Welcome to my blog!

Hello Dear Reader/Readers,

Welcome to my blog, yes it is official everyone with Internet access has one, I will be writing about podcasts I have listened to. I started listening to podcasts sometime in 2009 when I, in similar non-early adopter fashion, got an iPhone. I didn't take long after that until I stumbled across the podcast section of iTunes, I now can no longer remember if it was Adam Carolla's or Kevin Smith's show I saw first, regardless I decided to give them a try. It's not like I was taking much of a risk they were both, and still are, free to download. It only took a few minutes to figure out how to get the shows downloaded and playing, and just like that I was hooked to the point where I rarely listen to any other form of audio media. There were some circumstances that set me up to have the best chance at enjoying this. The main event that laid the groundwork for me to enjoy podcasts had taken place a few years earlier, when shortly before I got around to purchasing an iPod and transferring all my music to it and my computer my entire collection was stolen out of my car. The loss of my CD's, combined with college induced poverty and the fact that if I were to be totally honest I was never that into music led to my deciding I would be just fine listening to the radio when I was in the car. I had made a rather serious miscalculation, I had failed to take into how much I disliked listening to any and all of the local music stations. I found that each station played about the same ratio of 1/4 commercials, 1/4 songs I liked, 1/4 songs I would listen to, and 1/4 songs I really hated, which meant that 1/2 the time I was listening to something that I didn't enjoy. In desperation I surfed through the talk radio section of the dial and eventually found KFAN, our local sports-talk radio station. To this day I really don't understand why I liked it as much as I did, maybe it was purely the fact that I only actively disliked the 1/4 of the time they aired commercials, who knows but I ended up listening for about 6 months leading up to my discovery of The Pod. There are many reasons why I love the podcast format which I will address in more depth in future posts, however I just want to give anyone who is thinking of checking it out a few quick reasons to do so. I would tell you that you should give podcasts a try because, 99.9% of them are free, if there are any commercials they are generally 2 or three minutes at the beginning and maybe a few 15 second live reads in a show that is between 1 and 2 hours long, and unless all of your interests are illegal (like really illegal) there is absolutely at least one podcast dedicated exclusively to each interest.

Wow that was really long-winded, I do that sometimes, I'll try and watch for it going forward. What I am aiming to do with upcoming posts is to provide a little bit more in depth information about some of the podcasts I have listened to over the last 2-3 years. Hopefully someone will misspell some magic word on Google, wind up here, and see something they like, and end up finding something they really enjoy. I will try to first describe each podcast in terms of topic, format, number of hosts, whether they have guests, etc; and then I will share whether I enjoy it or not and why. I think podcasts are one of the more subjective forms of media so I'm sure not everyone will agree with my opinion, and in fact I am only willing to accept the likely blast of related vitriol in hopes that after people listen to a few podcasts I cover they can figure out whether they are likely to agree with me or if they are better of doing the opposite.

Thanks for Reading One Person/Everybody,

Ben M