National Public Radio has introduced a nifty little feature that lets you create your own custom podcast of NPR content on topics that interest you. Type in Obama or Madonna or whatever, and you can sign up for a stream of NPR clips that match your keywords that can be downloaded to your computer, smartphone, iPod or Zune.
I’m highlighting this, not because I think this particular feature will be all that widely used, at least in its current incarnation. Podcasts are not a mass market phenomenon now. For most services, only a small fraction of users choose any option that involves customization. And while NPR has done a decent job of making the service easy to use, it still has a few steps to it.
But I am very interested because I think that NPR is onto something that really shows where digital media is moving, especially for news.
Irreducible minimum
A key thing something like this depends upon is granularity. What is the smallest discrete chunk possible? NPR has chosen to make that the individual segment.
I do something similar with Yahoo! Pipes relative to the “All Radio NZ” feed to exclude what I don’t want to hear. Aggregating feeds in Yahoo! Pipes before they hit iTunes can make them easier to manage at times. Your mileage may vary…
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Stephen Michael Kellat, Host, LISTen
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