I am a curiously late adopter of this form of content. As a result, I'm voraciously devouring pod casts of all kinds as I play catch up and I'm on the look out for recommendations.

I figured you might be too. If so, I hope this is the place to discuss what podcasts you're listening to and what you think of them.

My current playlist:

Casefile True Crime - some describe the narrator's accent as too thick, but as I am Aussie his accent sounds perfectly normal to me. Covers criminal cases from all over the place, with a focus on Australia but not limited to that. Listening will cure anyone of thinking this is a land of innocent naifs.

Dirty John - have yet to delve into this but I heard great things said about it and am curious to see what a big budget podcast is like.

The Dollop with Dave Anthony & Gareth Reynolds - these guys make me cry with laughter...but probs wouldn't appeal to anyone that has a distaste for American humour.

S-Town - queued up and ready to roll for reasons just like Dirty John.

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R'AMEN

Oh dear, I’m light years behind you on this topic. What is a podcast? What hardware / software is involved?

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Podcasts are digital audio files made available on the Internet for downloading to a computer or mobile device, typically available as a series, new instalments of which can be received by subscribers automatically.

I've yet to pay to subscribe to one, but if I get sick enough of the sponsors advertising I just might.

I use Spotify mostly as I find that interface is the easiest to use on mobile devices. I do occasionally use iTunes (for the odd Podcast I can't get through Spotify), though the mobile app is abominable.

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R'AMEN

Nominally, of course, my notebook (or laptop – nah, never been there) is a mobile device. But I’m guessing that nowadays, even tablets are getting looked at askance as becoming doddering old school. So are we talking about the smart phone set? And as for content, are we talking about news?

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Mobile devices are usually separated out in nomenclature to tablets and phones as opposed to laptops in my neck of the woods.

As for content, we're talking about podcasts - which are a particular format of content in and of itself. Some podcasts might be current affairs and other factual based content, some are most definitely fiction.

News, rather, is a genre of content rather than a format.

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R'AMEN

Let me simplyfy it for The Gandolorin. You take a pod of, say, peas; put it on a fish hook, and you give it your best throw into a lake. Pod Cast.

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Hanasian
Annalist, Physician, & Historian
of The Black Company of the Dúnedain,
The Free Company of Arnor
~ ~ ~
Durian: Dúnedain Ranger of the North: Rhudaurian Lineage
- - - -
Roleplay Repository

At least it's not pokémon...

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R'AMEN

So you're implying things can get fishy in podcasts?

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Pretty sure there both angling podcasts and dodgy podcasts and a podcast for any particular interpretation of "fishy".

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R'AMEN

I’ll give it another try: so podcasts are stuff that people like me with at least notebooks (15” screen, my non-connected if elderly power tower has a 26” monitor) can ignore disdainfully, as they are crutches necessary for the display-size-challenged set to get a useful fraction of the content that the owners of less-portable equipment can access with ease?

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They're audio files, rather than video files, so provided you have speakers/headphones you like and a reliable internet connection, you should be good to go.

Have fun!

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R'AMEN

Ah, radio 4.0!

Dim memory stirs: before the iPad and the iPhone there was this iPod! (I've never owned any Apple gadget, so all of my information on them is second-hand at best)

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Good news - you don't need an Apple gadget to access podcasts.

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R'AMEN

OK, but the use of the (now generic?) term “pod” might be a hint that you don’t necessarily need some state-of-the-art gadget to be able to receive them. Like a Samsung whatwasit that might burn your ear off.

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Podcast is the term, it is an assembly of words but it is illadvised in English to break that down into its component features and presume you have a sense of it's collective meanings. English is tricksy that way, and the approach to assembled words used typically in German appeals to me.

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R'AMEN

Here I do beg to differ. Don’t forget the English language’s (if blurred and corrupted) Germanic – Anglo-Saxon - roots. And looking at words, their component parts, can be interesting to get to their older, now perhaps forgotten meanings. My favorite is “awful”, which now to my knowledge simply means terrible. But its original meaning was “full of awe”, which at the least has a wider meaning, if not almost the opposite meaning. JRRT and Tom Shippey, among others, have sharpened my interest in such things – and my US high school SAT scores back in the early 1970s certify me as an English native speaker – in the top percentile of high school pupils who took the same tests as I did, perhaps even among those who were college-bound.

The worst things that can happen to terms nowadays, especially scientific ones with a precisely defined meaning in their field, is that some midget-mind from the dregs of human existence, say advertising or politics or the tabloid media, get a hold of such a term without the slightest idea of its precise scientific definition, and often end up using it just totally butt-backwards. Here my favorite bête noire is the “quantum leap”.

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