- Breaking into Radio Is Really Easy
- When You Have Listened to Song Number 19,999
- When Blogging Meets Media and Becomes Podcasting
- The Future of the Mobile iPod
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When You Have Listened to Song Number 19,999
You may hit that day when you have tuned in to the last song. It's playing, and you realize that it would be really cool to get something else to listen to.
Bah-boom, the iPod is there to help again.
You can listen to a couple different things on the iPod. The first is music. The second is books. You spend a lot of time behind the wheel; why not expand your cerebral muscle? The Apple iTunes Store has a very extensive book collection you can tap in to. You will find all sorts of audio books, from best-sellers such as The Da Vinci Code to classics such as Huxley's Brave New World. The books are supplied through an exclusive contract with Audible, and each book is priced separately.
If you want to give the book thing a spin but do not want to spend $20 for a book, a good starting point is tied in with the recent U.S. election: election speeches. You can download a lot, from Bill Clinton's Democratic National Conference speech through to the town hall debates between Bush and Kerry. Whichever way you voted, these speeches are part of history and are free.
If you are frustrated with the collection of books and want to listen to news and magazines, you will find that iTunes comes to the rescue again. You will find periodicals such as the Harvard Management Communication Letter through to Jazz Times. You can purchase any of these and listen to them through your iPod.
This is good, but can it be better? I would really like to have the latest news on my iPod. I would also like to listen to radio stations from the Internet on my iPod. In short, I want my iPod to always have new and fresh content.
Well, it can. A new service gives you access to more than 300 media outlets, including the BBC, Discovery Channels, NPR, and A&E, to name but a few. AudioFeast is one of the first companies that enables you take your radio into the car.
My experience with AudioFeast, however, is that you can tell that this is still new stuff. The files took a long time to download, and I have a cable modem that cranks. I can tell that this will be really cool, but it may take subscribers willing to get through the bugs over the next 6 to 18 months for the service to really get up and going. By that time, there may be alternatives on the market.