Podcasts – the easiest way to stay on the bleeding edge of technology

Like most serious I.T. professionals I find keeping abreast of technology a constant struggle. There are only so many hours in the day and balancing a full time job and a family makes finding time to read about and research new technology next to impossible.

That is until I discovered Podcasts.

For anyone who really hasn’t kept up to date, a podcast is recorded audio that can be downloaded from the net and played on a computer or a portable listening device such as an ipod, mp3 player or smartphone.

By far the best technology podcasts in my opinion are offered by the TWIT network. TWIT contains many different podcasts all hosted by Leo Laporte – a veteran technology broadcaster. There are 3 TWIT podcasts I listen to religiously;

• This Week In Tech – TWIT’s weekly flagship and namesake podcast where a panel of experts discuss the weeks technology news. It generally focuses on the consumer end of technology concentrating on topics such as the iPhone, and Kindle, venture capital deals, the rise and rise of Google and Microsoft’s various legal battles.
  
• Windows Weekly – a weekly podcast where Leo and Windows IT Pro Magazine editor Paul Thurrott discus the latest news from Microsoft. It generally focuses on consumer products such as Vista, Office, the Xbox and Windows Home Server giving little coverage of enterprise products.
  
• Security Now – a weekly podcast discussing everything related to security with GRC founder and security and hard drive expert Steve Gibson. This is by far the most educational podcast I’ve come across - comparable to a university degree in security. Topics range from encryption algorithms, identity management and firewalls.
  
  All the TWIT podcasts are very well produced with a sound analogous to a commercial radio station and are a pleasure to listen to.
  
  Carl Franklin produces a very educational .NET podcast called .Net Rocks. Carl himself a .NET guru often interviews experts including many who developed the .NET platform at Microsoft, giving great insight into how to leverage its functionality. This podcast is also well produced with excellent audio quality, however I find Carl and his co-host painful to listen to. They have very strong accents and share a terrible sense of humour.
  
  Hanselminutes is a podcast with I.T. evangelist Scott Hanselman. The topics are generally web development related such as how to mashup Google Earth or write apps for Facebook, but also cover more general topics like building a developer PC or setting up a home network. This podcast is not always of interest, ·but is one I listen to regularly.
  
  All of these podcasts are about 1 hour in length and are released weekly. I listen to them on my iMate JAM smartphone. I find the best time to listen to them is in bed (I find it hard to fall asleep now without a podcast), driving and while running.
  
  All of these podcasts can be subscribed to using RSS. I use Juice which uses the RSS feed to automatically download the latest episodes when they are available.
  
  Before I discovered podcasts I was seriously considering leaving the I.T. industry. I have a young family and just couldn’t find the time required to maintain the standard of knowledge I expect of myself. I am a web developer, and it seems this segment of the industry has been reinvented in the past 3 years undergoing rapid change with the introduction of 3 versions of .NET, AJAX. and now Silverlight. No sooner have you invested a huge amount of time and remastered your craft when the next technology is released and you slip back to the bottom of that learning curve.
  
  Podcasts have reduced the time it takes to get up to speed. You don’t have to make time to listen to them – instead you turn your downtime into the most productive part of your day.