The BBC is making In Our Time archives available for download (!)

After years of making past IOT episodes available only for streaming, the BBC is making the archive of their History of Ideas program available for download.

In addition to the regular weekly In Our Time podcast, you can now download all previous editions of the series via the podcast genre pages listed below.

In Philosophy, for example, there are currently 62 programs available dating back to 1998. In early 2010 the BBC made back episodes available to stream, but now they've gone all in. My 2006 tech post on grabbing old episodes is now happily obsolete, my fears of 2008 have been refuted, and I don't need to covertly circulate DVDs of past programs.

These are not great times for the old world (US, Canada, Japan, Europe, UK), but there are still a few candles in the dark. This is one of them, there's more good news in efforts to freely distribute learning and education. Echoes of the Enlightenment as it were.

In honor of this happy event, I'm adding a "good news" tag to Gordon's Notes. A wee ray of sunshine in my daily gloom.

PS. It's not now documented, but little known, that Blooger has tag (label) feeds. For example, this is my "good news" feed (1 article at the moment, I don't want to overdo it) - http://notes.kateva.org/feeds/posts/default/-/good%20news. The label feeds get the main feed title, so you would want to rename them on subscription.