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.
2 comments:
> I can't believe Jon ran out of
> In Our Time podcasts.
Actually I only found out about it recently, from you :-)
Ahh! That explains it. Let me know if you'd like me to mail a back catalog (jfaughnan@gmail.com).
I'm disappointed that the BBC hasn't either made the IOT back catalog public or started selling DRMd versions via iTunes.
Just sitting on the shows is so annoying.
I'm looking forward to a spokenword news feed, I gather it's on the way.
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