Podcasts & Vidcasts

Today, I'll take a look at 2 fairly popular types of entertainment/information. Purely audio-wise, there's podcasts and video-wise, there's vidcasts(or vodcasts).

When it comes to podcasts, for some reason I could never understand why people like to use them so much and personally I would rather read some magazine/newspaper to get my information rather than use podcasts but this is purely out of personal preference. When I'm relaxing, I'd rather listen to music and when I'm doing work, it either destroys my concentration or sounds like white noise and I don't pick up anything useful(or entertaining) from it anyways.

The two podcasts that I looked at were:

• Film Junk (http://feeds.feedburner.com/filmjunk) provides some reviews and such on movies from a group of Canadians with a sense of humour.
• Game Center: RPG PC and Console (http://gamecenter.mypodcast.com/rss.xml) provides lots of information on any interesting games.

Like with all things on Earth, everyone has their own preferences. People who prefer to read might probably prefer blogs and others who prefer to listen to talkshows will probably prefer podcasts but blogging and podcasts are somewhat different blogs don't have to center around any one topic but most podcasts have a single topic as their main focus. In a sense, podcasts are much more similar to RSS feeds.

While we're on the subject of audio entertainment, we will also take a brief look at audiobooks. An audiobook is basically a book which is narrated to you instead requiring you to read it. The problem with audiobooks is the speed at which it is read. The speed will be much slower than reading the book yourself since it needs to be able to be understood by anyone listenering to this narration. On the otherhand, unlike an ebook, which is very tiring for the eyeswhen reading for extended period of time, and a physical book you no longer have to use your eyes and hands to read the book leaving you free to do something else.

Unlike podcasts, vidcasts are something I use on a daily basis. It is extremely easy to videos to satisfy any interests. To me, the visual aspect of vidcasts are much more satisfying than the pure audio aspect of podcasts. Youtube is probably the most popular out of all vidcasts. I believe the success comes from the simplicity of their layout and the ease at which you can access their functions.

Here are several vidcasts that I watched:
Top Gear BBC (Nissan GTR Review) from youtube
Fifth Gear (T-Rex)



Resident Evil 5 from G4 (http://g4tv.com/)


As for how vidcasts "stack up" against blogging and other formal methods of providing information, I would probably put vidcasts on almost the same level of television but you can watch what you want when you want.