I've had a week of podcasts and it's been brilliant. Podcasts are great if you have dead time that you can't really do much else in. I have circa 90-minutes of dead time per day in order to get to and from work. I also like to go for a walk for an hour during dinner as it's the only exercise I get during the day. All this week, I've spent that 150 minutes listening to podcasts.

What have been listening to? The gaming podcast Fear the Boot and the Marketing and Strategy podcast from Cambridge University's Judge Business School.

I like Fear the Boot. I used to listen to it before, along with Sons of Kryos, and then I sort of drifted away from them both (and I believe Sons of Kryos isn't made any more). Despite Sons of Kryos being more compatible with the gaming groups approach, I found that less interesting, probably because it was so compatible, it had an element of 'simple confirmation' about it. Fear the Boot is still interesting, largely because they use a language and seem to have a body of experience that ignores a certain strand of game development post-1996. Whenever they quote game examples they come from D&D, Battletech, Vampire, FASA Star Trek, Palladium and the token simpler and classless game of Savage Worlds. Despite sometimes breaking away from it, a lot of the language focuses on the 'GM story and setting' and the separation of the GM and the player, and too much use of the term 'RP'. Anyway, it's still good because it's about gamers in a different place with different experiences, though it does mean you sometimes mean I'm shaking my head in the car. Still, one of them was also very enlightening, and pulled together a number of thoughts I've been having about gaming generally, and the two on live action role-playing was interesting in terms of the thoughts and mindsets of those involved in the hobby (they had a panel).

The Cambridge University Business School podcasts were an experiment with iTunes U. The first minor issue is iTunes U podcasts don't download to the iPod. No idea why. If you go into the subscription and change all the file types to podcasts rather than iTunes U they will download. When something is so easily changed it always seems odd the restriction is in place? I've listened to a good number of them and a core of them are the usual academic of the day telling people what they should do with marketing budgets in the recession, or the latest academic theory. All when and good but they involve little application, so they are interesting, but are sort of repeats of things that can be picked up elsewhere. It's not that hard to know what you should be doing theoretically, after all. The interesting ones involved either case studies or new theories and their application to the real world. The most interesting one was on global strategies and how true the Global Market really is. As I've always suspected it's not that true. Capital and commodity markets are global, but it turns out even the top 500 global companies are remarkably slanted to their home market or markets just a hop away in the same region (Europe, Asia Pacific, etc). In short, we have a quasi-global market and the detail may be in regional markets along with the various regional structures and bodies and extending globally is hard. I've always had thoughts in this direction, it was interesting hearing it backed up with research, facts, theories and some wider thinking. Overall, based on the podcasts I've listened to, I'd recommend the odd iTunes U experiment if you've got dead time.

The trouble is, I've ran out of back catalogue, so now I'm waiting for new episodes to drop into my iTunes subscriptions. The strategy is now going to have to change to less back episodes and more subscriptions. As a result, a bit more trawling around iTunes shall feature in my future.