I’ve had my video iPod for somewhere near a year (that reminds me…need to get Applecare). It has become a very useful part of my arsenal of tools in crafting the daily commute into a solid 40 mins of cerebral input.
So without further ado, here are the great and the good podcasts.
The must-haves
X-Play by G4 TV is a video-podcast on video game reviews. I am a gaming fan, though these days I have neither console nor gaming rig. Hosts Adam Sessler and Morgan Webb are stomach-cramp-inducingly hilarious. The dialogue is high-speed, frat-boy shallow but frequently punctuated by intellectual references to politics and trivia.
Like in the review for Odama, Morgan manages to pull this off:
Obama, Osama and the Dalai Lama can play Odama in Yokohama while Wilbur Valderrama performs ‘No Drama’.
Viewers who watch X-Play, as Morgan puts it, “come for the Kingdom Hearts, but stay for the vaudevillian antics”.
Low-brow, ditzy and geeky all rolled into short 5 minute clips.
Diggnation is the video-podcast covering the weekly top stories on Digg. Information-wise, I have found Diggnation extremely useful in keeping me up to date with the major stuff happening on the internet, as well as a lot of quirky stuff only geeks can come up with. In one particularly funny episode, host Alex Albrecht mentions a friend who was thinking of selling “toasty testes”, which were essentially mittens to keep testicles warm in winter.
The laughs on the show are largely a result of the Alex and Kevin unloading moderate to high amounts of alcohol into their bloodstream. Though not always a laugh a minute, Diggnation is the one tech-based video podcast Faith has actually been interested enough to be a fan of. It is that good. You will discover that everyone has a little bit of geek in their blood.
The Good
I don’t drink alcoholic beverages, but have always had some interest - probably due to the amazing palette of colours. Tikibar TV comes across to me like Mathnet for cocktail connoisseurs. There’s always some poorly constructed storyline, where the appropriate cocktail conconction will save the day.
Who are we kidding. We all watch Tikibar TV for Lala. Honestly, that Canadian smile is … wow. Also the fact that no one knows her real name adds the enigmatic quality that drives geeks all antsy with intrigue.
The tie-ins between Diggnation and Tikibar TV are quite cool as well.
PhotoshopTV’s attempt at entertaining doesn’t quite rub off well on me, but it is a great treasure trove of information on the use of Photoshop. While I use Photoshop from time to time, I’m not what you would call a power user. Personally, I don’t think Photoshop TV lends itself well to the subscription model of podcasting. It makes perfect use of video to illustrate effects, but I’d prefer an online repository of video tutorials that I can search through. I forget most of the stuff I see anyway, but would like to be able to pull it out when I need it for reference.
That said, I think PhotoshopTV should be a staple for folks who work on Photoshop extensively.
Conclusion
These are a few of the podcasts I watch regularly, and I know they aren’t enough to last the daily commute, but you got to carry a book around with you for some serious in-depth info-loading.
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