New podcast subscriptions for February 2010

At the beginning of the year I posted the state of my media diet in 2010 and based on that post have received a lot of great suggestions for additional podcasts and other media which I should add to my diet in 2010.  I’ve also found a bunch of new podcasts through searches of iTunes directory and via referrals from other new podcasts which I have subscribed to recently.

Here is a list of new podcasts I subscribed to in January and earlier this month. In each case I have also added the feeds to Google Reader which includes many non-podcast blog posts.

• Dragons Landing – One of a number of gaming related podcasts which I have subscribed to recently. I’m undecided about this show which while interested and well produced does tend towards being a bit long.
• Robertson Games podcasts – One of a few podcasts I have subscribed to which are podcasts of live play sessions of role playing games. I really like the blog these podcasts are from, but am uncertain about the live play (in part because it tends to be, so far at least, just a single one-shot game)
• Icosahedraphilia – a long running live play podcasts of a D&D 4E campaign. Very well produced and the game is interesting, if a bit a tame language wise due to the players & DM’s personal religious beliefs. Really fascinating for the detailed descriptions of the props and resources used in the course of each game.
• The Tome Show – A reviews and interviews show about role playing games. Very well done though I have only listened to a few shows so far.
• NPR Planet Money Show – A show I have been meaning to subscribe to for some time now as I have really enjoyed the episodes of This American Life which have featured the team behind the Planet Money podcast.
• Studio 360 with Kurt Anderson (blog) – One of the two most recommended shows in the comments and responses to my initial post. So far I have enjoyed this show but have found that I listen to other podcasts before catching up with this one.
• WNYC’s RadioLab – The other most recommended show in the responses to my initial post. A show about science but presented in a very intelligent and engaged way. That said, I also find myself listening to other podcasts before I catch up with this one.
• Huffduffer (personal feed) – not a podcast in a traditional format but rather a service for handcrafting a podcast feed from audio content available online. My friend Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read Write Web wrote up a glowing review of Huffduffer and based on his recommendation I checked out the service and signed up. I have, so far, found it to be a great way to quickly and easily create a personalized feed of various bits of audio content I find online and want to listen to on my iPod.

So still haven’t found any tech podcasts to subscribe to but I have added a great deal of new content to my podcast listening diet. I welcome suggestions for other media I should add – podcasts, video podcasts, magazines or other media forms & experiments.

the state of my media diet in 2010

As 2010 begins I have been taking stock of the media I pay attention to and am looking to add to my current diet, I’m looking for new flavors and cuisines, new forms to replace stale old ones.

At the moment my media consumption looks like:

No daily newspapers, no TV news of any form, no Radio (either over the air or Internet). I catch a few TV series, mostly at my girlfriend’s house (or via various means online) but not too many (mostly SF series & a few Food Network shows)

Magazines

• The New Yorker magazine – I have been a New Yorker subscriber since college in the early 1990’s, however as I write this I am nearly two months behind and all year have found myself increasingly disappointed in the quality of the writing and the point of view of most of the writers for the New Yorker (Malcolm Gladwell excepted).
• occasional issues of Monocle and even less often The Atlantic Monthly – I may subscribe to both magazines in 2010 even though I am currently months behind on my Monocle reading

And that is it. Years ago I had a dozen of magazine subscriptions (including free technical publications) and would supplement those with local free weekly newspapers and often one or more magazines purchased from a newstand. But that is no longer the case, even when I’m in one of San Francisco’s many excellent newstands with literally 1000’s of magazines available to me I rarely see one I have to buy. I feel there are, I hope, magazines out there I really should be reading – but I do not know what they are!

