Podcast 2.0

This week's assignment was to learn about podcasts. At first I had trouble differentiating between podcasts and online videos such as those offered on YouTube, but after some exploration I think I'm beginning to understand the difference. I explored both "Podcastalley" and "Search Yahoo! for Podcasts" and was FINALLY able to locate a podcast that I wanted to add to my Google Reader account. Initially I used Podcastalley and came up with everything from "Ron Paul Fancast" ("The place for people who are Ron Paul fans and for the rest of you who don't know why") to "The Colbertcon podcast" (a sampling of clips from Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report") to a Sesame Street podcast. Unfortunately, most of these podcasts hadn't been updated recently. (Dr. Paul's and Mr. Colbert's sites were both last updated in January 2008.) I wanted something more recent so I looked up NBC's "The Office" and found a site called "That's What She Said," a podcast providing in-depth commentaries and critiques on every episode of the hit T.V. show. According to Podcastalley this site was last updated on April 28, 2008. Much better! Just for kicks I searched for the same podcast on Search Yahoo! and immediately found it, with the added bonus being that it was completely up to date. That's right, it had the most recent podcast dealing with last Thursday's episode. After exploring Search Yahoo! I decided that I like it a little better than Podcastalley. It was very visual (which works well for me) and included more graphics and video clips, and the kicker was that it was actually up to date. I added it to my Google Reader account with only minor problems (I found that it took me a few minutes to re-familiarize myself with Google Reader since I haven't used it in several weeks.) Podcasts are interesting and it's good to know how to look for them, but honestly, at this point I'm not sure how much I'm really going to be using them. But that said, who knows? I may find myself secretly listening to "That's What She Said" right after next Thursday's episode of "The Office." Shhh, don't tell anyone.