08:52 PM by Brian in Archive | Portable Audio/Video

Podscope is the first search engine for podcasts.

TVEyes, which has been indexing television and radio broadcasts since 1999, crawls the web with Podscope looking for podcasts and creates an index against every word, thereby making the contents searchable. The user can search on a term, generate a list of results ranked by a variety of methods to find the most relevant podcast and click to play or click to download.

Because Podscope uses speech recognition to index podcasts, there are some recognition accuracy issues. A search for ebooks yielded zero results. I find it hard to believe that no one has mentioned ebooks in a podcast.

A search for lifedrive also yielded zero results, but a search for life drive comes back with relevant results. Keep this in mind when podscoping.

When you do get search results, you can click on a hit to get a mini-player with a short audio excerpt of each hit, as well as a text description of the podcast and links.

Happy podcast listening and podscoping.

Brian

06:52 PM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

A PalmAddict user is wondering if anyone beside him uses his Palm (or any other PDA for that matter) while exercising (weight lifting, running, etc.). I am particularly paranoid of dropping my stuff, which is why I would never have the stomache to take a handheld with me to my workout. Feel free to drop your workout habits in the PA forum.

06:22 PM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Bookbutler is a really handy meta-search engine for comparing online book prices among various vendors. Simply type in title, author, keyword or ISBN of the book and you get the results ranging from cheapest to more expensive. Support for US, UK, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

05:59 PM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Portable Audio/Video

In a move that may give Audible.com and makers of audiobooks on cassette and CD some serious competition, FindawayWorld today announced the development of Playaway, a "self-playing digital audio book that is ready for the way you live your life, no downloading required."

The Playaway device is about the size of an iPod that is already preloaded with an audiobook. It is not sure from the description whether you can change the audio content or if this is one of these disposable, single-use electronics that don't necessarily help to save our planet.

07:24 PM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Brighthand (via PalmAddicts) has a quick write-up explaining newbies how they can listen to podcasts on their handhelds. Basically you pick a feed client that also supports podcasts enclosures; Brighthand recommends QuickNews (Palm OS) and FeederReader (Pocket PC).

06:38 PM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

Podiobooks.com provides audiobooks, serialized and delivered via podcast feeds. You can subscribe to podcast feeds on any of the books hosted on their server and automatically receive a chapter of each of the subscribed books every week. Authors provide Podiobooks.com their books at no charge. In turn, Podiobooks asks that you provide a donation for each audiobook you download. They in turn split that donation with the author.

From the website:

Podiobooks is a term coined by Evo Terra of The Dragon Page and Slice of Scifi to describe serialized audio books which are made available in podcast format. Subscribers to the podcast feed for each book will receive a new chapter each and every week. Some listeners keep it on their computers, some transfer the book to CD, but most (hopefully) transfer the file on to their mp3 player so they can listen no matter where they are.

10:58 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

Don't miss any freebies!

I quickly compiled a convenient RSS feed for the free e-book summer promotion at eReader.com. The feed lists and links to the current free e-book of the day.

Link to the feed

It's not necessary to poll it more than every 24hrs!

Enjoy.

10:16 AM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

Jeffrey Veen, an established design guru and one of the creators of HotWired.com, has authored with The Art and Science of Web Design a carefully structured look into the undercurrents of Web design. Organized around the key development topics, the book is laden with a historical background of standards, features, and trends. Yet the topics are timeless and core to good Web engineering, so it's space well spent. The mix of expert opinion and historical explanation creates a well-rounded reader experience.

You can now download for free the full book (in PDF format) with illustrations from Veen's website.