

What a weird take on podcasting.

"We are living through a great flowering of the podcast industry, whose province of iTunes is something like a frontier boomtown right now, teeming with hastily erected new storefronts. The podcast form has been around since about 2004—it is kissing cousins with the iPod, in that way—but it was only in 2014 that the idea struck gold."

Uhhh... what?

https://trends.google.co.uk/trends/explore?date=all&q=podcas...

A re-flowering perhaps, looking at the trend's rise since 2014 - but certainly not as popular as it was around 2005-2006.

I am glad that I found this article. When I search for podcasts, I predominantly see listings from America and Britain. Unfortunately, I could not relate to most of them as I grew up in and lived in India. There is cultural/historical tight coupling with west except some of the BBC ones.

In my opinion, the radio never took off in India. I see old Hollywood films and realise that in the pre-mobile internet era radio was a major way to be entertained and communicate while in the road. I can visualise family road trips (Playing empty roads .. west Virginia on FM) on a deserted free way. Same for a truck driver and amateurs having ham radio conversation.

On the contrary India Railways have been the primary inter city commute. People talk to each other instead, as there are always many people around (Its kind of true everywhere in India :)). However, with cheap mobile internet, this is changing. co-passengers may get busy on their own smartphone even in a 24 hours long journey. I think we directly jumped from Television to moile internet never bothered abour radio. There was a rise of world space radio in mid 2000s but turned out to be costly. With no restriction on pirated mp3s from the internet and burning them on CD/ putting them in USB sticks and now side-loading on smart phones, we never bothered about or dependent on music on radio. This is one of the reason services like Flipkart flyte who offered paid mp3 download never succeeded. While countries like Norway switching off FM some of the cities in India are just coming up with their first channels, that to full of commercial. Its too late for radio I think. With Google installing free WIFIs in all railway stations and Reliance Jio giving dirt cheap 4G internet on mobile (as a result all cell companies matching their offers) having internet enabled phones will be soon a hous hold thing even in a poorest hoise.

What we don't have is content. There are millions meaning less whatapp hoaxes being forwarded which most of the people see as interesting and true. Especially my father's generation refuse to disbelieve anything which is on the internet(Whatsapp/facebook). There is no sense of responsibility of the people who spread those messages.

There is no good Indian radio or podcast online now , at least what I think is good. I think we need a "Serial moment" .

> "The podcast form has been around since about 2004"

Downloadable audio shows predate the iPod and the term "podcasts". For example:

https://web-beta.archive.org/web/19981212013454/dailydementi...

High production values, interviewing guests, etc.

Of all the articles I've read in my life ... that was one of them.

I don't even know where to start, though I'll try.

I access a lot of media, in different forms, much of if online: articles, books. And quite a bit of spoken or video content.

Most of what counts as "podcast" listening for me comes rather from YouTube, mostly as recorded lectures or interviews. The better material tends to run 10 - 60 minutes, though it can occasionally go over (most ideas, and speakers, as well as myself run out of steam after about an hour).

With few exceptions, I tend not to follow any podcasts as such particularly religiously. There are a few exceptions. I raised a stink some months back when the CBC blocked my podcasting app (Podcast Republic) from accessing its content, on the exceedingly slim pretext that PR's occasional text banner ads constituted "commercial use" -- and the stink was raised specifically because Paul Kennedy's Ideas is a very nearly uniformly excellent program. Unusual, intelligent speakers, outside the Overton window, and generally not heard on other programs.

The other regular programme is WNYC's On the Media, which is also excellent, and largely serves as the breech in the news dike I've erected -- a once-a-week dose of reality seems to be about right for my constitution, if perhaps not the US Constitution....

But ... other than those two (and they're excellent), I mostly prefer queuing up a set of related items, and working my way through them. Even with podcasts, what I'm often aiming for is to string up a set of programmes or episodes that I'm currently interested in listening to. My listening doesn't follow any particular schedule.

For YouTube or other downloadable content, the best solution is often to simply download the material (and usually simply the audio), and to queue it up on VLC.

(I've previously noted on HN that this is possible on Android if you install the Termux and Termux-API aps, the termux-api shell tools, python, and via pip, youtube-dl.)

The Android environment is still sufficiently fuxnored that for a long playlist -- say, the 48 episodes, 30 minutes each, of David Christian's Big History lectures -- your best bet is to download everything first, then queue up the set. It isn't possible to do the Linux equivalent of constructing a playlist and running, say, mplayer over it:

    <playlist while read file; do mplayer "$file"; done

(Though it may be possible to construct a playlist file and run it.)

VLC won't directly stream YouTube or other online video content on Android. So no dice setting up a playlist along those lines.

What's proved most annoying is that the software I've experimented with to date simply doesn't retain or sustain specified lists. Podcast Republic allows items to be added to various lists ... but they vanish within seconds (I've reported the bug). VLC allows queueing up of multiple items, but doesn't really seem to sustain that list very well. And trying to find and utilise the playist files that do exist is ... awkward at best.

Beyond this, when playing content, the controls for managing playback ... don't exist.

Mplayer is awesome on Linux as there are keyboard mappings to skip backwards or forwards within a track, across tracks, speed up or slow down playback, or pause. When I'm following a lecture, all of those are employed.

VLC offers none of this.

Podcast Republic has a GUI control to skip forward and backwards (15s) within a track, which is quite useful. But there's no keyboard mapping.

Short of all of this: there's some truly amazing content out there. Tools for accessing and programming it from a user's PoV are sorely lacking.