Different ways of looking at it

Don’t tell anybody, because some people see me as a champion of this stuff, but the standard formats for reading RSS feeds bore me silly. Bloglines drove me nuts: you couldn’t even change the garish colors. Google Reader is the best I’ve found but even that becomes monotonous. So I rotate feed readers. One of my favorites, especially if I’m in a hurry is a cloud view of learning sites. Other times I look at a river of the same feeds. And sometimes I prefer the pageflake view. Chacun a son goût.

In a dialog with the No Name Group this morning, Melanie Swan clued me in to a great learning resource, HBS IdeaCasts, a series of podcasts on senior management issues. How interesting are they? I just downloaded ten.

Lately Harvard Business School Publishing, once a soporific, has been churning out lots of interesting stuff: newsletters, blogs, author interviews, and these podcasts. What’s going on? It helps that HBR has a great editor in Tom Stewart. (The current Mrs. Jack Welch was a predecessor.) Probably a stronger motivation behind this community outreach is the fact that HBS is celebrating its 100th birthday.

The timing on discovering the Ideacasts couldn’t be better. I listen to podcasts while I hike. For most people, listening to an iPod is secondary to the hike. For me, and I really need the exercise, the opportunity to learn motivates me to get out and walk.