Podcasts and video podcasts

Mostly a mix of music podcasts & some niche focused podcasts. Here’s the roughly complete list:

• Accident Hash – CC Chapman’s long running podsafe music podcast, in 2009 this was fairly irregular but usually enjoyable
• American Public Media’s Sound Opinions – One of my favorites, I have been a listener since an earlier version of this show was on commercial radio in Chicago
• CO-OP – a video podcast from Revision3 covering video games
• Critical Hit – a newer audio podcast from students in the Game Design program at Columbia College in Chicago
• Critical Hit: A Dungeons & Dragons podcast – from the website MajorSpoilers.com a podcast of a group of players playing D&D 4th edition – a bit of a nostalgia trip for me – but also it has been catching me up on the new rules of a game I played years ago
• Doctor Who podshock – for my occasional Dr. Who fan discusison
• Dungeons & Dragons podcast – an occasional podcast from Wizards of the Coast, I subscribed for a series of episodes they did with Wil Wheaton & folks from Penny Arcade playing a series of D&D games. The website archive is a bit clunky – subscribe to this podcast via iTunes.
• Games with Garfield – an occasional podcast from Richard Garfield on game design (inventor of many great games – including Magic the Gathering)
• The Geekbox – a group of B ay Area geeks – fun even if I’m a bit older than many of them and have slightly different tastes
• iFanboy – I subscribe to two audio and one video podcast by the iFanboy team (the video is with Revision3) these cover the Comics industry exceptionally well
• KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic – one of the best music radio shows anywhere – live in studio sets of great music are what they include in their podcast, but every show is available for streaming on demand.
• Major Spoilers – another comics (mostly) but also all things geek discussion podcast from a great comics review website
• Monocle (videos & audio podcast) – great short videos and audio podcast series from one of my favorite magazines, Monocle
• Murmur.com podcast – from the folks who do iFanboy an occasional podcast on movies & TV & other things geek
• NPR All Songs Considered podcast – amazing music podcast from NPR – almost always stuff I really enjoy
• NPR: Live Concerts from All Songs Considered – videos and audios of amazing live concerts
• Only A Game – NPR’s sports weekly podcast
• Radio Free Burrito – Wil Wheaton’s personal podcast which he has recently restarted after his recent Memories of the Futurecast series
• This American Life – another series I started listening to on radio, when it was first broadcast but now catch (occasionally) via podcast

There are a handful of other podcasts I still subscribe to but which haven’t been updated in months so are mostly archives in my iTunes.

It is worth noting that I no longer subscribe to any tech industry podcasts – I’m sure there are some which are engaging & well edited enough to be worth subscribing to? What are they?

Online Blogs & websites

I mostly use Google Reader – currently I have 211 RSS feeds I subscribe to, but looking at Google’s stats, I mostly only read a very small number of feeds – a few customized feeds (Craigslist searches and the like). They break down as follows.

for Politics:

• The Daily Dish – Andrew Sullivan’s Atlantic Monthly blog along with a few other Atlantic Monthly political blogs
• Jack and Jill Politics – an African American focused political blog friends of mine run

for Tech news:

• Techcrunch – I subscribe the main, full feed but am annoyed by the partial feed elements from other TechCrunch sites
• Mashable
• The Next Web
• Scobleizer – I have been reading Robert Scoble since before he joined Microsoft
• Venturebeat – full disclosure – I wrote for Venturebeat in 2009
• Boing Boing
• and really that’s about it – I don’t get to or read many other blogs and of the above I average only about 25% at most of any one of them – and usually closer to 10% or less of their posts. I subscribe to many other tech industry blogs, but these are the ones I read the most frequently.

for Food

• the Kitchn
• Serious Eats
• and a few other random blogs from friends or covering San Francisco (Mission Mission for example)

But again I have some 150+ other feeds I subscribe to yet rarely, if ever, get around to reading. If the feed isn’t a full text feed, even if from a very close personal friend, I will almost never, ever read that feed. Since I read on my iPhone over 50% of the time I’m reading RSS feeds, a non-full text feed requires a crapshoot of loading another site which is rarely well designed for an iPhone (or which breaks the links as far too many mobile site’s versions do) vs the easy navigation between stories when all full text and in Google Reader which has a great iPhone interface.

So clearly I am missing a great deal – what would people suggestion I add in 2010?

Please leave suggestions as comments below – for print publications, podcasts, video podcasts or other forms of media I should pay attention to on a regular basis  in 2010. Please include areas I am missing as well as media in fields I am already following (so suggestions for business/econ focused podcasts are welcome). Even media which is niche & seemingly not likely focused for me – but which is a great example would be welcome suggestions. I’ll listen to or read everything suggest – at least once on the web.

