Listening to podcasts piecemeal: huffduffer & Instacast
For the past few years, there's been a site called huffduffer (started by Jeremy Keith) that lets you link to bits of audio you find online and it shows you popular items across the service. I've always thought of it as Instapaper or delicious for audio, but I never found myself considering it a useful tool that met any of my own audio needs.
Last year I found Instacast, an iPhone app that fully replaced my podcast listening through iTunes. It works around Apple's previous limitations that require you to sync your phone to a computer and requring wifi to download episodes. It's a great app and keeps you up to date on everything you love, even when you're on 3G.
What's weird is in the years since podcasting came out, the world has changed and there are lots of different podcasts producing infrequent content. You also hear about one-off events or shows, or single stellar episodes in an otherwise established series. I finally found a personal use for huffduffer recently as a way to collect all the single podcast episodes I want to hear without the committment of subscribing to a podcast and having to download every one of its 100s of episodes.
Take for example the Marc Maron show. He's at 339 episodes, many of which go beyond a couple hours, and though it's an incredible comedy interview show you're talking a pretty significant chunk of time if you subscribe to the show. On the other hand, I've had friends that listen to the show say there are 4 or 5 episodes you shouldn't miss, and I've been happy to listen to those but I simply don't have the time to follow 2hrs of new content a week from the podcast forever. Another example is friends doing a guest spot on a show I've never heard of, it's a great way to just pluck out that single episode and save it to huffduffer. This also works the other way. If I hear three good single episodes of a podcast chances are I'll subscribe to the full feed.
How To
The final step in the puzzle is wiring your huffduffer feed to instacast. It's easy, but I couldn't find any instructions for this online so I'll post them here. Sign up for huffduffer, use the bookmarklet to add single episodes to your account, then look for your personal podcast feed, which takes the form of:
http://huffduffer.com/{your username}/rss
Next, go to your Instacast client, hit the + button to add a new podcast, then click the link button in the upper left. Put your huffduffer podcast URL listed above and save.
That's all there is to it, whenever you hear about an amazing episode of a podcast or someone you follow on twitter guest stars somewhere, add it to huffduffer, pop open your phone and enjoy.