This discovery exercise was a bit more challenging than the others to date. There was lots of exploring and I found quite a few podcast sites of interest. The bad news on some of these is that they had not done a podcast in several months. Others seemed very "grass roots," almost like a blog. Podcast Alley was the best directory for me as it had good genre lists and summaries. It was great to be able to go in and see exactly what a podcast was about, including one I found under "Kids and Family" that had an explicit warning (why was it under that genre rather than another?)...hmmm.
I was amazed at all of the language learning podcasts. I think tech savvy, traveling patrons could really find this useful. I also found one that had old time radio broadcasts so I guess a 21st century family could sit around the computer and listen to one of these rather than the radio. More likely this family would download to an MP3 player and listen to it on a car trip...who knows?
I was able to set up the RSS feed to my Bloglines account. For the exercise I chose National Geographic World Talk podcast which was like reading an article in the magazine. Educational as well entertaining...there were a few others that I was interested in and will probably add them later.
There seems to be a podcast out there for everyone and every interest!
1 comment:
I think you're right to be wary of those that haven't produced any new programs in a couple of months. I tend to steer clear of those as well. This is an important point to remember if you decide you want to produce podcasts for your library. Your subscribers will expect new content on a fairly regular basis. If you can't or won't commit to that, it's probably better to just create an occasional audio program and link to it from your web page or blog.
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