The Future of Media is Curation

Much has been written in the past few years about the Future of Media, dozens (perhaps hundreds) of conferences and discussions have occurred and there has been a lot of mashing of teeth, a lot of posturing, volleys of lawsuits on the behalf of some parts of the media landscape (RIAA I’m looking at you!), at least one major strike (Writer’s Union), numerous failing and flailing businesses and much confusion about what the future holds.

Starting with a shifting and varied definition of just what “media” is anyway. 

Without picking a particular definition, though I’ll try, here are a few of the many sources of what I include as “media” – books, magazines, journals, weekly newspapers, daily newspapers, radio, TV, blogs, online video, podcasts, Internet radio and other streaming audio, electronic books, online magazines, games (console, computer, online/web, even mobile), art (a broad category indeed).

And almost certainly there is someone, somewhere, creating a new form of content and experience which should be included in my list above.

So with so many variations what isn’t media?

Short answer – increasingly many things not previously part of the “media” have some aspects of the media – Gap’s recent Vote for t-shirt campaign for example, the ads are fairly traditional “media” – albeit delivered online, but the shirts themselves were also a form of media and self expression.

Building on this expansive and highly inclusive definition of media – which includes media whose purpose is to entertain, media whose purpose is to inform, media which is intended to persuade, and media which is entirely personal and esoteric, what does the future hold for media?

I claim that the way forward for Media, at least the media which will have a sustainable and lasting future, media which will remain important as well as viable, is curation. 

What is Curation? 

In a way I am using an old word in a new way. I’m not, however, the first or the only person to use this broader usage. Originally curation referred entirely to what a curator did which, in turn, was to maintain a collection of art or artifacts, usually for a museum or art gallery. A curator would manage a museum’s collection, would put together a particular show or exhibition. That process might, occasionally, be referred to as curation. Virginia Postel made a similar point, though she used the term Age of the Editor back in 1994 in Reason Magazine. 

My meaning of curation is broader:

Curation – To select and highlight specific media usually ground in a particular point of view

Simple perhaps, but I think also something new – something different than Editing, though not unrelated to what a good editor does at a magazine. Indeed I would say that some editors are also acting in a curator role, though many are not. The key point, I think, is that curation is a process that filters, that selects a set of things to be highlighted, that is about less not more.

So why do i claim this is the Future of Media?

Because as we entered a world where everyone can (and most people will to at least some degree) create media the volume of media available to all of us is increasing at a rapid rate. The technology which only years ago was only available at great expense to a small set of highly trained people is now available for free or for very low cost – digital cameras often with video capabilities are most new cellphones to note just one key example. 

Thus “professional” and “amateur” content will continue to proliferate and expand – likely with the “amateur” content vastly exceeding in quantity the “professional”. But value will be created by curators, such as the founders of I Can Has Cheezburger, Pete Cashmore of Mashable and Robert Scoble of FastCompany who each filter through a huge amount of media and select a small set of content to present to their respective audiences. In some cases they create the content themselves, hire others to create content, or select and promote works created by a large pool of people. 

Some curators will be highly selective, highlighting only one work a day if that, others will create a large pool of content every day. Many will work in many different mediums each an avenue for different forms of interactions and media. 

A few other great examples of modern curation at work

• Monocle magazine – a traditional print publication with a solid web presence, they look very much like a traditional if highly polished magazine, but they are also functioning as curators in many ways. They select a small set of physical goods which they sell customized versions of to their readers. In the content of the magazine itself they adopt a rich multimedia sensability – lots of photos and video on the web. See http://monocle.com
• Jason Kottke –  For many years Jason has blogged as a curator of as he calls it “fine hypertext products” in short he links to the best stuff he finds across the web, often design related, but wide ranging, across many topics, and for his passionate audiance almost always of great interest. His audiance is passionate enough that he supports himself from his blog and he selects his advertisers with much the same care as the sites to which he links. See http://kottke.org/
• WallBlank – A site that sells one print a day, five days a week, either a photograph or a print, always a limited edition and selected with care. One of a number of similar businesses which sell a small set of limited editions, usually only one or two works a day (or a week). See http://wallblank.com/ other similar businesses with some differences are Threadless, PleaseDress.me and 20×200.com