While making a coffee in the kitchen this morning, and discussing last night’s MacWorld keynote with a colleague, the subject of how we keep up with the latest happenings came up.
Over the past two years I have spent inordinate amounts of time on trains, and became a regular listener of a number of podcasts - among them Buzz Out Loud, Net @ Night, MacBreak, Diggnation, TWiT, and many more. My travelling companions became Molly Wood, Leo Laporte, Kevin Rose, Andy Ihnatko, John C Dvorak, and a host of other IT journalists. It was like keeping an ear to the ground for two years.
Now I’m away from the trains, and the hours of navel gazing, I find myself in the very alien situation of having to find time to listen. It’s strange. Having been such a consumer of media for so long, pulling away from it is hard.
In many ways the iPhone has helped me by affording the opportunity to fill the cracks in the day with podcasts, music, news, email, and mobile access to the web.
I never thought I would find myself saying it, but I miss my time commuting - jammed in the corner of a train carriage, with no room to move, lost in thought as podcasts pump news and conversation into my head.