Down in Napier...

I decided to take the afternoon off work and trek down to Napier for the weekend to catch up with old friends and family for my birthday. The drive down was pleasant with a distinct lack of traffic... untill I approached Taupo where rain, wind, practically nil-visibility and the entire countries contingent of traffic all converged together...

Still, the drive down wasn't bad, no sign of any accidents and only one cop; not to mention a good selection of podcasts and music relieved the boredom of a long drive alone.

After catching up with Mum and Dad briefly, good friend Kerry came over and we tripped off to a few pubs to catch up, we picked up Aj from Magic FM on the way and an enjoyable evening with beer and bourdon ensued.

Following the pub, we returned to Aj's so he could do his radio show, he's got a nice setup and it was interesting to see how the radio show was run. Something that struck me whilst I sat there watching Aj and Kerry back and forth "on air" - the station is mostly automated music and advertising sweepers, with the occasional live interaction with the DJs during their shows.

Ok, theres nothing strange with that, but what struck me was that I found the off-air banter and interaction between Aj, Kerry and myself far more entertaining to listen to than the shorter 'on air' banter. I can see that the format of the show targets less discussion and more music, but part of me would have loved more discussion with the same level of music.

It's this that makes me love podcasts so much, my iPod has 40gb of music that I love listening to, I have 3-4gb of rotating podcast content I also love listening to, I have playlists that give me my fresh podcasts, and also my most played songs.. This gives me a "radio station" thats time shifted, and tailored to what I like - theres a mix of comedy, religion, science, and sci-fi, along with insane amounts of heavy metal and hard rock.

Since podcasting started, I've been thinking in the back of my mind "hey, I should start a podcast' which normally follows up with "don't be stupid, don't jump on the bandwagon just because". So I'm sitting here with two voices on either sholder, should I listen to one side or the other? Years ago I used to record my thoughts into a dictaphone and record inspiration for poetry, which is something I've been thinking of doing again independantly of podcasts and podcasting. As I was driving down from Auckland I started thinking on this again, and came up with an idea for an experimental podcast to solve a question that's be sitting at the back of my mind for years, I'm still not sure if I'll go through with it, but if I do, you'll find out about it here...

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