Martha Rotter's Blog

Pod­casts are so awe­some. I love dis­cov­er­ing new top­ics and con­ver­sa­tions, and find them great to listen to both at work and at home. Since I listen to a lot of pod­casts & adjust my listen­ing fre­quently, I usu­ally have new things to recom­mend. If you’re look­ing for some­thing new to listen to, check out some of the below.

I’m cur­rently using Stitcher almost exclus­ively for listen­ing to pod­casts. It’s fant­astic. It works every­where, stores lists of my favour­ites, and I don’t need to sync any­thing. There are a hand­ful of pod­casts I like that aren’t on Stitcher, but for pretty much everything else, I love it. Addi­tion­ally I think the Down­cast app for iOS is great if you’re look­ing for some­thing to sync & listen offline.

 

New (or new to me) podcasts:

Hack­erNews Pod, or HNPod – gen­er­ally around an hour, only 15 epis­odes so far, but have had great guests and inter­est­ing top­ics for developers.

http://hnpod.com 

Monocle 24 – I love the Monocle magazine, and now they have a series of pod­casts I like, too. Spe­cific­ally The Stack, which is about print media, but The Glob­al­ist, The Urb­an­ist, The Menu, The Entre­pren­eurs, & Sec­tion D are all great.

http://monocle.com/24/

Jobs to be Done Radio – Fans of The Re-Wired Group or dis­ciples of the Jobs-to-be-done frame­work will like this pod­cast talk­ing about apply­ing the meth­od­o­logy, product design and business.

http://jobstobedone.org/topics/radio/

Tools of Change for Pub­lish­ing – O’Reilly has star­ted pro­du­cing an excel­lent pod­cast for people work­ing in the pub­lish­ing industry.

http://toc.oreilly.com/tag/toc-podcast

 

Thought-provoking stuff:

99% Invis­ible – My find of the year. 99% Invis­ible by Roman Mars is a fas­cin­at­ing look into design, archi­tec­ture and how the things around us affect our com­munit­ies. It’s so well-produced and researched. Much kudos to the team behind it, it sets a very high bar for pod­cast qual­ity. Plus they’re all an ideal length at around 8–15 minutes.

http://99percentinvisible.org

Freako­nom­ics Radio – Who didn’t love the Freako­nom­ics books? Freako­nom­ics Radio fol­lows on from there and pro­duces always sur­pris­ing looks  into people’s beha­viour. Look­ing at tough top­ics like is col­lege worth it and $15 toma­toes keeps this pod­cast at the top of my queue each week.

www.freakonomics.com/radio/

NPR Planet Money – I have liked Planet Money for a while, but in 2012 it has just become a power­house of inter­est­ing and insight­ful report­ing. Their con­ver­sa­tions with eco­nom­ists on cre­at­ing a fake, ideal polit­ical can­did­ate and mar­ket­ing him, for example, was a won­der­ful exper­i­ment. In these tough fin­an­cial times, Planet Money is great for help­ing you to under­stand where the world’s money is going.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127413729

 

Short, daily tech updates:

I gave up listen­ing to the longer, TWIT/TWIG epis­odes a long time ago. They just got to be too long and ram­bling for me. Now I gen­er­ally listen to more focused shows, and for gen­eral tech news, I just listen to the fol­low­ing short shows in the morn­ing on Stitcher before head­ing off to work:

Tech­Crunch Headlines

Tuaw Daily Update

Wall Street Journal Tech News Briefing

 

Longer or more focused tech/start-up podcasts:

Entre­pren­eur­ial Thought Lead­ers – a lec­ture series pro­duced by Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity. It’s a weekly speaker series with lead­ers from tech­no­logy, busi­ness and edu­ca­tion such as Noam Wasser­man, Melinda Gates, and more.

http://etl.stanford.edu/

The Industry -  A new voice in tech media, with Jared Erondu, Adam Sta­coviak (formerly did the Founders Talk pod­cast series, which I also liked), and Drew Wilson. Inter­est­ing dis­cus­sions about start-ups, design and tech. They even men­tioned Woopie once so I like them even more.

http://theindustry.cc/category/podcast/

The Big Web Show – I’ve been a long-time fan of Jef­frey Zeldman’s show inter­view­ing my inter­net her­oes, it’s always interesting.

http://5by5.tv/bigwebshow

The JavaS­cript Show – Really well-produced JavaS­cript developer pod­cast, short and focused with always rel­ev­ant content.

http://javascriptshow.com/

A Django Pod­cast – This may have ended, but has been good & would love to hear more episodes!

http://3rdaverad.io/shows/django-podcast/

 

Mis­cel­laneous Fun stuff:

60-Second Mind

http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/podcasts.cfm?type=60-second-mind

Brain­Stuff, from HowStuffWorks.com

http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/hsw-shows/brain-stuff-podcast.htm

Latest in Paleo

- http://www.latestinpaleo.com/

Stuff You Missed in His­tory Class

http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/hsw-shows/stuff-you-missed-in-history-class-podcast.htm

Every­day Russian

http://everydayrussianlanguage.com/

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