I have recently become addicted to
podcasts, and blogs, but I haven’t got much from forums yet. This is mostly in my estimation due to the
fact that they are fairly passive forms of information gathering rather than
participating in the creation of ideas in a forum. There are a few forums that I am apart of
though, just not that active in them.
When I was a kid, my Dad would get the newspaper
everyday and read it, and then in the evening he would watch the news usually
The National on CBC at 10pm followed by one of the other local networks for the
“local” news. He still does this to this
day, and the local news is the closest city to him about 150km as he lives in
rural Alberta. For me I get very bored with traditional
media news. The closest I get to a
newscast is on the radio while I am driving somewhere, but this is limited as I
am usually listening to a podcast or talking on my mobile amateur radio rig on
the local repeater.
I started listening to podcasts a few years
ago as my interest in emergency preparedness grew and I was searching on the
internet for information. This was in
close connection with my work on getting my Amateur Radio license and emergency
communications. I started listening to
Jack Spirko over at The Survival Podcast.
He does a daily one hour podcast on preparedness and modern survival
with a very broad range of topics. At
the time I started I was listening on my computer, but the sound of Jack’s
voice irritated my wife after a while, so when I began working full time after
I finished school I was issued a Blackberry which I installed the podcast app
onto. During this time I would listen to
a podcast as I commuted to and from work.
Jack is very good and enthusiastic and I agree with a lot of his points
of view, but I was concerned that I was only getting one point of view, so I
sought out some alternatives just to broaden my own horizons and make sure that
I had multiple perspectives. At the time
I did not find too many, but after I got a new personal phone I downloaded the
Listen app by Google and have added 13 podcasts to that list. Now for the most part these podcasters
produce 1 episode a week some less so I can usually keep up with demand.
During my last year of university we had
Ben Eadie come into our design class and lecture on social media and blogging. He is a local guy that has had a lot of
success with this format of being a guru and getting his message out
there. He encouraged us to start a blog
on what we were passionate about and had some knowledge on to establish
ourselves as experts in that field. The rationale
behind that is if we are experts then people will seek us out for more
information and people will offer us work.
Ben is the reason that I started this blog. I never really read a lot of blogs until I used
the blogger dashboard and then I would subscribe to a few blogs and that was
good, it helped aggregate the feeds for me, but I was under the impression the
dashboard only worked for blogger websites.
With the acquisition of my android phone I was introduced to the Google
Reader app and from there my number of subscriptions has skyrocketed. My feed was getting a little overwhelmed so I
trimmed a few that do the short little one line spam posts, also if they were
abandoned feeds they were gone too . If
I was not getting value from their work I kicked them to the curb. So for me when I am eating breakfast in the
morning I grab my tablet and read some of the content that I have found value
in and partake in that. I am the editor
of what I receive.
Here is a quick note on forums. There is a lot of information out there in
forums as I have mentioned before.
Anytime I am searching for some information on how to do something I
usually end up either on YouTube or I end up in a forum. Building community is important and that is
typically done in the forums for the places that interest you. One of the things you can do if you do not
find a forum that suits what you are looking for is that you can start one of
your own.
Anyways, that is how I use Podcasts, Blogs
and Forums. Please share in the comments
how you use these wonderful resources. If you like what you have read, please subscribe to the blog, or follow me
on twitter at @bjshideler. Also,
share this post with your friends on your favorite social media sites.
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