If you have any interest in start-ups or the business side of technology you will find Venture Voice very entertaining. The podcast features Greg Galant interviewing an entrepreneur and usually features a successful tech entrepreneur. Today I listened to episode 40 which was no different.

This episode featured  Ried Hoffman of LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a social networking site that caters to an older crowd. Unlike sites like myspace and facebook, LinkedIn is geared toward managing the social networks of business professionals. I heard about this site a few months ago when I recieved an invite from a colleague on my current project. I signed up, but have yet to explore some of the functionality discussed on the podcast. After listening to this episode, I am seriously considering checking it out again.

The episode was a little over 46 minutes long and in typical Venture Voice format gave a background of Ried Hoffman and how he got into entrepreneurship and business models and the implications of social networks to professionals. Ried was another veteran of Paypal (See Episode 34 David Sacks if you are interested in that).

Venture Voice Show #40 - Ried Hoffman of LinkedIn

Dot Net Rocks was live from Tech Ed Europe in a panel format with a live audience.  The topic was agile and the panelists were Kate Gregory, Stephen Forte and Roy Osherove along with usual hosts Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell.

The show brought up some interesting insights into agile but I can't help but feel that they are over-estimating the uptake that agile as a methodology has. As a consultant who spends a lot of time interviewing other consultants, I find it rare when I find a candidate who has actually used a methodology professionally, let alone agile. And although I find Scrum (project methodology that leverages two - four week sprints with customer feedback between iterations)  interesting as a project management approach, I haven't fully bought into Test Driven Development or extreme programming for that matter.

The one interesting point that was brought up was the difficulty in trying to manage concurrent sprints when using Scrum. If you are interested in agile and have more than 71 minutes to spare I would recommend listening to the whole thing, but everyone should download it and listen to the two "Adam Sandleresque" songs Roy Osherove played at the end.

Dot Net Rocks Episode 205: TechEd Europe Agile Panel 

Hanselminutes has been dropping off in recent weeks and although this week was a little better, it is still not up to par with some of the earlier shows. Unless you have not heard of WS-* (then read some of my exam notes for WSE3), I probably would recommend passing on episode 53.

The episode did present some nice analogies for wrapping your head around some of the envelope and security concepts that WS exposes. But don't expect going beyond the surface of any of the WS specification. If you haven't look outside of the Microsoft implementations you may get something out of the discussion of some of the lesser popular WS specifications (WS-Metadata Exchange, etc). Otherwise I'd recommend skipping the almost 26.5 minutes episode

Hansel Minutes Episode 53: <WS-*/> 

So there you have it. My first three reviews. If you have listened to any of the above shows let me know if you agree with me, or disagree.