Those of you who follow this blog know my friend Jim Widner is a “pod-head,” seeing podcasting as the death of radio as we know it. You also know that I am somewhat…blasé…on the whole thing, maintaining there’s nothing earth-shattering here, just a lot of noise from johnny-come-latelies.

But for the first time, I thought for a few minutes that I actually saw some advantage to podcasting. It didn’t last, though.

I listen to a public radio program, produced by WNYC (and unfortunately distributed by NPR instead of a more responsive organization) called, On The Media. Each week, Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield review the media itself; not always successfully, but I usually enjoy the effort (unless they’re replaying for the bazillionth time an old piece of Garfield’s to eat up time). This is one of the very few public radio programs to make available a downloadable version of their show, in MP3 format - what’s better, it’s a pretty good-quality 96kbps file. I wrote a pretty ugly shell script designed to download the show each week automatically (if that sounds like what podcasting does…well, duh), which has been working pretty well for quite a while now, although their rather strange naming scheme (otmMMDDYY.mp3) makes life interesting, and they occasionally move the directory of the file requiring an alteration to the script.
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Andrew Dubber has done something amazing; releasing a 1990’s New Zealand radio serial into the world under a Creative Commons license. “A good few years back, I was involved in a radio drama series for children - a ‘Cartoon for Radio’ called Ashley’s Worlds. I’ve made the whole thing available as a bittorrent file.”

To download the file, first read Dubber’s blog entry Ashley’s Worlds torrent. You’ll need a BitTorrent client; I’d recommend BitTornado.

And please remember that this is a perfectly legitimate use of a peer-to-peer client/server system, a system the entertainment industry wants to stop you from using for any purpose. Tell Hollyweird to get their act together and deal with illegal uses, and leave the technology itself the hell alone.