Clubhouse was recently made available to Android users.

I wasn’t sure if it was a little too late and if they had missed hitting their critical mass, but I decided to give it a shot anyway.

A number of featuers were missing, including the ability to show links to your other social media IDs, which I thought was a pretty glaring omission.

As a highly auditory individual, I’ve always enjoyed listening to the radio and, later, podcasts. No surprises that I enjoy Clubhouse as well.

I certainly prefer it far more than Zoom meetings, for the one major benefit that I don’t have to be visible and nobody else is either.

For all I know, the person speaking at any one time may be in the toilet, walking around in his underwear, or tucked cosily in bed.

And it doesn’t matter!

I’ve listened in on discussions about the pandemic, politics, travel, people offering useful tips for various things, and even improv jazz performances.

I’ve also shared my thoughts to complete strangers.

All without having to dress up, prepare my background, and make sure I look presentable.

Clubhouse is interesting. And I’m going to stick with it for a while.

I used to teach a podcasting workshop.

But this was a long time ago. Mobile devices already existed, but they weren’t anywhere as feature-packed and powerful as they are now.

My students had to find a quiet spot (at least as quiet as a school could be), record their podcasts on to a laptop using a small plug-in microphone, and save the file before submitting it for evaluation by the teachers.

A large part of the time was spent on activities other than the actual recording: writing and perfecting the script, as well as practising. I would have liked to give them the freedom to do off-the-cuff recordings, but time was very tight and the school wanted specific results.

Nevertheless, some of the groups of podcasters did very well.

During the slowdown in Singapore, I had the opportunity to listen to a rather large number of podcasts. In some cases, they were videos of the interviewer/ees in the studio. I also listened to a number of audiobooks (though I still prefer reading physical ones).

And all of this started to reignite my thoughts on potentially taking up podcasting again.

It’s surprising how affordable a proper microphone and shield are these days. You can have a decent set up for under $150.

I’m still not certain, though.

As with a lot of things, I’m not entirely sure what I would talk about.

I’ve had suggestions of just having conversations, talking about subjects that come up, and just working through them.

For that, I’m going to need to either have regular fellow podcasters or else a list of people to interview.

And, of course, a list of subjects to cover.

That’ll take some work, but it may be worth exploring.