I started listening to podcasts again and have found some amazing episodes that I want to share with people. I’ve also rediscovered why being a podcast listener is so frustrating. Let me share the good episodes first before I start complaining.

Three of these next seven episodes are amazingly good. These are so good that they’re worth listening to over dinner (Sarah and I did actually listen to the two This American Life episodes that way).

Venture Voice // Tom Perkins of Kleiner Perkins – Great history and perspective from one of the most experienced entrepreneurs and investors.

This American Life // The Giant Pool of Money – Explains the mortgage crisis in a way that anyone can understand, even covering CDOs.

This American Life // Another Frightening Show About the Economy – They expand on their coverage of the mortgage crisis to include the credit crisis, including commercial paper. I swear, this is interesting and understandable.

These next four were pretty interesting to me at least. I bet they have things that you haven’t heard before.

Knowledge@Wharton // Google’s Joe Kraus on How to Make the Web More Social – Covers a lot of fundamental trends that effect a business like CrowdVine.

TalkCrunch // Interview With Newt Gingrich About Tech, Elections And American Solutions – If you live in the Bay Area you probably only know Newt through the Clinton impeachment. However, I thought it was interesting to get his policy perspective since I almost never hear local pundits or politicians talk that way.

Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (Stanford) // Music Artists Go Entrepreneurial – Quincy Jones, MC Hammer, and Chamillionaire discuss social software’s effect on music. They even mention Twitter and FriendFeed. I love how so many hip hop artists take control of the business side of their art so that they can have some measure of independence (it’s like a programmer who rejects corporate safety and venture capital).

USF MBA Podcast // All Things Digital – This is Kara Swisher giving an inside take on the News Corp acquisition of the Wall Street Journal.

Now I’m going to start complaining. I didn’t want to just tell you the titles of seven podcasts that were worth listening to–I wanted to make it easy for you to actually listen. The absolute best scenario would be if I could create a feed that you could subscribe to in iTunes. Then my recommended podcasts could automatically be added to iTunes and your iPod.

First I tried Odeo. They have playlists but the playlists don’t have feeds. So then I went searching for other podcast directories. I remember when I worked at Odeo being unnerved every time a new podcast directory launched. Well, all of the competitors seem to be defunct or in major disrepair.

So then I tried Digg. They have podcasts in their directory that you can “digg” and they offer an RSS feed of your history which includes those diggs. I created a new account so you wouldn’t have my non-podcast diggs (mostly just favors for friends at this point). That produces an RSS feed but the RSS feed doesn’t have enclosures, the information linking directly to the podcast audio file that you podcast player needs to download.

So then I went back to Odeo so that I could at least point to a web based playlist. I would have used Odeo for six of the seven links above but they’ve removed their “add to itunes” buttons. The seventh (USF MBA) is missing from the directory. But I can’t be too harsh about that since they’re still by far the most complete directory.

Who is to blame? I guess I am at least partially. I worked at Odeo. Our flash guru, Ray, was a huge proponent of what he called curating. That’s exactly what I’m talking about here. I don’t have much content to offer, but I can offer my editorial filter. I wish we had solved this problem before we’d moved off of podcasting.