While I was huffing and puffing on Sunday manhandling my heavy desk and moving the computer, monitors and bunches of cables around, I was listening to the huge backlog of MP3s I had downloaded over the past couple of weeks.

I probably listened to about 10 hours of audio over the weekend and was more active than usual in my twitter stream too.

I think it’s important to use your “downtime” well, especially if you’re working on your taxes, cleaning the desk, clearing your inbox (snail mail and email), or sorting out your baseball card collection (or samurai katana collection if that’s up your alley).

Here’s my list of favorite podcasts at the moment:

#1: Geekcast (the podcast, not the network…) -  A collaboration between Shawn Collins, Sam Harrelson, Lisa Picarille and Jim Kukral, I’d classify it as a industry banter session. I can identify with Lisa’s sentiment that it seems unstructured at times, but I think it’s part of the fun, especially as the show hosts go off on each other.

There was some drama recently as Shawn and Sam had a spat with Jim, but all seems well now, and we should have the 4 musketeers back in the seat. The show is recorded every Tues and Sam usually has the podcast up within 24 hours.

Be sure to check out the “Sorry, Jangro” drinking game that accompanies the podcast.

#2: Affiliate Summit Sessions Podcast: If you missed the recent Affiliate Summit West, or even if you attended, you probably wouldn’t have had an opportunity to attend every session as there were 4 simultaneous sessions with many great sessions in the same time slot. I enjoyed listening to the “How To Futureproof Your SEO Efforts” by Wil Reynolds, the video innovation panel chaired by Buy.TV’s Melissa Salas, the social media panel chaired by Sam, the super affiliate panel with Kris Jones, Zac Johnson, Amit Mehta and John Chow, the ABestWeb panel….I haven’t had a chance to listen to all the sessions yet, but there’s quite a hoard of great content there.

You might also like to check out the editorial panel I appeared on.

#3: Affiliate Fortune Cookies: A 5-day a week podcast from Sam, it’s his take on Lost, science fiction, social media, affiliate marketing and whatever else comes to mind. As Sam mentions, it’s intended to be a personal podcast and you can kind of hear his existential angst, especially when it comes to affiliate marketing/internet marketing in recent episodes.

Those are my top 3 podcasts at the moment, given the limited time I spend sitting and listening to podcasts.

You might also like to check out Shawn and Lisa’s Affiliate Thing podcast on Webmaster Radio, Linda Woods’ Affiliate Marketing Insider also on WMR. They’re other podcasts on the Geekcast network.

Another resource I highly recommend are the past episodes of Affiliate Marketing Today, especially the episodes hosted by AbestWeb owner Haiko De Poel and the later season hosted by Jeremy Palmer. These sessions provide a great foundation in affiliate marketing for new marketers.

I keep hearing that GarageBand is a great software suite for podcasting on the Mac, and I might fire up my new MacBook to test it out soon.

Also on the cards is a live podcast via Skype’s SkypeCast service one of these days when I have a little more time on my hands.

It’s always a pleasure talking to affiliate marketing veteran Rachel Honoway who’s one of the pioneers at affiliate marketing service agency Kowabunga (later acquired by Think Partnership), having started in 1997.

She’s not only friendly, but highly knowledgeable about prevailing issues in the affiliate marketplace.

If you haven’t yet, check out Partnercentric president Linda Woods’ interview with Rachel on a recent episode of Affiliate Marketing Insider.

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For this edition of the Friday Podcast, we discussed:

• Challenges for affiliate managers, especially in keeping up with your affiliates
• The chronic issues related to talented affiliate managers leaving for greener pastures and how networks can address this
• Highlights from the recent AC Certified workshop
• Why Syntryx might be the “killer app” for affiliate managers
• The rise of the Web 2.0 social/community-based affiliate
• Jim Kukral’s role in the affiliate universe (with a pointer to the Daily Flip)
• And lots of AC Certified goodness

Check out the Friday Podcast below:

To find out more, visit: AC Certified

I probably spend about 1-2 hours each day driving and where I used to listen to music, then later switched to listening to news programs like the BBC, I’ve since switched to listening to podcasts a couple of months ago.

Why listen to podcasts? I personally would absorb more information out of a book, especially since I like to mark them up, but a podcast is a good way to multi-task, especially if you’re short on time and a great way to find something to do while you’re driving, exercising (I’m shooting for at least 2 hours of exercise a week to fight the flab), or while cleaning my desk or doing paperwork.

My personal preference is to go for programs with useful content, although I do like the occasional “talk radio” style podcast with hosts who are doing a “Seinfeld” (ie a podcast about nothing…) but generally that doesn’t take up more than 5% or 10% of my listening time.

If a podcast contains very good information, I’ll make a mental note to go through it again and take down notes.

Here’re some of the podcasts which I listen to and might be useful for you:

• Lisa Picarille and Shawn Collins’ “Affiliate Thing“: A great weekly topical podcast, Lisa and Shawn usually have a number of industry experts on their show and cover the latest shows.
• Sam Harrelson’s Affiliate Fortune Cookies: This is a new project which Sam has recently started up and it follows a “22 minute” (refering to the program length) daily podcast (5 days a week) format . It’ll be interesting to see Sam keep this up and perhaps make reference to it during the Social Marketing panel that he’ll be moderating at Affiliate Summit West. (Especially since the session synopsis reads “With almost 50% of Internet users now creating and sharing their own content, this new medium is changing how markets operate and how companies communicate with consumers.“
• Jeremy Schoemaker AKA Shoemoney’s Shoemoney Show: Jeremy hosted the Net Income show which featured interesting guests and where Pepperjam’s Kris Jones talked about doing seasonal PPC campaigns based on UGG boots and the American Idol television series to great effect. The latest show continues the tradition.

In addition to these, I buy quite a number of information products on CD or MP3, and also have utilities to rip DVD videos into MP3 tracks, so finding more audio material to listen to isn’t an issue.

If you’re looking for more audio podcasts, you might also like to check out the SEO podcasts on WebmasterRadio.fm. I spoke to WebmasterRadio founder Daron Babin (AKA SEGuru) last week and he mentioned that a number of new programs are in development.

Linda Woods’ (CEO and President of Partnercentric) new Affiliate Marketing Insider podcast looks interesting.

Shawn, Sam and Jim Kukral have recently launched/re-launched Geekcast.fm which will be a podcast aggregator of sorts.

For more podcasts, check out:

• Listing of podcasts on Shawn Collins’ iPod
• Carsten Cumbrowski’s Podcast Directory