Oh iPod, How Do I Love Thee?

A couple of years ago, I got a lovely black and red U2 iPod as a gift. I was quite taken with it, but wasn’t sure how it would impact my music experience. As online media has matured and the players themselves have grown more powerful, our household has become increasingly reliant on audio and video that can be bought (commercial free, yeah!) and moved around easily.

Portable digital media allows for things like:

• listening to great audio books on long prairie drives


• finding common musical tastes through customer music reviews and ‘listeners also bought’ links


• following very high quality podcasts of book and film reviews, radio programs and technology happenings


• watching a TV program when it is convenient for us (although this is just getting rolling in Canada)

The key advantages of podcasts are that they give the user more control, often have a quality rivaling that of radio / TV, are well tagged and cover a large variety of topics. The RSS format allows someone to subscribe to a podcast series, so that new episodes download in the background and automatically sync up with their mp3 player.

There are some great podcast directories on the Web. I tend to gravitate to the iTunes music store. It syncs all downloaded material with my iPod. Unwatched episodes are marked with a blue dot. iTMS is quite comprehensive, easily searched and well laid out. The podcast area can be browsed in pictorial or column view.

Video podcasts make up a larger proportion of material available all the time. Some topics seem to need a little more visual support. I hope that audio podcasts remain strongly represented. It is a great chance for young people to experience a form of radio, where their imaginations are fully engaged in filling in the pictures. For those podcasts that include video, the user's iPod can be hooked up directly to the TV to easily share with family or students. It is a strange experience to have full blown video streaming off of a tiny little iPod to a big television set.

posted by John Lobe @ 11:35 AM