ESL podcasts. Finally something useful from a podcast.

Podcasts are some of the most hit or miss sorts of things on the web. They can be absolutely awesome if they are done well and fulfill a tremendously small niche. If you happen to stumble upon one that you want to listen to and that has consistent quality and content, you hoard it like a precious gem found deep in a mine. However, just like a mine, there is a lot of crap you have to sort through to find that gem.

While the liberalization of publishing that has allowed Tom, Dick, and Harry to basically have an "audio blog" has created lots of new ways for people to express themselves, the problem is that not everyone knows what they are doing. People have "communications and broadcasting degrees" for a reason, and if you want to express yourself in a spoken manner, it takes more than a few folks sitting around talking to make an interesting show.

It's not the mode, it's the content. There is a lot of content, and a limited amount of time for me to listen to it. While I can surf the web with multiple tabs that make switching between blogs easy, I only have two ears to listen to one podcast at a time. This makes looking for content harder, and more time intensive without proper filtering tools.

Programs like Itunes can let you search for podcasts and even filter them by rating and topic, but thousands of results are returned for simple queries. It's just not worth my time to investigate all of these options.

I have found one particularly awesome podcast that serves a niche well that I could recommend however. English as a Second Language podcast, at eslpod could be a really useful tool for someone looking to practice their listening skills. While English radio broadcast programs are common in Korea, they all suffer the same limitation of being on the radio. Students often told me that they would have a hard time catching what someone said and wouldn't be able to get clarification since the shows don't get syndicated and can't be reviewed easily.

Podcasts are all about syndication, so as long as the content is worth listening to, review and practice wouldn't be a problem at all. This show can be played as many times as they student wanted, and it even provides scripts for more difficult words. Best of all, this is free and doesn't require much of an investment to begin beyond a computer with speakers. If you can read this, you can take advantage of it already. Pair this with an abundance of cheap audio music devices and you have the ability to always have good ESL content with you on the go. I could see this as being a rather big niche product in Korea, where any advantage that can be exploited by parents. If someone wrote an podcast program for mp3 phones, this could be a huge money making item.

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