Anne is a Man reviewed

Recently my blog was evaluated at two other blogs and I wish to show you those reviews.

A short review was delivered by my podcast review colleague at The Podcast Place: "The man called Anne reviews many podcasts that you won’t find on this site and his writing is very good. Like me, he is a fan of podcasts and also like me, does not give the podcasts he reviews ratings."

A much longer review was delivered from the blog PTSD Spirituality; Healing Souls Wounded by PTSD, which is written by the theologian and US Army veteran and PTSD struck John D. Zemler PhD. The blog is mainly about Zemler's PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) experiences and his views how spirituality can point the way out of the infliction. Pointing to a blog about podcasts then seems like a far away side step, but here is how John Zemler makes the point that learning is a way out of PTSD and that the disorder frequently goes with symptoms that make it extremely hard to read and to check in with regular classes, not to mention the financial constraints. In this respect the kind of intellectual podcasts I review offer exactly the kind of low-threshold, free education in your own time and pace that PTSD patients can benefit from.

"In the world of podcasting, Anne provides [a] service. He spends a lot of time evaluating and finding the best of the best when it comes to podcasts and then posts them for you and me to listen and learn.

What I find most amazing is that Anne does this for free. He does not make money from this service. He has a love of learning, podcasting, and making it available to whomever is interested in using it. [...]

Anne even has helpful tutorials that explain what a podcasts is, how to use an RSS feeder, and so on. For many blog readers this is old hat. For folks like me, who are on the wrong side of the digital divide, this is very helpful information that enables the internet to be useful to me – and not be only something which bewilders me."

Arie Kleywegt - Marathon Interview recensie

Eerder deze week meldde ik dat Ronald van den Boogaard over zijn Marathon Interview met Arie Kleywegt had geschreven. Aangezien dit interview niet in de officiele podcast feed wordt aangeboden, had ik hem zelf via Huffduffer gemaakt (feed Arie Kleywegt).

Inmiddels heb ik het drie en een half uur durend interview beluisterd. Het is zeer de moeite waard; ik kan het van harte aanbevelen.

War in winter: diplomacy - Historyzine

Historyzine's recounting of the War of Spanish Succession, brings us in the latest issue of the podcast to the winter of 1705. The main protagonist in Jim Mowatt's version of this history is the Duke of Marlbourough. Until the winter of 1705 he has had a successful campaign and now the war takes a break and preparations begin for the next round, after the winter in 1706.

These preparations consist of diplomacy. Marlbourough travels around the courts of his allies to assure their continued support in the next part of the war. Mowatt makes this lull in the fighting an extra interesting part of the history. He describes how Marlbourough has to use all his talents in order to placate the various allies in the east. Once having done that, he makes his last stop in The Hague, where the closest allies, the Dutch are and only on the last day of the year he returns to England.

The importance of this round of diplomacy is made clear especially by the example of Prussia. Marlbourough, in Mowatt's history, closes a fateful deal with Prussia, that keeps this rising power from allying with the Swedes and paving the way to the consistent growth of the small kingdom, to the eventual power that would unite the German Reich.

More Historyzine:
The lines of Brabant,
Historyzine at its best,
The battle of Blenheim,
Reliving the War of Spanish Succession,
The year 1703.

The podcast reviewers

When I started reviewing podcasts, two and a half years ago, I think I was the only one. There may have been an abandoned blog that contained an insignificant number of reviews, but that was all. By now there are many more, maybe even more than I actually know of. So here is a list of where you can go.

Blogs:
The Podcast Place. A blog that started in December 2008 and tries to review a couple of podcasts per week from all genres.
Daily Podcast Reviews. Is not exactly a daily blog, but every now and then there is a new podcast review. Among the reviewed podcasts are quite a number of the Quick and Dirty series, best known from the podcast Grammar Girl.
DIY Scholar. My favorite among these blogs and a recurring source of inspiration is the Do It Yourself Scholar. She reviews many educational podcasts as well as videos, blogs and other free academic content.
Baxter Wood. The re-education of Baxter Wood is the blog of a 62 year old truck driver who takes on academic podcast series and reports about them without links. But he is quite exact in how to google the content.
Marje's favorite history podcasts. A near complete source for history podcast reviews compiled in a bookmarking tool. Marje helped me discover new history podcasts, but it seems, I have helped Marje as well.
Open Culture. The free culture blog by Dan Colman, associate dean of Stanford, which used to bring more podcast reviews than it does today. These days there are more general culture links and many, many videos.

