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April 04, 2005

Podcast Review: Tech Nation

This entry posted in: 4 stars , I watch , Podcast Review

IT Conversations; Tech Nation

Format: interviews
Content: Technically knowledgable host and guests talking about the guests specialities
Rating: 4 stars
What I'm going to do: watch podcast feed
Typical Length: 5 - 40 minutes

Dr. Moira Gunn is something of a jack of all trades, with degrees in Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering and work experience as a professor and at NASA. Perhaps that serves to explain the varied nature of the Tech Nation podcast's guests and subject matter.

Tech Nation is produced for public radio, and is one of IT Conversations first forays into repackaging National Public Radio audio into podcasts. The NPR show's format typically consists of 2 or more interviews; the IT Conversation series breaks these into separate 'casts. The Tech Nation website has similar information to the detail pages at IT Conversations, and points solely to IT Conversations for the internet audio.

One of the most refreshing aspects of the Tech Nation podcast is that unlike most tech podcasts (for example most of the techpodcasts.com affiliates), Tech Nation doesn't focus primarily on computer, web, and gadget technology. Dr. Gunn covers everything from special effects (Jim Rygiel - effects supervisor, LotR) to social science (Barbara Heinzen - geographer and social scientist). One of the interviews from each set is often part of a regular sub-series; Bio Tech Nation, which deals with, um, biotechnology. Guests cover the gamut from authors to entrepeneurs, professors to CEOs, programmers to futurists.

As we've come to expect from the IT Conversations series, the audio is well-mixed and well produced. The balance of host and guest voices is even and the intro / outro music fades smoothly into Dr. Gunn's own vocal introduction and closing. File- and track-naming is adequate, including both channel (series) name and the name of the guest; however I would like to see a date tag in the name in addition to the existing information. Also, more recently IT Conversations has begun naming the tracks with an abbreviated channel name (i.e. "ITC.TN..."), which I find less clear than the older naming, which had the full name of the series (i.e. "Tech Nation"). That said, the shorter name is probably more useful on a portable device, where the slow scrolling of longer names can be frustrating.

Tech Nation is produced weekly.

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Also see reviews of other IT Conversations Series:
The New, New Podcast Review: Podcast Review: IT Conversations; The Gillmor Gang
The New, New Podcast Review: Podcast Review: IT Conversations; Voices in Your Head
The New, New Podcast Review: Podcast Review: IT Conversations; Memory Lane

Disclosure: To avoid any sense of impropriety, I am going to be working on IT Conversations as an editor in the near future.

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Posted by cori at 09:49 PM

March 30, 2005

Podcast Review: The Bob & AJ Show

This entry posted in: 4 stars , I watch , Podcast Review

The BobAndAJ Show

Format: funny talk with some music
Content: interviews, music, general shenanigans
Rating: 4 stars
What I'm going to do: watch this feed
Typical Length: 40 - 60 minutes

The Bob and AJ show comes to us from Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and is (I believe) the first Canadian podcast I've reviewed. I really liked listening to these guys, partly because I lived for a few years in Sudbury, Ontario and hearing them speak brought back a lot of memories.

Bob and AJ mix up talk and music in a pretty good melange; they typically play 2-3 songs during the course of the show, and their musical taste is good. They've found some good artists in GarageBand and at least a few really good ones (Christa Couture in particular comes to mind), and must spend a fair amount of time researching their selections. The talk in the show centers around podcasting and recently they've been doing a lot of Skype interviews with other podcasters. In addition they throw in a fair amount of personal talk (but not too personal, if you know what I mean). Their self-deprecating humour (threw in that extra 'u' just for you guys, Bob and AJ) and self-effacing manner make them both easy to listen to and highly funny.

Bob and AJ are occasionally non-child- or work-safe but are for the most part unoffensive. In fact (and it may not seem a compliment to them) but this is one of the things that appealed to me about the Bob and AJ Show - perhaps I'm just getting old, or perhaps parenthood has taken its toll on me, but gratuitous cursing doesn't appeal to me much anymore. It's refreshing to hear some guys being funny without feeling like they have to swear. They broadcast once a week for now (typically on Sundays) but have been considering doing a shorter show more than once a week. They claim to shoot for 30 minutes but consisitently overshoot that and end up at 40 to 50 minutes. File meta-data is good, but I'd love to see the date in the track name as well (currently just the show number appears) (rant). Also, it'd be nice to have the track lengths in the podcast (rant).

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Posted by cori at 01:08 AM

March 12, 2005

Podcast review: Teach42 Podcast

This entry posted in: 3 and a half stars , I watch , Podcast Review

Teach42 » Teach42 Podcasts

Format: audio blog entry
Content: technology and education
Rating: 3 and a half stars
What I'm going to do: watch
Typical Length: 25 - 35 minutes

Stephen Dembo at Teach42 is an educator by vocation and a podcaster by obsession. Stephen's podcasting about educational issues and often about the conjuncture between education and technology, as befits his role as a Director of Technology. Stephen also occasionally podcasts about podcasting, blogging, and gadgetry without a direct link to education.

Gadget-based podcasts often provide interesting information about how other real people use their technology and how well the technology works in the real world - I found some of Stephen's commentary about his iPaq phone/PDA to be very interesting. However, I think the real value of Stephen's podcast is his commentary on education and technology in education. Stephen's been in education for some time and has seen it from a variety of positions, both in the classroom and out - he's one of those rare male teachers who loves to teach early childhood and has more recently been the Director of Technology for a small school in Chicago. His insights cover a wide variety of subjects within education, and he pays a lot of attention to other educator's blogs and podcasts and comments freely on those as well, bringing many different viewpoints into his podcast. His commentary on technology and education is especially enlightening, and he's clearly got a love of technology that provides an important viewpoint into this controversial topic.

Stephen is in his last semester as Director of Technology, but I hope that Stephen will continue to evangelize the importance of technology in education even after he's left behind the day-to-day worries of network outages and printer problems.

Stephen often speaks very quickly, which shows his enthusiasm for his subject, but can make it hard to follow his podcast - this issue might be worth an extra effort on Stephen's behalf to try to account for. Audio quality is mostly good in the Teach42 podcast, although Stephen's car-casts have an understandable weakness with regards to audio quality. In addition, some of Steve's podcasts have less than ideal balance between music and vocals and I occasionally have to adjust the volume of my player to account for the difference between Stephen's intro / outro or interstitial music and his vocal segments. Stephen makes a point of noting that he's not editing his podcasts and we're getting the "real Stephen" all the time. I think that it's great that many podcasters aren't editing what they say in their podcasts - that level of honesty is one of the things I like about podcasting. The downside of this "live production" model is that the balance of content to environment doesn't get the attention it deserves in many cases. Stephen encodes at what seems to be a variable bit-rate (the podcasts range from 65kbps to 96kbps) which is ok, although the structure and content of this podcast doesn't seem to require a 96 kbps encoding. Stephen's vocal quality is decent and his podcasts are almost universally work- and child-safe. Music track lengths not too important - Stephen doesn't always include music in his podcasts and rarely more than one track. Meta-data is OK - Stephen gives us the name of the podcats and the date in the file and track name. He uses the album name tag to include descriptive information about the podcast, which while not logical from a data standpoint at least gets that information on my portable player where I can see it. Stephen podcasts every couple of days, perhaps twice a week.

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Posted by cori at 08:58 AM