pat loughery

I’m addicted to podcasts.

Podcasts, if you haven’t yet discovered them, are recorded programs that are usually updated on a frequent basis. Think of public access television in an audio form, and with a generally higher quality level.

You can listen directly to podcasts on any sound-equipped, Internet-enabled device (your laptop or desktop computer, for example) – they’re usually just MP3s. Or you can use a software application to subscribe and synchronize to your favorites and drop them into your MP3 player (iPod, etc). I didn’t do any podcast listening until the software app I was using (iTunes) added podcast support in version 4.9, and the current version of 5.0 continues that support.

I listen more to podcasts than to music on my iPod right now – though that will change if I can fix up my home stereo and pick up the FM transmitter module for the iPod. It’s analogous to the fact that I listen way more to talk radio in the car than music, even though I’m a huge music junkie and I discovered KEXP a while ago.

Here’s an expansion of my previous post about what podcasts I subscribe to in iTunes. These are listed alphabetically.

Alancreech podcast
Alan’s thoughts on simple church.
Updated: Irregularly

Baseball Prospectus Radio Podcast
A weekly radio feed from Will Carroll on baseball. Really well done interviews, a wide variety of teams, and unlike reading some of BP’s stuff on the web, it’s quite approachable even if you don’t want to think about postgraduate-level statistical analysis :-).
Updated: weekly.

Bluer – The Minneapolis Vineyard Church – Message
A weekly sermon podcast from one of the folks at Bluer. I met John Musick at the last Vineyard national conference, and Dan Lukas and I have been in a lighthearted comment teasing mode for a while. I’m waiting for the mailbomb to hit Dan any day now.
Updated: weekly.

Cedar Ridge Community Church
Sermons from the church Brian McLaren used to pastor. I just subscribed to this one. I’m curious to hear the current series, titled “stories of struggle”, which profiles 4 different historical figures in the Christian faith. As a side note, I’ve found that I don’t like listening to other peoples’ sermons very much (short attention span), so I’ll probably not stay subscribed that long.
Updated: weekly.

Celtic Daily Prayer
Tomas Kennedy reads the daily prayer sections from the Celtic Daily Prayer book by the Northumbrian Community. It’s a great idea. I considered doing this myself as a podcast, but Tomas is a great fit, given his Irish accent. I usually try to listen to the morning prayer as I’m waking up; I put the Evening prayer in a playlist to listen to before I fall asleep. Yes, I’m a dork and I have my iPod on my bedside. But I don’t listen to music during these times much. This podcast set (3 podcasts in the set for morning/midday/evening prayer) turned up a flaw in iTunes’ logic. In iTunes, you can choose to keep all your heard and unheard podcasts on the device, or have all the already-heard podcasts removed. I like option 2 better, but simply to keep around the 3 daily prayer casts I need to use option 1. iTunes doesn’t allow you to set this option on a per-podcast basis. Then again, iTunes is pretty brain dead software anyway. But I digress.
Updated: either daily or never; I can’t figure that out.

Conversatio Fide
I wish these guys would end their hiatus.
Updated: not in a long while

Digital Photography Tips from the Top Floor
Simple, non-techy tips on digital photography. This is by far the best produced podcast I’ve heard. Unfortunately, the tips are incredibly simplistic, and I don’t find many of them to be helpful to me. And, it’s highly self-promoting, which is annoying. But it’s so darned well done that I keep listening, thogh I think I’ll unsub soon.
Updated: Twice a week

KEXP Presents Music that Matters
An hour-long mix of songs from Seattle-area and worldwide phenom KEXP (public radio for people with eclectic music tastes). This station and show are awesome. On any set, they’ll play hip-hop to reggae to alternative back to back to back, and none of it is stuff that I’d normally listen to on my own, but it’s a fresh mix that keeps me interested. It’s the only FM radio station that I listen to unless I want a dose of NPR “commercial free” (don’t get me started about this lie) news.
Updated: Weekly

LensWork – Photography and the Creative Process
~3-minute shows about the creative process of fine art photography. Short and sweet.
Updated: Regularly (weekly?)

NPR: Most E-Mailed Stories
A 30-min to 1-hour collection of the stories that NPR.org visitors most frequently email to people (an interesting idea, no?). It’s a bit long for my tastes – I find that I am happy to listen to things under 20 min, but I’m not frequently committed enough to listen to something that’s much longer.
Updated: Daily

NPR: Story of the Day
A selected NPR story. I just subscribed to this and the above one over the weekend. I didn’t realize this was only 3 min – 8 min, so I’ll probably listen more frequently.
Updated: Daily

People from My Town
Interviews with interesting people around a small town in the Northeast. I LOVE this idea, but the feed has been broken since I found it a couple of weeks ago. I hope it gets fixed.
Updated: Irregularly

Photoshop Radio
I subscribed a month ago and still haven’t listened to an episode. I have hope for the content though 🙂
Updated: Weekly

podcasting :: jordoncooper.com
Jordon’s podcast. I’ve read Jordon’s blog for about 4 years now, and his voice isn’t anything like I expected it to sound. Just thought you’d want to know that.
Updated: Irregularly

Radical Congruency
Local guy Justin Baeder’s podcast. Topics usually include spirituality, the church and technology. I just subscribed. I thought he did a nice job with the podcast on hell (different from the “podcast from hell”).
Updated: Irregularly

RELEVANT Magazine Podcast
A weekly peek behind the scenes of this pop culture + Christianity magazine. The magazine I have mixed feelings about. The podcast is pretty good. 10-15 min episodes.
Updated: Weekly

Surviving HIV
This one was just born, and it’s going to be fantastic if they can make it a regular feed. It’s interviews with people who are HIV+ and surviving the disease. There’s a warning for explicit words in the podcast feed, but I found nothing offensive, and much to be compassionate toward. The first interview was excellent. Two thumbs way up.
Updated: Only twice so far. I hope there are more coming.

Weekly Messages from New Life Church @ North Bend
Sermons from my friend John at his church plant here in North Bend. I’m curious about how John teaches and preaches. The church planted right when ours did, and is doing very well running on the Purpose Driven + seeker-targetted model. The first few episodes are recorded directly to iPod, which is a crappy recording device. I hope they can upgrade their recording quality.
Updated: Weekly

Wired Jesus Podcast
I hope you’ve read this far. If you haven’t subscribed to this one yet, do it right now, and make sure you listen to episodes #14 and #15, in which the host reflects upon another podcaster’s confession of losing evangelical faith. These two episodes were powerful, gracious, and I wish that every Christian who is truly concerned about representing Jesus in this culture would listen to them. Many times. Well-produced, very helpful stuff. Good intro to postmodern thought as well, from a pastor within a mainline tradition church.
Updated: Frequently

When I see that Wired Jesus or Baseball Prospectus has published a new episode, I carve out time as soon as possible and listen. The others I try to sneak in whenever I can. Somtimes I wish I had a commute in to work for more iPod time, but it’s easier on the gas bill this way…