Week 9: Podcasts aka Webmarshall strikes again

Podcast.net is blocked by Webmarshall

The home page of Podcastalley.com will open but getting beyond the first page rivals paint drying, bread rising and grass growing for speed...

Even the top podcasts option, which you'd think is a fairly uncomplicated link, is attempting to load for about 50 seconds and then sullenly telling me its Done when nothing has happened except'n ah've gotten older.

I stand corrected, something has happened, now I have an error message 'internet explorer cannot display the webpage'.

http://podcasts.yahoo.com is equally unhappy about the prospect of loading. (There 'tis, another error message, same as before).

Fortunately I can comment on podcasting as I've been an infrequent listener to a blog recommended in Vogue Knitting. Alas the name and link are at home but essentially I found that being a dial-up customer on a decidedly dodgy phone line it was impossible to stream and listen, I had to download the file to my harddrive (using my download manager and allowing an hour and a half for a 15 minute chat to reach completion) and then it's there to be listened to at my leisure.

And therein lies the trap. Once the thing is on my hd, just like a book you own and are going to read 'one day', it sits waiting in a digital holding pattern for that mythical day when I sit down at my pc and instead of thinking 'Ach, damn, 145 missives in the in-box and thats after I've deleted the spam, how long has Aunt Agatha waited for a reply? Oopser, 7 weeks, best start there' I sit down and think 'I'm so up to date, I'll just indulge in one of those podcasts I've got on file...how delightful.'

Score so far, podcasts downloaded: 8, podcasts listened to: 2.

A 25% success rate.

But I'm halfway through The God Delusion (Dawkins) and three chapters in on The six sacred stones (Reilly) because they're portable entertainment and mind expanding reading.

And I recognise that if I could dl podcasts to an mp3 player I'd have played them all by now, so maybe it's less a matter of time and more a matter of adequate technology.