Podcasting/Digital Audio

Bob stopped into Cafenation this morning while I was there and while were chatting he mentioned a new site he's been asked to do some consulting work for--Travel Goat:

"TravelGoat.com is a free customizable insider's audio guide to New York City . Unlike other audio walking tours or online travel guides, TravelGoat provides a unique perspective on New York through the power of personal storytelling. The site provides a forum for members of the TravelGoat community to:

•  Browse your and other's stories

•  Listen to stories online or download them to an MP3 player to listen to at the location the story is about

•  Use the online recording studio to record and share your own stories

•  Learn about locations around New York and what your peers think is cool and interesting about them

•  Create customized walking tours of New York City"

Not only can you easily record a story right in the browswer and then attach it to a map, but you can also create customized walking tours ("safaris") that you can dowload as mp3s to your portable music player. While Travelgoat is only designed for NY right now, Bob said they hope to expand to other cities soon.

Today I'm blogging from Boston University where I'm attending the Podcasting Academy for work. A bit ago Tony Kahn from WGBH radio talked about his experience with podcasting, particularly with Morning Stories. As example, he mentioned a segment called "One Foot in Front of the Other" in which Caleb Smith talks about walking every street in Manhattan between 2002 and 2004 in order to get to know his place (See New York Walk for more about his project).

I'm interested both in the project as a heuristic for exploring a place and in podcasting as a way to document one's exploration of place. Since many place bloggers include visual media in their blogs (photographs, sketches, maps), it doesn't seem like a huge leap to begin using audio (now that the technology is more accessible). I need to look around to see if anyone is podcasting regularly about places and reflect a bit on the relationship between modes and the representation of place (visual vs audio vs text).

So far, most discussions of podcasting in education focuses on using it as a mode archiving and distributing audio recordings of classes. However, it seems people will also begin using other people's podcasts like Morning Stories as class material (Kahn gives the example of ESL teachers using Morning Stories in their teaching). I'd like to see more discussion of how student podcasting could become another form of composition--as forms of storytelling and research. 

Since I recently bought a microphone for my iPod, I may begin experimenting with a bit of place-based podcasting just to see how it feels to focus on the sounds of place rather on views of place, as I normally do.