On Podcasts
When I was in college an iPod cost nearly 300 dollars after tax. I saved up my broke waitress cash to get a brand new Razr phone instead. But not long after they came out with a little guy called the Shuffle. It looked like a white pack of gum and you could wear it around. I used to take it to class so I could listen to music during those 4 hour painting classes.
You would charge it up with the built in USB port on the bottom of it, like a thumb drive. After you got home from work or school you would plug it in to your computer and it would sync whatever music files you wanted from iTunes while it charged. Getting legit music from iTunes was a big deal, songs cost between 99 cents and a dollar and change and you didn't have to buy the whole album. We obviously just filled our MP3 players with the virus riddled fodder we downloaded from Kazaa over the years.
Anyway, at some point during this time they started to offer something called Podcasts on the iTunes store. They were free to download and if you subscribed to them (RSS) they would sync to your iPod the next time you plugged it in. Download the podcast during the day while at work. Charge/sync the device overnight, and get to listen to the new episode the next day.
I didn't bother listening to any of these early podcasts because they all seemed like news, politics, and sports - which wasn't on my radar as a 20 year old who was either at work, in class, or playing World of Warcraft.
Fast forward a couple of years and there was now a podcast for anything. Every blogger I read was starting a podcast. Now that the iPhone was out you didn't need a computer and microphone to make one. (It wasn't going to sound good but you could do it from your phone.) I started listening to one called Stuff You Should Know and Stuff You Missed In History Class. There were several shows flavored like this.
The biggest one for me was that NPR started uploading their syndicated shows via podcasts, meaning you didn't have to get up at 8am to listen to Car Talk. I could load Car Talk, Wait Wait, and Splendid Table on my iPhone 3g before driving to work and with the magic of an aux cable - listen to stuff from my phone.
Then somewhere around 2010 I quit work again after my youngest son was born. I got sick afterwards and it took a while for me to get better. During that time I listened to my "shows" while doing freelance design work. That got me thinking that I could do a podcast. (Just like everyone else.)
So I did a whopping three days of research to see what I needed to make one. I had figured out the RSS, the logo, the theme, the everything. I had a Shure SM58 - the Honda Civic of microphones. (I still have it, it still works. Flawless device.) A while back I worked for a company that sold live audio equipment and learned a marginal amount about recording live sound. I had a little Behringer 2 channel mixer, and was ready to go.
I called it Art History To-Go! It was going to be a series of episodes, each covering some famous artist. The first one was Frida Kahlo, which was easy because I just finished reading the Hayden Herrera biography. Now, I have no idea what happened to the audio for this. It's been lost to time but I did find the blog post image and logo I made for it back in 2012.
The episode lasted over an hour, which is way too long these days. I also do not have a voice for radio. Listening back to it even back then made me cringe. The second episode was going to be on Georgia O'Keeffe but the Kahlo episode took me a month to finish on its own. If I were to redo any of this I would pre-record a whole season at once like a sane person.
Anyway, after all that effort and little to no feedback or response, I just hung it up. I still listened to my regular shows after that but never found the time or drive to pick it up again. These days it seems video podcasting is the new cool thing, with folks posting them to YouTube so people can see how much money they spent on overpriced headphones and mics aimed the wrong direction.
Do yall still listen to podcasts?
Have you tried making one?
Current Podcasts I listen to: