Buzz Kill • Hacker News Board

Re: Buzz Kill

#81

Post by Splines » Mon, Aug 23, 2010, 6:14 PM UTC

michael_h wrote: post #77

Splines wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, while I enjoy the long format and the lively discussion (it keeps the car commute enjoyable), the TWiT podcast is very much an echo chamber. I've since stopped listening to it and instead have broadened my podcast list.

Can I ask to what you have broadened your podcast list? Sometimes twit gets boring, and that leaves an hour long void to fill during my commute. Searching for 'technology podcast' unsurprisingly returns a lot of terrible podcasts.

Currently I've been catching up to old episodes of Radiolab. I've had a hard time finding tech-related podcasts that are enjoyable to listen to. Currently what I listen to are:

* NPR: Car Talk

* NPR: Planet Money

* PRI: Selected Shorts

* PRI: To the Best of Our Knowledge

* Stuff You Should Know

* This American Life

* WNYC's Radiolab

* Xbox Live's Major Nelson Radio

That's usually more than enough new content to last me through a week (1.5 hrs per day in the car). Sometimes TAL has re-runs that I've already listened to, or SYSK has a not-so-interesting topic, but it's usually not a problem.

I really miss the Stack Overflow podcasts, but I suspect they just ran out of material.

I've tried listening to Software Engineering Radio, but I'm practically ADD when it comes to podcast hosts, and it's difficult to pay attention to this sort of podcast (others seem to love it, but it's not for me). This is one of the reasons why I love Planet Money and Radiolab. Both usually talk about topics that aren't in my field, and usually do so in a very interesting manner.

Re: Buzz Kill

#82

Post by mechanical_fish » Mon, Aug 23, 2010, 6:33 PM UTC

rimantas wrote: post #34

mechanical_fish wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two words: Learning curve . It takes time to understand what new media are for. Real , human-scale time, measured in years. The inventors of the telephone thought it was a B2B technology, didn't really grasp that everyone was going to have a phone in their home and use it to talk to relatives. The inventors of the phonograph, amazingly, thought of that as a business technology as well, for recording memos and stuff.…

Twitter is not a technology. Unless you want to call phone calls shorter than 14 seconds a new technology too. Twitter is RSS for humans. Uhm, what? Maybe for some weird breed of humans who cannot digest more than 140 chars and hate context.

I would apologize for the use of the word technology for Twitter... but I can't see where I actually used that word.

IMHO Twitter is a medium, not a technology. Not that the specific word we use makes much difference. Call it a genre, if you like.

Re: Buzz Kill

#83

Post by csixty4 » Tue, Aug 24, 2010, 5:41 AM UTC

protomyth wrote: post #76

" was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves." I really don't think this is true at all. Leo runs a media company and many people follow him to keep tabs on what he is doing. It is not a personal relationship. He doesn't answer a large percentage of his audience so there is no true conversation. Most people probably thought he was on vacation or som…

He was absent from all of his podcasts for a while to take his daughter Abby off to college. I noticed he hadn't tweeted for a bit. I just figured he was relaxing after all that stress.

Re: Buzz Kill

#84

Post by csixty4 » Tue, Aug 24, 2010, 5:46 AM UTC

jasonkester wrote: post #23

Funny, but not at all surprising. I don't think I've ever read anything on Twitter. I can't imagine why anybody ever would. What is the use case where a human being would ever actually read a piece of text coming from Twitter? The only one I can think that of is searching for one's own product name to see if anybody is writing about it. Is there another reason I'm missing?

The people I follow on Twitter basically fall into two categories: people I know in person and people I don't. I like knowing what's going on in the lives of people I know & care about. And, the people I don't know share interesting articles and links to stuff they've done, which I'm interested in.

It's especially important to me as we all get older, move to other states, and have kids which eat into our free time. We can't hang out, but we can "hang out" with each other through Twitter.