I don’t use last.fm anymore, since it became apparent I listen to far more podcasts than music.

I find podcasts as useful as Twitter or RSS for keeping up with news, but they lack the social ‘findability’ aspects (since Odeos demise) of either.

So I’m sharing my favourites here.  I hear that comment forms work for non-spam related feedback, so if I missed any good ones, let me know.

interviews and news

• the changelog : interviews with open-source project leads. Padrino this week.
• it management & cloud podcast @cote and @botchagalupe chew the fat. IT(SM) / devops / cloud discussion and war stories from their IBM days.
• devops cafe : someone worth hearing every week, so far @auxesis and @allspaw
• Pivotal Labs tech talks – audio streams of presentations. sometimes you feel the absence of slides, but interesting topics.
• SplunkTalk : they talk. about Splunk.
• the Basho Riak podcast : the CouchDB podcast seems to be dead, this is a good noSQL sometimes ropey audio quality, but smart cookies.

history

• history of the world in 100 objects : excellent, especially considering you can’t see the objects.
• In Our Time : Melvyn Bragg being rude to academics. They cover an amazing range of topics.
• The History of Rome – the full history of the Roman Republic and Empire
• 12 Byzantine Rulers . the history of Byzantium (after the fall of Rome). Finished now, but well worth getting the archives. The last episode made me weep in a queue at the Post Office.
• History 110 Roman Republic from Stanford – iTunes U is a bit of a mixed bag, but Isabelle Pafford is great. She’s just uploaded a new one, too.

developer news

• the jquery and yayQuery podcasts : if you missed the memo, javascript now rules the world. JSConf live is a lot of fun too.
• the dev show , ruby5 , the ruby show : all great. Wish there were more bi-weekly 5-minute news podcasts.
• a little bit of Python : there aren’t many active Python podcasts, this is consistently worth a listen.
• herding code : .Net development. Surprising coverage of technologies I think of as coming from ‘my world’.
• the MDN show : OSX and iPhone dev. Good to get a UI developers perspective now and again.

tutorials

These are videos, 30 minutes or under. I usually prefer audio, but  handy when there’s nothing on the telly.

• jQuery for designers : Remy Sharps video walkthroughs. He’s not scared to debug live on camera now and then.
• vimcasts : a bit on the hardcode side, but you will learn something useful.
• MAKE Magazine Weekend Projects : Good to watch with the kids over Rice Crispies on a Saturday.
• FOSSCasts : Really accessible tutorials on screen, monit, zsh, emacs etc.
• TextMate : the most under-used popular editor in the world. This series shows off some of its hidden gems.
• python osmosis : A Terminal-led playalong to the Python Tutorial. Brilliant. no longer updating (he reached the end of the tutorial).
• gitcasts screencasts : demos, walkthroughs and conceptual slideshows. Really very good indeed.

things I’m missing

• a good Android development news podcast. Or even a bad one. All I can find is app reviews.
• google appengine development. Google Developer Podcast was close, but has been dormant for a long time.
• Erlang. hello joe doesn’t count.
• a Ruby tutorial. Lots of people ask me about Ruby beginner resources – there are excellent Rails video podcasts , but nothing close to Python Osmosis.