Podcasts:
Edgy Reviews (feed). A weekly podcast that rates a wide variety of podcasts in sets of three.
Podwatch (feed). An Australian podcast review show that has recently been revived.
Historyzine (feed). A history podcast that also reviews history podcasts.
Forgotten Classics (feed). A literature podcast that opens every episode with one or several podcast reviews in various genres.

Veertien Achttien in transit

Voor de trouwe luisteraars van Veertien Achttien wacht er vanochtend wellicht een kleine teleurstelling. Wie in afwachting zit te kijken tot de nieuwste aflevering uit de feed komt rollen, moet tot de ontdekking komen dat die feed niet meer werkt. Wat daar aan de hand is, is dat de provider van deze feed, podplaza, over de kop is gegaan en daardoor is Veertien Achttien nu in een transit terechtgekomen.

Er moet dus een nieuwe feed komen en de maker van de podcast, Tom Tacken, laat me weten dat een nieuwe formule voor de podcast in de maak is. Tot nader order zullen de nieuwe afleveringen handmatig op de website gedownload kunnen worden. Voor de aflevering die men vandaag verwacht, heeft het dus zin om op de betreffende blog post te kijken; zie: Wilhelm Wassmuss.

Nu dat er download links op het blog staan, betekent het echter dat de rss 2.0 feed ook als podcast feed kan worden gebruikt. Wie zich in de podcatcher (ook iTunes) abonneert op de feed van Veertien Achttien, kan in ieder geval alle in rechtstreekse download aangeboden afleveringen automatisch ophalen. Het valt te betwijfelen of deze situatie nog lang voort zal duren, maar tot nader order is dit een goede tussenoplossing en ik zal jullie op de hoogte houden hoe het verder gaat.

Meer Veertien Achttien:
Pegoud, Grimm - Veertien Achttien,
Emmeline Pankhurst,
Lord Kitchener,
Walther Rathenau,
Komitas Vardapet.

The Long Now podcast

Recurring subjects on this blog are issues of global and far reaching meaning. I love all angles of history, I tend to pick up issues of geopolitics, environment and climate change when it is about current affairs and in science I like to look at the brain, at genetics and evolution and then of course I do not shun religion and philosophy. Broad and general and all-encompassing is my appetite. And when you tend to look that wide around and that far back into history, the future is also no small matter. Thinking a century ahead easily comes with the territory.

In comparison with The Long Now, that is nothing. This foundation propagates looking at global issues, at history and at the future with an even wider scope. For The Long Now, here and now spans twenty thousand years. Ten thousand back in the past and ten thousand into the future. As Ran Levi told about in the podcast I reviewed earlier today, The Long Now has devised to this end a clock that is supposed to run for at least ten thousand years. Another project is the Rosetta Project that tries to collect and preserve as much language data as possible. The common ground is the idea that humanity and its culture spans all at once this long now and in order to properly treat it, it must be viewed from this large perspective.

The Long Now also organizes lectures and these are podcast as well (The Long Now podcast and vodcast - audio feed, video feed). I have begun listening to these podcasts and although the basic idea of taking a really long ranging view of affairs thrills me, some of the content comes of as mildly obligatory, as if, predictable and obligatory. And example is the speech by Wayne Clough of the Smithsonian institute, which turns out a summary of long term project the institute is engaged with. Much more interesting, predicatably, is the combined lecture about organically grown and genetically engineered food; this somewhat unexpected combination that really throws a fresh and long-term outlook on feeding the ever growing population and at the same time preserving the environment by using less space and needing far, far less pesticides.