Thursday, October 4, 2007

Casting About

Podcast.net provided some interesting material during non-peak hours. I especially enjoyed the world music offerings that included interviews with the featured artists. Finding really good library-related sites on Podcast was a bit trickier. The best tag was "book", with "libraries" and "library science" yielding many fewer hits; even "book reviews" was disappointing. For comparison, I explored Yahoo! Podcasts (with some reluctance, since the company is closing down this service on October 31 due to Yahoo's financial slump) and appreciated the familiar topic/author/other keyword search function.
Websites related to books and culture often provide podcasts, of course, and a search on C-Span's Book TV reassured me that there's a lot out there for the literate. Finding sites that don't make you download software before playing is a big plus. Libraries which offer this kind of easy access podcast will score points with the non-technical...though I'm not convinced that podcasting a storytime without some sort of visual component will hold any child's or parent's attention for long.
Just for fun, I added the popular MuggleNet podcast to my RSS feeds and will dip into it from time to time to keep up with the news from Hogwarts.

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