Podcast review: When is a podcast not a podcast?

I play acoustic guitar and have been thinking about how to incorporate music into podcasts in more integral ways than the catchy intro and exit stings we lift from Garageband. The first result to turn up under a search for “acoustic music podcasts” was a winner called “The Acoustic Version of the Hits, the Unknowns, the Covers, and the Originals.” t’s like a podcasting version of MTV’s “Unplugged.”

The home page offers a menu of four categories: Originals, Covers, Humor and Lessons. The format includes text previews of featured performances along with the YouTube videos. I give it high marks for offering a variety of styles and artists in a format that’s easy to surf and sample. One of the headaches, or should I say ear-aches, of surfing music performances on YouTube is that there’s usually no way of telling if a video is going to be of listenable quality until you invest at least 30 seconds in it. More often than not, even videos of well-known artists turn out to be crap shot on a fan’s cell phone.

One of the great things about The Acoustic Version is that they’ve addressed the crap problem by being an old-fashioned gatekeeper. They’ve done us the great favor of weeding out the crap. The quality of the videos I sampled were perfectly adequate, which passes for excellent by Internet standards. The Goggle ads are relevant to musicians. Even the guitar lesson on how to play George Harrison’s arrangement of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” was good instruction that even beginners could follow.

The podcast part of this package consists entirely of the music performances, and, alas, the audio of these do not appear to be downloadable for obvious copyright challenges, since many of the videos are covers of published songs. Which raises the question: does podcast audio have to be transferable to a device other than my computer for the content to be technically be a podcast?

Summary of 2 Blogs and 2 Podcasts

Blog: The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs
http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/

A parody of what Steve would blog about if Steve blogged. I didn’t laugh once, but I am impressed that it’s become “a Forbes.com Site, and features advertising from Canon.

Blog: Breaking News and Opinion on the Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/the-blog

Technorati listed this as the current “most popular blog” so I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I counted 19 blogs posted on one day, covering all the topics you’d expect from a Huffington blog roundup. The writing here seems a notch above typical blog quality. This would be a good first stop for left-leaning readers who want to arm themselves daily for anything that might come up around the water cooler.

Podcast: Free Talk Live
http://freetalklive.com/netcast.xml

You can take control of the airwaves – just call the toll-free number. This is a libertarian podcast with two co-hosts who do a good job of letting the callers drive the show. I like how they’ve hit upon filling a very distinctive niche – providing a forum for Libertarians, who typically get cut off after 30 seconds on mainstream radio call-in shows, to go on at length.

Podcast: Diggnation
http://digg.com/podcasts/Diggnation/954839

Ranked at the current most popular podcast on Digg. I’d heard of these guys as the big podcasting success story. Production quality in the current episode is surprisingly poor, with one guy sounding like he’s inside a 55-gallon drum. They spent the first two minutes yammering that they’ve been nominated for a Webby. Banal banter, wit-free opinions and obnoxious sound effects. If this is all it takes to make a podcasting hit, excuse me while I quit my day job and find a kazoo.

Blogs and Podcasts I’m Following

Blogs: Wall Street Fighter <http://www.wallstreetfighter.com/>

The taglines for this blog is “Insider News From the Outside.” and “The Funny Side of Trading.” I found it doing in a search for “Humor in Business,” to see if there are any other blogs or podcasts attempting to be funny about business and finance (so far, this is one of the few blogs and I’ve found no podcasts with an approach similar to my concept for “Where’d the Money Go?”)

Advertising Age: Garfield, the Blog <http://adage.com/garfieldtheblog/>

Bob Garfield is a venerable critic for Advertising Age magazine and is co-host of NPR’s On the Media. I have a bad habit of letting weeks go buy without paying close attention to what is happening in what is still my fundamental profession — advertising — and I can count on Garfield to keep me current.

Podcasts:

Diary of a Shameless Self-Promoter for all self-promoters, from the timid to the fearless.”

The tagline is “Zen marketing for all self-promoters, from the timid to the fearless. Heidi Miller, a successful small-business guru/public speaker has been producing this podcast for 4 years. She seems to do a comprehensive job of giving sound advice to small businesses on how to leverage new media.

Slate Culture Gabfest

Steven Metcalf, Slate’s Critic-at-Large, Julia Turner, Slate’s Culture Editor, Dana Stevens, Slate’s Film Critic had an interesting, civilized discussion on “The viability of personal virtue” relevant in recent news stories on global warming, ethics failures in the travel writing industry, and Errol Morris’s latest documentary about Abu Gharaib prison. I liked that the show had an umbrella theme and managed to cover diverse and current cultural ground while staying under it. They made me want to tune in to hear what they take on next.