What is carpodding? It is a term I made up to describe listening to podcasts while driving. It's a versatile word. You can get creative with it. In essence, carpodders are people who carpod.
Unfortunately, I can't claim to be the first person to invent this word. It is defined at techweb and a couple other places. It's not defined on wikipedia, dictionary.com, or even urban dictionary... yet.
Most people write about carpodding because they do it while they commute to work. There are even podcasts called Monday Morning Commute or My Daily Commute.
Some of you might be wondering, just how do you carpod? You need three things:
- a portable music player (probably an iPod)
- podcasts in your player (probably by downloading MP3 audio files and importing those files into your player)
- the ability to listen to your podcasts while driving
And others of you are wondering, how do I carpod safely? After all, it's against the law to be driving around with headphones on both ears. I guess the simplest way would be just use one headphone. You could buy a speaker for your MP3 player. I chose to buy a fairly cheap car radio with a headphone plug and connect it to my iPod. There are much fancier solutions, like car radios that directly plug into and control an iPod.
What would you listen to while you carpod? Pretty much anything! Check out these blogs and articles about finding podcasts. Some even write about free audio book resources.
Sometime soon, I'll share my list of favorite podcasts. That's a problem with podcasts... they are slow to review because you can't skim them. As Scoble said, they're great for places where you can't read... like the car.
Happy carpodding!
p.s. It would be really cool if the podcasts were already automatically in your car stereo - and you could bypass the player, downloading and plugging into the stereo!