An Epiphany
I’m commuting to work these days since Ephox has a sweet office in Windsor and while I’m there by myself at the moment its still nice to get out of the house.
Anyway the point is I now have 30 to 40 minutes each day walking to the train station, waiting for trains or sitting on the train. In the mornings this is the perfect opportunity to review email and feeds but in the afternoon there aren’t many of those so the trip is somewhat boring. Of course this is the perfect use case for audio books an podcasts so I’m going to have to try a few out.
Previously I haven’t bothered with podcasts because the information density is too low. Its so much more efficient to read text instead of listening to someone talk. Its rare that emotion and speaking tone really adds anything to technical discussions. If you have spare time sitting on a train though that’s not really a consideration so you may as well cover off that extra content that isn’t provided as text.
June 12th, 2008 at 10:27 am
This is why some of the best podcasts are 40 minutes in length, the early adopters did a lot of experimentation and found that fits with most commute times perfectly ;)
There are a lot of people with the “text is more efficient” mentality, but they’re slowly coming around and personally I only listen to podcasts that do add value. I particularly enjoy podiobooks where the author does different voices for each character - they modify the narration a little because you can recognise each character by their voice and it turns into more of an old-school radio drama. Some of them even go to the extra effort of adding sound effects which really adds to the experience.