Saturday, August 16, 2003|
NPR and Audible Team Up To Provide Customized Audio To You Through Their New Weblog-enabled Affliate Service As I walked the Princess Del Cerro Park Loop this morning, ideas for having interesting and timely things to listen to as I walked came back into my head. I've written before about how NPR should really do a lot more to blog-enable their totally killer audio content, but I never really took it to the this level. And here I do, taking what Audible.com is doing with NPR now and turning that into a personalized, blogable, feed on content that can downloaded and listened to when I need to. Like when I'm heading out for an early morning walk or a drive to work. And enabling me to share these things via weblogging, becoming an NPR / Audible affliate. There are many more out there like me. So, here's the story... As I started out this morning, I pretty quickly thought that it would be nice to have quick audio wrap up of the news on a portable player to take along with me. Ideally, it would be the lastest NPR Hourly News plus a customized version of other NPR News stories and audio (like these Jazz pieces). NPR and Audible are selling NPR content for download, but they haven't really tapped into how they can really make this happen via webloggers, as far as I can tell. I really want to be an Audible affiliate, selling NPR story by story content (not entire shows, which Audible already does) by listening to it and blogging it. To not get too far off the track, what's needed is a blog that can link to all of the appropriate pieces and automatically enable them to be downloaded to a computer and portable device. This is somewhat inspired by Adam Curry's recent ode to the One Page Aggregator (OPA), To Collect and Serve and here are some relevant quotes,
"RSS provides a 'static free' format for content and is constantly being improved to do things like carry attachments (just like email) along with written words. No formatting, no fancy script thingies or blink tags, just plain content. I write and blog (and even audio blog my writing) about an NPR piece and the NPR piece is included in that blog post as an enclosure. The NPR piece is downloaded via Audible, for which my listeners 'blog subscribers' need to be members. I'm an Audible affliate. Audible delivers more NPR content (and gets into the audio blog business to serve up my audio blog content, maybe even allow me to sell it like they do NPR audio pieces). And NPR sells more of it's content. (And I get to do what I love, listen to NPR and comment / write about it). Here Adam talks about how the technical means of blog subscribing (RSS) meets up with what that trusted person you subscribe to is writing and talking about.
The beauty of rss comes into view with a one-page aggregator (OPA). You get the same serendipitous effect as when you flip on the tv, or radio to a station. You know what 'genre' to expect, but probably don't know exactly what program, or song will be playing. " Since my blog subscribers are subscribed to me, they don't really know exactly what NPR pieces I'm going to blog about and that are going to come down to their computer, but that's why they subscribe to me, because they know I'm going to give them interesting things to listen to and a little bit of me to listen to. And I'm definitely going to categorize this stuff so that if they only think I blog interesting Jazz audio pieces and don't want to hear my take on Foreign Affairs or other current events, they don't subscribe to the whole enchilada, only the categories they want to. And here's where the weblog subscription results in something YOU can listen to and think about when YOU want to,
"There's a hidden gem in rss. Each entry can be accompanied by a url that points to an ' enclosure '. The idea is that an enclosure is a large media object, like an mpeg or DiVX file. It's only one small step from having this enclosure download of the audio pieces automated so it's on the listening device of your choosing when you get out of bed and need to get that update on the world. So, who do I need to work with / for to make this happen? Audible? NPR? Both?! Now that would be fun!
P.S. It's amazing what you can do when you walk! |
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News from the Princess Del Cerro Park Loop Since parenthood descended on me like a Florida waterspout, my general health and, in particular, exercise habits have remained in a somewhat boarded up state. The health Thing has not been too bad, and I'm still not suffering from a lot of age related stuff being early 40-ish, other than carrying too much weight. The exercise Thing has totally been abandoned though and as I've gone through some head-clearage this last month, that has continually come back as something I need to address. Regular exercise for health-sake had only in my later adult life been something for exercise-sake. Growing up and through my college days, I played lots of sports and had lots of energy, so a regular exercise routine was never even considered, it was just part of the training for the organized sports I played. Even as I began my work career, I continued to play hoops at lunch with the work-boys, so I stayed in pretty decent shape. But even that got dropped for some reason in the last 10 years, probably due to a couple of severe ankle twists and other not-so-good reasons (like no longer able to be at work for 10 hour days). I flirted a bit with morning aerobics, some life-cycle, some lap swimming, but nothing that took real well. Sometime in the 10 year-ago timeframe, we moved to within a 5 minute driving range of both Lake Murray and Cowles Mountain. The outdoors had been something I had been exposed to quite a bit growing up, so beginning a walking and hiking routine was both somewhat natural and fun. And doing those in the morning, when it's cool and quiet and thought-provoking, really seemed to match up for me. So I started a routine of alternating early mornings with walks around the lake (really back and forth the 3.2 one-way non-loop) and hikes up and back on the south approach to Cowles Mountain (contrary to that link, I wouldn't call it easy, especially with the 900ft elevation gain in 1.5 miles). The morning calm of the lake or the spectacular views from the summit were a great way to start the day. Oh, and being the exercise-is-a-chore person (and, honestly, a most-things-are-a-chore person), I got lots of satisfaction from getting that done first thing in the morning. I could do either of these in about an hour, so with drive time, it would at the most be about a 1 1/2 hour excursion. Ah, the 1 1/2 hour exercise period. Memories. OK, enough of that. Now how do I get it back! That really is the regime I want to get back to. So, this morning I took advantage of the weekend morning's lack of required start time (school, work) to forego the news paper and any writing, and to first strap on my sneaks and head out the door to do something, anything. I decided that I'd start small and see how much distance and time a loop boardered by College Ave, Winrich, and Lance would be. Since it passes one of our local parks, which is going through a much needed upgrade to it's old metal-bar play structure, I've dubbed it the Princess Del Cerro Park Loop (putting 'Neighborhood' in there makes it too long and there's only one park in PDC). So I walked it at my typical brisk pace and it took a little over 15 minutes or so, which is really not enough to consider an exercise period, but since I was really only wanting to get out of the starting gate, I'll say that I exercised. I did a quick hop in the van to measure it and it looks like it's just about 1 mile, maybe a little less. Which is really what I set out to do when I started writing this piece...record how long that loop was. Leave it to me to be a bit long-winded (or worded, more appropriately). Some family-knowledgable folks would say I'm taking over for Pops Outlaw, only in the digital domain! But as usual, the walk led down another mind path...
NPR and Audible Team Up To Provide Customized Audio To You Through Their New Weblog-enabled Affliate Service |
Last update: 10/28/03; 7:44:25 AM .
