Timothy Post.com

Crazy idea for you. Why not create a webservice that offers old magazines articles as audio files.

Each month there are hundreds of mainstream magazines that produce thousands and thousands of articles. Many of these articles are topical and have a short shelf-life. But some of these articles are still relevant and interesting for months, and in some cases years (think of Mohamed Ali’s interview from Playboy magazine in the 1970’s).

It’s as if these articles pass right through our mental radar screens and then poof, they’re gone forever. It’s sort of wasteful. It’s not as if the content itself isn’t valuable, rather it’s just that we only have so much time in a day to process it. The solution?

Refry the old magazines articles into audio files. Create a blog, to begin, where you choose one article a day from an “old” magazine (say The New Yorker from last May 2006. The Malcolm Gladwell book review of “The Wages of Wins” titled, Game Theory: When it comes to athletic prowess, don’t believe your eyes.)

You know and I know that ANYTHING Gladwell writes is killer. Seriously, find me a bad Malcolm Gladwell article (yes, I was onto Gladwell before The Tipping Point).

Anyhow, I don’t have the time to read this short book review and you don’t have the time. But I have the interest to get that information into my brain. So the problem isn’t one of attention, it’s a problem of input capacity. I can’t read and drive/walk/talk at the same time. However, I can listen and do other things simultaneously.

Or check-out this article from this week’s The New Yorker titled, TV Dinners: The rise of food television. Does that not sound like a great article? Definitely. But I don’t have time to read it. I want to listen to someone else read it to me as I drive down to Providence Airport tomorrow afternoon.

Podcasts are a great way to input data into your brain during those times when your brain has excess capacity. When you’re running on the treadmill, driving in a car, sitting on the throne, waiting in line a the grocery store or the drive thru window, waiting to pick-up someone, etc. Don’t let that time when your brain is on idle go to waste. Fire up the iPod Nano and learn, laugh, reminisce, listen.

The biggest problem with podcasts are that there are not enough and they are super topical. Have you ever tried to listen to your average podcast two weeks after it was released. Forget it. Irrelevant. Doubt it? Go listen to a TWIT from one month ago. You won’t make it ten minutes. The problem with audio books is that they are too freakin long.

So, the answer is to refry great magazine articles into audio files. Waste not, want not.

Format the whole thing as a daily podcast. Offer it through iTunes to start. Eventually, build a team of independent “readers” who take the text-based articles and turn them into audio podcast articles.

There are thousands upon thousands of great articles out there. Create an online directory of all the refried audio articles. The articles either cost a dime or they are free if you listen to a 20 second audio commercial of your choice.

I, for one, would love this service. I would go back and listen to all those amazing National Geographic articles I promised myself that I would read when I subscribed to the magazine. How about all the tens of thousands of interviews? Interviews have a long shelf life. Would you be interested in listening to an interview of Joseph Kennedy while JFK ran for President? And on and on and on.

Yeah or nay?

// 09.27.2006 at 7:43 pm // Tagged webwidgets