We have eBooks, audio-books, podcasts and portable ipod-videos — what’s next in the new media explosion?
Podzines. Podzines are the audio version of magazines. Don’t have time to read The New Yorker? Perhaps you could listen to it during your commute to/from work. The journalists themselves could narrate their articles, or the publishers could take care of it. Podzines will open up the enormous volumes of magazine literature to the jet-setting, commuting, on-the-go crowd who programs their computers to download audio to their iPods before they leave the house in the morning.
The idea of Podzines occurred to me recently, after I forked over $6 for a really interesting looking magazine, and wondered to myself when I would find time to read it. I decided that I’d read it when I went camping the following week. I did, and it was thoroughly enjoyable. I don’t go camping very often though, and it would be nice to experience some of the quality content that many magazines have to offer more often, without sacrificing time from my other activities. A Podzine of a good news magazine would become part of my daily dose of audio news, usually soaked in while I’m making & eating breakfast, or catching up on email correspondence.
As it turns out, Googling for Podzine brings up a ton of matches, so the new fad is already well underway! Now all I need is a portable media player :). A brief scan of the search results doesn’t reveal any big names in magazines though, so this new trend has clearly not taken hold in the corporate world yet.
* * Note * *
For some reason, spammers have become fascinated with this article. Akismet stops tens of thousands of blog spam comments on this blog, but every week it a couple of them make it into my moderation queue for this post. I don’t know what it is about this particular post that the spammers like so much, but I’m sick of logging in to mark them as spam, so I disabled comments on this post. Sorry.I’d be happy to add your comment if you contact me by e-mail.
