I have seen the future, and it will be... (The Italics Entry)

Part 1, Aperitif: There's yet another new thing over in the sidebar: A little button that says "Skype". If you have Skype installed, it will dial me up. Skype is sort of like Vonage, except there's no actual phone (you need a microphone attached to your compy), and it's free. If you need to know more, it's over at their home page. (Skype is one of those awesome web technologies that will eventually get bought by Google and made perfect, but it does the job pretty well right now.) Caveat: You have to be on my contact list to get through, or I won't even know you called. Email me at "s c a m p i" at gmail dot com, removing the quotes and taking the spaces out of the stuff before the at sign. Then Skype Me.

Part 2, Meat & Potatoes: Back when I was hell-bent and purposefully striding toward a career in broadcasting (circa 1988-1993), I always imagined that I wanted a radio show of my very own. How cool, I tantalized, would it be to have a microphone and studio and all the trappings of a radio show all subject to whatever whim I was harboring that particular moment. There was a certain cache to having the power of the mic at my disposal.

Heedless of any regard I had for the unique power of the voice that I had, technology has now made that power meaningless. Everyone and their mom can (and do) have their own radio shows now. They're called podcasts, and I'm just now getting hip to them.

I'd heard the term bandied about 'round about the time that the iPod started making them popular, but being the old geezer that I am I was content to let this newfangled bit of technology pass me by (as I have with other whizz-bang acronyms like PSP, HD, XM, RSS... the list goes on). Then I came across a news item on one of my chief geek-out sites that led me to this site, that led me to realize that anyone can have a radio show. I don't say that in a necessarily derogatory manner. Just stating the facts.

Anyway, at tfrollout, there's a podcast that they recently introduced where four guys (in four georgraphically disparate locations, sit around discussing stuff that may or may not interest anyone else. And there was a link to get their podcast, and it opened up this whole new world. In iTunes, it popped open the Music Store, which I generally avoid, and then popped to their Podcast section. Also, this new category popped up over where the playlists are kept, called (shockingly enough) "Podcasts". What you see when you get to the Podcast area of the Store, though, is what enthralled me...

Hundreds... nay, thousands of people with their own radio shows. As of this writing there are 417 podcast shows in the Politics category alone (with 21 categories total, like Travel, Arts, Education, Audio Blogs...). Some of the titles are awesome: 101 Uses for Baby Wipes, KCRC Airchecks, and Awful Podcast Showcase, of which I'm downloading an episode as I type.

The whole notion is actually thrilling. I mean, here's just thousands of people sitting around talking - for the most part - to their computers. Sometimes they're all by theirselves, sometimes they have friends "in studio". And as long as they have something to say, regardless of Production Values (or lack thereof), they're entertaining. That's not to say that all of the entertaining ones are my cup of tea (I probably won't be checking out the baby wipes one), but... just damn. How freakin' cool.

I heartily endorse the time wasted browsing around in the iTunes Music Store for the (largely) free podcasts.