Since being OOW I thought I’d be able to have more time for consuming podcasts, but actually, since I now don’t have to take a bus in to New York every weekday, I don’t have the extra 2 hours a day or so to watch more Video Podcasts. (One of the other reasons I hate jobs where you have to drive yourself to work). I seem to be going through my audio podcasts a little faster, because besides the job search, I’m also doing more housework, chauferring the kids around, and trying to be useful around the house; which all leads to more opportunities to tune in…

The last couple of weeks I’ve changed some of my shows, to try to accommodate my new realities and priorities.

I caught up with some of my Video Podcasts this past weekend. Here are my thoughts and a few surprises I’ve found since being away from them for so long:

Leah D’Emilio has left Mahalo Daily for greener pastures after less than a year on the show! I did think she was a great host and had great rapport with Lon Harris, who is now executive producing most of the new shows, some with Shira Lazar pitching in with co-hosting of their Friday This Week in YouTube show. (Lon has shaved his beard, and his mustache – he’s looking younger already). I thought Leah was great and will miss her. It looks like Maholo will not be doing another “on air” search for a new host like last year, but those were some of the best shows they ever had.

BOL (Buzz Out Loud) *is* a great show for getting tech news – I never used to listen to this show but Leo Laporte always mentions it on his various shows, especially TWIT (This Week In Tech). I was worried that this would be another drain on my time, committing to this show, but “the show of indeterminate length” is usually a fairly short show that’s entertaining and informative. The hosts are Tom Merrit, Natalie Del Conte and Jason Howell with Molly Wood showing up once a week to rant on Mondays. The chemistry of the hosts is great, they have a great take on current events effecting the tech industry as well as how it affects “normal” people and it’s great to hear Natali’s voice again – she was on a Video Podcast Textra a while ago, under Adam Curry’s network, and she is a terrific on-air personality. She is also a regular on CBS’ The Early Show and Loaded, another Podcast on the CNET Network. While she’s great on the eyes, you really don’t need to download the video version of BOL or catch her on the live stream (unless you’re really into her), she’s smart, and does really great research on her pieces, injecting them with the right amount of personal opinions, cynicism and optimism. Her, Veronica Belmont and Molly Wood are a great new breed of attractive but knowledgeable news correspondents who happen to be women!

Another CNET show I’m trying out is Apple Byte, a Video Podcast with host Brian Tong, I haven’t watched enough of the show to get a feel for Brian yet, but he seems capable and has an entertaining show. I would say thought that sometimes the show’s a little cheesy, so sometimes it’s difficult to watch, I don’t know if Brian’s really able to pull off the whole self-effacing humor schtick yet. I think he just needs to work on his presentation a bit.

One of my new favorite shows is the 404 with regulars Jeff Bakkalar, Jason Yu and Wilson Tang, another group of terrific young hosts. This show is like the Y-GEN Bizarro version of Leo Laporte’s TWIT, where it’s very off-the-cuff and ostensibly supposed to be about tech. Tangents on some of their stories often diverge into inescapable rat holes and I love Justin Yu’s bathroom humor. There’s been a running joke on Jason Yu’s relationship with recent guest Natali Del Conte, who chose him to “Boff” on a game of “Marry, Boff or Kill” which is ROFL hilarious. They also had on Erica Boeke, author of “GameFace: The Kick-Ass Guide for Women Who Seriously Love Pro Sports.” which was another excellent not-to-miss episode. P.S. if you’re not reading this too late, the crew is looking for a new slogan for the show, the favorites so far are “404: the Nerdy Dirty” or “404: High Tech News, Low Brow Humor”. Oh – and if it matters, this is an “Explicit Language” show, so buyer beware.

CNET has become my new favorite network, they have terrific shows.

On the flip side, the G4 network seems to just produce a lot of pretty face shows that I find hard to get in to, for instance: there’s a sex advice show from those folks called AOTS (Attack of the Show) : In Your Pants which seems obviously geared to a younger crowd. I’ve only caught a few episodes and while it’s one of those “living vicariously through others…” kind of things, I think I’ll be taking this off my “must watch” list. The host, Olivia Munn and sex columnist Anna David are attractive enough and what show featuring pretty women discussing sex wouldn’t be a hit for heterosexual guys? (this one apparently) I’ll see how it goes, it certainly doesn’t compare yet with the absolute best sex-advice-sketch-comedy show on iTunes, the Midwest Teen Sex Show (MTSS).

Don’t get me started on MTSS! This koldcast.tv sponsored show is one of Podcasting’s hidden gems. The troupe of actors/writers/producers of this show send up sex advice with sketches that poke fun at everything from Male Masturbation to Abstinence to Oral Sex and Teen-Age Pregnancy. They have a great healthy attitude towards sex, are not gratuitously sexy like “In your pants” and are really excellent advocates for sex eduction in their own way. They’ve got a great following, and have been trying to get on Facebook, MySpace and YouTube to reach a wider audience, with little success apparently – check them out and send a letter of support.

I haven’t got to watch much of Rocketboomxx either, even though it’s a short podcast, the host Joanne Colan can be a bit too esoteric and dry, but sometimes that works too. I can’t say I love the show, but they do some really great avante garde stuff now and then, and report on some of the more obscure tech and non-tech stories about art and culture as well as conferences and public “events”. They are also one of the few shows that has fairly regular reports on normal life in Africa, from one of their field correspondents. Unfortunately, I’d have to say this is not a “must see” for me either.

I don’t watch Diggnation very much any more, I love Alex and Kevin, but it takes too long to watch a whole show, I have the same problem x 10 with The Totally Rad Show! (TRS)

I used to watch TRS religiously with hosts Alex Albrecht, Dan Trachtenberg, and Jeff Cannata, and I’d still say it’s one of the best, most intelligent (but not condescending) review shows anywhere. They review everything from TV shows to Video Games to Movies to Comic books with a tongue-in-cheek casualness that makes them feel like old friends you knew in college. They’re geeks in the best sense of the word, they love Star Wars and Star Trek as well as The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, (and hated the Fan Boys movie). The format is just a bit too long for me, it’s an hour show, and I also don’t have time to see most of the stuff they review (I wish I did have the time though). I think if it wasn’t for them I would never have bought Puzzle Quest
for DS for my kids (which my wife also loves), nor seen the Jekyll
BBC TV series, nor seen The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
nor start following The Avatar
cartoon series which my kids have always been watching. The problem is, the show has just become too frustrating for me to follow, I just cannot watch everything they review, and they make it compelling enough that you really want to run out and see something immediately, I don’t play video games, and with a DVR, I already watch way too much TV, and I gave up on comics in the glut of the mid 1990s (I’m extremely selective now, and only tend to buy self contained stories). They do have a great show for geeks who lived through the 80s and 90s, and probably a younger audience too, and I’d recommend the podcast to anyone that has more time to consume the work they review, but not if you don’t have the time.

In the fiction department, if you haven’t seen the Jake and Amir sketch comedy show, you don’t know what you’ve been missing. The show follows two completely mismatched friends who work at a .com company. Watch this from the start so you get the context, Hilarious!

In the must haves on my list I also include the following podcasts:

• Best Ads on TV (video)
• Best of YouTube (video)
• Happy Tree Friends (video)
• Mac OS Ken
• MacBreak Weekly
• MacCast
• This American Life
• TWIT (this Week in Tech)
• NPR: Fresh Air

I’ll review those ones some other time.

Cheers.

p.s. hats off to all those bloggers who do this everyday, writing this much and linking back to sources takes time and is hard!