BBC Radio4's “In Our Time“: An hour. Interviews with physicists about the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Sounds boring or at least pedogogical, right? Really facscinating stuff, actually, but had to pay attention, or at least rewind a bit. The presenter, Melvyn Bragg, did a great job of pretending like he didn't understand in order to get the physicists to explain a point (I fully believe the guy's a smarty). On the superficial side, British accents talking about physics - what could be better. Not the expected “podcast“ but a very welcome one, indeed. Rating: 7/10

Rip & Read Blogger Podcast: I liked this one; the producer read a lot of blogs, distilled them, made commentary. Precisely what one wants in a review/summary: enough of the real stuff plus enough of what the producer thought was interesting. Subtle and nicely done. Three of them, about 13 minutes each. Rating: 8/10

Tracks Up the Tree: This one was great. Some neat music (Metric, I already love, so that made my ears happy) and some personal commentary about the music so you got to know a bit about who was talking. “Funtime Ben,“ the host, comes across as knowledgable, engaged, interested in spreading indie, and not haughty or snooty as some of my friends or myself, er, um, some of the other indie music whores, er, people can sometimes be. This is one I'll listen to a second time, just to hear some of the songs. I have a bunch of Blonde Redhead, but I haven't really gotten into them so much. Same with Stephen Malkmus Listening to TUTT, I'm definately going to give them a listen again, too. On top of that, some suggestions for other podcasts, other than Podcast Alley. At the time, the Podcast Alley site was down, but this podcast is worthy of me deliberately going out and touching someone (via a rating, guttermind). (oh yeah, and it makes me miss nyc.) An hour, fully worth it. Rating: 8/10

Two Rights: Conservative Political Discourse: Some good dissection of the stories of the news cycle, too much focus on Dave Winer. When I subscribed to this podcast, their feed coughed up some “promos“ for their upcoming show. Now, I was eager to get an ear on the real show, so the garish 30 second or so teasers turned me off. It annoyed me that I'd have to find and delete the files. Yeah, it's a small thing. The odd commercialism of it all was, I guess, commendable? They've got friends who're podcast PR people, which seems like an odd curveball play to get into the adworld. Didn't appeal to me as much as I thought it would. The whining (pun intended) was too much and (w/o the pun) not the grating conservative whine, although there was some screedy tones. Speaking of tones, their mics were a bit hot. Overall not subtle, and I didn't expect it to be, but not really provocative, either. 30 minutes (not including seperate promo teasers) Rating: 5/10

Also, a Dawn & Drew today. Cute, lewd, yay.

Two things strike me about the podcasts I've listened to so far: The first, it seems like the indie one's I've heard have only been produced for a very short time (under 6 months), which is simply amazing. Even The Geek News, which didn't impress me impresses me simply for the balls to actually do the thing and have caught on so much. The dedication of the people that speak into a mic and rss their voices all over is commendable. The second is summed up in this line, from the TUTT site: “You snub one of us, you snub us all.” This second “thing” or comment or random though or whatever is a very fertile one for me, since it sprouts up a lot of thoughs about virtual communities, possessiveness, companionship, and self-referrential postmodern cliqueishness. Also, the reference to blogcons reminds me of anime/d+dcons and a good chunk of Chasing Amy. More as it ferments. For now, I'm going to browse the inkernet podosphere and not worry so much about what it signifies.