Ok. I’ll admit I am rater late to the pod­cast­ing thing. I remem­ber when they star­ted show­ing up in as spoken word com­ment­ar­ies to down­load to your iPod and of course I had to try them out. They were still rather unformed and exper­i­mental and more import­antly for me, I didn’t find myself with the time to ded­ic­ate to listen­ing to a rant. I wasn’t mov­ing around that much, so didn’t have the longer stretch in the car where these may have worked out. I tried a couple, but didn’t find any that really tickled my fancy, so gradu­ally stopped look­ing for them. Then Scotty forced me to watch a Video Pod­cast a year and a half ago and I have star­ted to find pod­casts that do war­rant a few minutes time. Moreover, they also gen­er­ate some anti­cip­a­tion between releases. There are the zany ones (TikiBar TV), the inform­at­ive ones (MoBuzz, Geek­Brief) and the Cros­sov­ers (zeFrank, Rock­et­Boom), or even the spe­cialty ones (Wine Lib­rary TV, Food Guru). I am now sub­scrib­ing and watch­ing or listen­ing to about twenty shows on a reg­u­lar basis. For me these have really replaced TV. They are imme­di­ately access­ible, fre­quently fresher than cable and cer­tainly much more raw — not pro­fane, often just less refined and thus seem­ingly more per­sonal. There’s some­thing to these. We can make the obviosu par­al­lels to the print­ing press and pamp­phlet­ing, or to reneg­ade radio sta­tions, but these are seem­ingly more power­ful. Today, of all days, ime Magazine has picked its most import­ant inven­tions of the year and You­Tube is at the top of the list. Its there because there has been a shift in the abil­ity of the obscure to rise to prom­in­ence and reac an amaz­ingly uni­ver­sal audience.

All I know is that I am enjoy­ing the enter­tain­ment and inform­a­tion charge that I can tune into whenever I have a spare moment.