Snortblog

I love This American Life (TAL). It’s a wonderful public radio show. In each episode, they have stories that revolve around a particular theme, like this week’s theme, entitled “fiasco”. I’ve had my eye on their website for several years. They’ve made their shows available in the Real Media format for as long as I’ve visited their site. Real Media is not exactly handy for listening to with an mp3 player, but by using audio capture software like Audacity, it wouldn’t be hard to convert shows into the mp3 format for happy unencumbered personal listening, though this probably isn’t what TAL intended. At long last, TAL added mp3 files to the site. Then somebody went to the trouble of repackaging links to mp3s on the TAL website as an RSS feed, thus making it easy for anybody with podcasting client software like iTunes or Juice to get it. Apparently, TAL wasn’t too happy about this; they apparently contacted the poor sod and asked him to take down the feed. However, TAL rose to the challenge.

This American Life has made a podcast feed available. It only has one show in it now, I hope they make more available at one time instead of making people work harder to get them. They also offer an option so you can donate to help pay for bandwidth. The next step would involve making bittorrent files available so we could donate bandwidth.