The summer is almost up.  I spend a great amount of time listening to podcasts.  I love them because you get so much more news about specific topics and the commercials are minimal.  I fear the day when podcasts go the way of radio or television (though it is coming!)  Radio is on the way out, and podcasts will soon be replaced by what we knew as radio shows.  (Isn’t there going to be a day when we can stream content from the web everywhere we go?)

A new podcast I have enjoyed (i have listened to the last 2) is This Week in Google, which focuses on the new things happening with Google and cloud computing.  Leo Laporte is the host like so many other shows, but I have to admit so far, I have enjoyed this show more than any of the others.  I don’t think many people would enjoy it as much as I do since it is more about looking to the future, making cloud computing easier and more effective.  I love the value of cloud computing; however, I feel we have stepped back in terms of reinventing software that already worked again in an online form.  Google Docs is nowhere near what Microsoft Word has become.

The most recent episodes have discussed the newest features to Google Reader, notably it’s ability to Send stories to other services, mark all items read, publish instantaneously to Friendfeed, and more.  I swear that Google Reader is one of the greatest tools online.  It saves me tons of time and brings the news (that I care about) to me.  Besides reading my email and checking MLB.com, I live in Google Reader.

I have to admit that one section of this week’s discussion was the vagueness around all the ways you could mark an article in your feeds.  You can Like it, Share It, Share it with a Note, Comment on it, Tag it, Email it and Star it.  I’m exhausted even thinking about it!  I really have to agree that they either need to make it clear what all these things do or remove some of these options.  I don’t know what to consistently do.

I usually Star or Share.  Star allows me to make it a favorite which I can find in the future.  Share allows me to make it public and then create a RSS feed with these shared items for embedding on blogs, elsewhere.  Tagging annoys me because it creates a list of tags at the bottom, which I don’t want.  Maybe there is a way to hide those tags on the bottom listing.

Also, I’m still wondering when we will see Themes in Reader.  Reader could use a little color.