Usable podcast archives. Most of the talk I've seen about podcasting has focused on ways the audio can resemble blogging done in a lively new medium, sound. So we get the regular posts and the familiar RSS. But if we're going to go to the trouble of making audio, at least some of the things we make might be created with an eye toward later use. With our blogs, at least somebody can run a keyword search and hope to locate a useful older piece, but with audio, there will be next to no useful searching capability if the posts resemble blogs.

But if some people use podcasting for other purposes that don't resemble blogs quite so closely, then the pieces might have a longer life. For example, students in speech or English classes might contribute their own recordings of great poems, with annotations or bibliographies to accompany them and with special attention paid to the sounds of good poems. Then later courses could use these collections for their own study, as well as contributing new poems and accompanying materials. The work would live on. [1 & P]