[Note: This post started as a copy from a Google+ post…but I’m committing myself to moving more of my voice back here, and starting this way is better than nothing. If the shutdown of Reader shows us nothing else, it highlights the danger of trusting another service with too much of our valued data and metadata.]

A silver lining to the Google Reader death fiasco…I’ve found my long-desired decent replacement to Google Listen, Google’s podcast player. They abandoned the app quite a while back, and even removed it from the play store, so I’ve been looking for a replacement for awhile.

For all its flaws, Listen was a pretty good podcast player app. The killer feature, IMO, is that it keeps its downloads out of the Music “inventory”. It sounds trivial, but it drives me *crazy* to see downloaded podcasts show up in my Music app just b/c they are new MP3s that the phone has found on the SD card. I seldom shuffle my entire music inventory, but the thought that if I did, I might end up with “song, song…podcast???” makes me batty. And way too many of the apps I’ve looked at did exactly that.

But on one of the threads I’m reading about the Reader retirement, someone (hold on…ah, +Kristian Serrano . Thanks!) mentioned Listen Up as a spiritual successor to Listen. I immediately bounced over, took a look, and bought it to try. (there’s actually a free [Listen Up Free] version of the app with identical functionality[!], but hey…it’s a buck. Pay the guy!)

I like the updated interface of the app (Listen was definitely dated), and….w00t! No podcasts in my Music player! FTW! (Update: I’ve since poked around the developer’s site a bit, and realized from a comment in a thread there the oh-so-difficult way to stop this is adding a “.nomedia” file to the directory the app uses to store its files. Seriously, other folks! Is that so hard to add to your app?)

I’m using Listen Up right now, and heartily recommend it as an Android podcast player. Thanks again to Kristian for mentioning it, and Patrick Julien for coding it!

This year has been pretty pathetic with respect to posting here on my blog…*sigh*. Best intentions and all that, but one post (last week, no less!) since January is not at all impressive. I’ve decided to set my sights low in an effort to get back in the habit. Here’s another Cory Doctorow presentation…the followup, in fact, to the one in my January post: “The Coming Civil War over General-purpose Computing”

(btw, “sights low” doesn’t refer to the presentation! Rather to shortness/simplicity of my post)

I got an email this past week that I’ve been dreading for a long time, but half-expecting…IT Converstations is shutting down. One of the first and best podcasting resources is going away. 🙁

The good news is that their existing content is safe; some of the sub-sites are rolling back to their original sponsors (ie, Social Innovations Conversations, for example), and the main ITC corpus is going to the Internet Archive, with ITC providing transparent redirects for as long as possible. Class act, IT Conversations…I expect no less from Doug and Phil, of course.

I understand the decision, but nonetheless, IT Conversations will be *sorely* missed. I agree with Doug that, in a sense, they’ve reached “Mission Accomplished”…over the past decade, podcasting tech conferences has gone from almost impossible to bog standard, and ITC was a big part of making that happen.

There was a pretty long period at the beginning of the “podcasting era” (2004-2006 or so) where the IT Conversations website was generally a daily pageload of mine. And invariably I would find something fascinating and interesting to toss into one of my feeds. Many of the conferences and even individual podcasters that I follow today came from a IT Conversations episode.

And even today, they continue to innovate. ITC’s Spokenword.org is a novel service that provides benefits that I don’t see many other places. Spokenword allows for the curation, rating, and organization of “playlists” describing podcasts from all over the Net. It’s a great service, with a great API that allows for proper programmatic manipulation. It’s not surviving the transition, though…I’m really going to miss it. I know of tools that can give me part of what Spokenword provides, but I may have to wire some of it together myself.

So I’m sad to see them go. Nevertheless, I want to thank Doug Kaye, Phil Windley, and all the other folks who worked together to make IT Conversations such an amazing resource. You did a fantastic job, and  were instrumental in bringing me into the podcast fold. I really appreciate everything you’ve done.

We’ll see y’all on the Interwebs.