I'm personally experiencing a renaissance of podcast myself, although part of why I stopped listening to podcasts several years ago was because I had moved from CA to NY, sharply limiting the time I was sitting in a car for hours (in a subway, you can play Angry Birds).
The Serial podcast is fantastic...I've forgotten the workflow of how to subscribe to podcasts and have them show up in my iPod, so I just go to the homepage (http://serialpodcast.org/) and listen to them individually. This American Life has an excellent iOS app that's worth the $2.99 fee.
The power of the podcast, or of radio in general, is to me, just another example of the captive power of basic, non-interactive narrative forms, something that is too easily lost in the rush to cram doodads into web publishing...I'm not saying non-interactive narrative is always the most ideal way to communicate, but it certainly isn't a weak or lesser way. I think the success of Kindles and of simple publishing sites like Medium also attest to the power of text. Given that narrative power, and the hugely reduced complexity in producing single-media content, it never hurts to go simple if you have a compelling idea or story.
edit: A commenter beat me to this, I was just about to post that the serialpodcast subreddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/serialpodcast/) is the best place on the Internet to discuss Serial, with at least a few of the people involved/related to the events going on to discuss things. It has a respectable size of 3,580 readers...which is not much compared to the biggest reddits, but the number of threads and comments is pretty amazing...and hell, r/journalism is less than 7,000 users.
I also don't think it's a coincidence that reddit, like HN, is a highly-successful discussion forum because of its commitment to a simplified medium (virtually all plaintext)
Check out Pocketcast - http://www.shiftyjelly.com/pocketcasts I use it on Android and it's awesome. It has tons of features but automatically downloading the episodes and playing the audio at faster speed are my favorite options. I listen to almost all of the podcasts at 1.6-1.7x speed.
Couldn't agree more. Narrative is part of being human. Talking can be interactive (think Socratic method), but linear narrative--stories, poems--has been with us forever.
Medium and friends recognize this. Apps like Talko do too in their own way--taking a basic form like voice and allowing things like asynchronicity.
The Serial podcast is fantastic...I've forgotten the workflow of how to subscribe to podcasts and have them show up in my iPod, so I just go to the homepage (http://serialpodcast.org/) and listen to them individually. This American Life has an excellent iOS app that's worth the $2.99 fee.
The power of the podcast, or of radio in general, is to me, just another example of the captive power of basic, non-interactive narrative forms, something that is too easily lost in the rush to cram doodads into web publishing...I'm not saying non-interactive narrative is always the most ideal way to communicate, but it certainly isn't a weak or lesser way. I think the success of Kindles and of simple publishing sites like Medium also attest to the power of text. Given that narrative power, and the hugely reduced complexity in producing single-media content, it never hurts to go simple if you have a compelling idea or story.
edit: A commenter beat me to this, I was just about to post that the serialpodcast subreddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/serialpodcast/) is the best place on the Internet to discuss Serial, with at least a few of the people involved/related to the events going on to discuss things. It has a respectable size of 3,580 readers...which is not much compared to the biggest reddits, but the number of threads and comments is pretty amazing...and hell, r/journalism is less than 7,000 users.
I also don't think it's a coincidence that reddit, like HN, is a highly-successful discussion forum because of its commitment to a simplified medium (virtually all plaintext)