I just finished a secret project! It is THREE brand new podcasts I am officially launching as of right now. I hope you will check them out!
These are quite a bit different than Curmudgeon’s Corner, the podcast I have done with Ivan Bou since 2007 where we talk about current events each week. That podcast will continue as always. (If you aren’t already listening to that, you should of course check it out too!)
Instead, these are short quick hit podcasts. Little bursts of knowledge to enlighten your day. Just a few minutes long each. Often shorter than 2 minutes long in fact. The podcasts consist of the summaries of Wikipedia articles. Each of the three choose which articles to highlight in a bit different way. Because it is just the summaries, not the whole articles, they are quick digestible chunks of information.
I of course don’t have the time or consistency to create three podcast episodes every day, even 2 minute podcasts. So the trick here is that these are fully automated podcasts. There will be new episodes every day, even if I am super busy and swamped with other things. Now that things are all set up, they will (hopefully) just run on auto-pilot unless I decide I need or want to change something.
The idea for these had been percolating in my head for a couple months, and a little over two weeks ago I pulled the trigger and started working on it an hour here and an hour there as I had time. Basically, the daily topics are chosen from Wikipedia APIs or RSS feeds, I pull the content from Wikipedia using another API, then I generate the actual audio for the podcast using Amazon Polly and assemble the Podcast RSS feeds. I also set up a website… wikioftheday.com… that dynamically shows the most recent episodes of each Podcast, gives easy access to old episodes, and has a detail page for each episode with the text of the episode script. I did most of this with PHP since I’m pretty familiar with that, with a few Unix shell bits where that was more convenient.
It was fun to do, and I hope at least a few people will find the actual podcasts interesting too. Go to wikioftheday.com and you can check them all out and listen to a few of the episodes that have been produced so far. There are just a handful so far, but there will be new ones every day!
They are indeed read by computerized voices… a bunch of different ones episode to episode for variety… but that technology has come a long way in the last few years, and they are actually pretty decent to listen to.
I’ve started to submit the three podcasts to the directories for this sort of thing, but it will take awhile for them to start actually showing up when you search for them in your podcast player of choice. So for the moment if you want to subscribe, you’ll have to tell your podcast player app to subscribe manually using the link to the feeds. Below are descriptions of the three podcast along with the feed links. Please subscribe! And listen!
- popular Wiki of the Day: The most visited Wikipedia page each day. This very often gets you pages related to topics that are in the news or otherwise timely. But if there isn’t much going on, they can be on almost anything. Feed: http://wikioftheday.com/pwotd/pwotdpod.xml
- random Wiki of the Day: What it says on the tin. A completely randomly selected Wikipedia page. You’ll get all kinds of articles about all kinds of topics, some well known, some completely obscure. Just a fun random sampling of knowledge. Feed: http://wikioftheday.com/rwotd/rwotdpod.xml
- featured Wiki of the Day: Every day Wikipedia picks one article to feature on their main page. These are articles that they consider to be among the best quality articles on Wikipedia. They can be on any topic, but have been selected for their quality and accuracy. Feed: http://wikioftheday.com/fwotd/fwotdpod.xml
For each of the three, I exclude articles with no summaries or really short summaries. I exclude “articles” that are just lists, disambiguation pages (which John Smith did you want to know about?), and other pages of that type. I also have each of the three podcasts set to not repeat the same article within 100 days, even if it comes up again in the source feed. Stuff like that.
Anyway, please check them out, and subscribe if you enjoy them! And let me know what you think of them! :-)
Oh… and tell your friends about them too!
I appreciate it!
