Introducing SpokenWord.org - Jon Udell:I can't believe Jon ran out of In Our Time podcasts. My personal collection goes back about five years, and it offers a lot of listening and re-listening.
...Back in the good old days, circa 2006 or so, I was a happy podcast listener. During my many long periods of outdoor activity — running, hiking, biking, leaf-raking, snow-shoveling — I sometimes listened to music, but more often absorbed a seemingly endless stream of spoken-word lectures, conversations, and entertainment. Some of my sources were conventional: NPR (CarTalk, FreshAir), PRI (This American Life), BBC (In Our Time), WNYC (Radio Lab). Others were unconventional: Pop!Tech, The Long Now Foundation, TED, ITConversations, Social Innovation Conversations, Radio Open Source....... From the FAQ:
Think of SpokenWord.org as a funnel. You collect streams (RSS feeds) of programs from all over the Web, then combine them into a singe collection on SpokenWord.org. Then in iTunes you subscribe to just one feed: the feed from your SpokenWord.org collection.
Managing feeds, in addition to (or instead of) managing items, is an aspect of digital literacy that’s only just emerging. I think it’s critical, so I’m a keen observer/participant in various domains: blogging, microblogging, calendaring, or — in this case — audio curation...
... I’m hoping that SpokenWord will become a place where curators emerge who lead me to places I wouldn’t have gone...
That hasn’t happened yet, of course, since SpokenWord.org just launched in beta this week. Meanwhile, the site offers a variety of lenses through which to view its growing collection of feeds and programs: tags, categories, ratings, user activity... the Active Collectors bucket on the home page has alerted me to a couple of feeds I hadn’t known about, notably BBC World’s DocArchive...
Then there are the Teaching Company's lectures. Not free of course, but you can by a lot from the backlist for a bit of money.
Still, if Jon's into it then it's worth examining. I've signed up.
