Bookstarter

[l33tminion]

Kickstarter is pretty cool. It's a site for the distributed financing of small projects. Pledges are collected if and only if the project is fully funded, so there's less risk of committing money to a project that will never have enough to get off the ground. The project creators can also specify different rewards for different levels of support.

Two of my favorite podcasters are using the site to get off the ground with self-publishing, so I encourage you to check out (and fund) their projects:

Douglas Lain of the Diet Soap Podcast is working on a book titled Pick Your Battle - Foraging as Revolutionary Self-Help, a self-help guide for the urban forager.

kmo of the C-Realm Podcast is working on a book titled Conversations on Collapse, a collection of interviews from the podcast.

Comments

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty jazzed about kmo's book.

That said, I tried to listen to Diet Soap, but just about exploded from Lain's staunch political views. kmo will get into a rant now and again, but he pretty much lets his guests yak unmolested. Doug? Frickin' everything relates to his views on Marxism and class struggle.

Ah, well.

/rant

[l33tminion]

Frickin' everything relates to his views on Marxism and class struggle

We're talking about a podcast where the opening and the closing music is The Internationale.

Doug Lain is indeed way more political than KMO, but I think he does some really interesting and artistic things with his podcast. Then again, I really do like political talk.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

I'm curious: what's on your regular podcast rotation?

I'm trying to find stuff I really like, but that's something that's missing online, an interactive rating system for podcasts, similar to what Netflix does with movie recommendations.

[l33tminion]

Currently: Escape Pod, Podcastle, Cory Doctorow's Podcast, Flickers From the Cave, JapanesePod101, This Week in Tech, Democracy Now!, Robert Reich's Commentaries, Mumia Abu-Jamal's Radio Essays, The C-Realm Podcast, Diet Soap Podcast, Shift Podcast, The KunstlerCast.

Just added Shift and Flickers from the Cave because they were mentioned on the C-Realm, so not sure those will stay on my regular list. I'm considering adding a few others mentioned on Diet Soap: Gnostic Media, Aeolus Kephas's Warty Theorems, Electric Politics... but I haven't added any of those yet since my list is long enough as it is. I've been listening to podcasts a lot more lately and music a lot less.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

We have the C-Realm, Robert Reich and the KunstlerCast in common. I caught the Flickers also, but they're too much in the Two Guys Bullshitting genre. Way too many of those about.

I used to do Democracy Now!, but an hour a day was too much time for Amy to productively fill on a distressingly frequent basis. I find Counterpoint a good balance; they focus on the biases in corporate media.

Cory Doctorow sounds interesting. He's a pretty frequent interview on Search Engine, a tech/internet pod/radio show from Canada.

My list includes The Amateur Scientist Podcast, Digital Planet, The Economist, For Good Reason, Geologic Podcast (Hrab is hi-larious), The Naked Scientist (a BBC radio show and cast), Nature, Planet Money, One the Media, Onion Radio News, PRI's The World in Words and Technology, Scientific American, Skepticality, The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, SModcast (one must have one's Kevin Smith fix), TEDTalks, This American Life, The Thomas Jefferson Hour, and RadioLab. Too many.

There are others, but they're on the probable chopping block.

[l33tminion]

Flickers stimulates my interest enough that I want to catch a few more episodes, at least, but I'm not sure I'll keep it on my list after that.

Cory Doctorow's podcast is a pretty good mix of audio-blogging, interviews, and fiction, so it's worth a listen if you like Doctorow's stuff (and not if you don't).

There's a TEDTalks podcast? I should check that out. I often watch the videos of the talks.

Democracy Now! is always on the edge of getting cut because there's just so much of it, but there are enough brilliant moments that I don't want to miss it. Plus, it's part of my daily routine now.

I should also mention The RU Serius Show and The Viking Youth Power Hour as brilliant podcasts whose archives I devoured, though both of those shows are no longer active.