Week 11: Podcasts

21. Find and listen to a Podcast or two

Have listened to a podcast from the BBC's "Culture shock" series, broadcast on 12/10/08. Added
the podcast series from the BBC Global Arts and Entertainment to my to Google Reader.

Listened to ABC radio National "Breakfast" individual stories and added a feed to Google Reader, and to my home pc. Was easy to click on to one of the broadcasts and listen to it. Showed length in minutes and seconds which was great.

Listened to it at work and had to load "Real Player 11" first! Oh well..... will come in handy for other podcasts in the future!

What I liked about the pod was that the BBC displayed how long the broadcast was (Duration: 26 mins 29 secs) so I had an idea how long I'd be listening for.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w0bttwlt

Podcast was interesing and featured a new start up company in Canada called "Fonolo" which helps people by simplifying automated answering systems.

http://fonolo.com/

http://www.canada.com/victoriatimescolonist/story.html?id=22fdf57b-440d-45fe-99f7-49cfc2d12459


The other part of the pod was about "ReCAPTCHA" a program that uses the "wasted time" people people spend when figuring out those little authentication boxes that usually come as part of a new account set up on the web. Often these are a jumble of letters and numbers.
ReCAPTCHA time is harnessed for digitizing old books, eg. like the Google project.

Definition of CAPTCHA below.

“Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” (those little picturegrams that are added to logins to).

http://www.teleread.org/blog/2008/08/14/recapturing-public-domain-texts-with-recaptcha/


Listened to a National Geographic Traveller Magazine's "Walks of a Lifetime" series about Sydney. Had a choice of about 25 cities.

Had no indication of how long the program was but bar showed me "% loaded". A time would have been better, as per the BBC podcast.

Got terribly carried away in the National Geographic site by making my own animal movie (video mashup). Saved it somewhere, but not sure where! Can't share it at the moment!


http://www.nationalgeographic.com/podcasts/walks.html



http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/filmmaker.html