Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Audio Tour Podcasts

The Times featured an article, With Irreverence and an iPod, Recreating the Museum Tour, a few months back that highlights a great idea. Folks are creating their own audio tours of museums and distributing them as podcasts. This is fantastic for two reasons.

First, this open up more possible source for audio tours. Museum-goers no longer need to depend on museums to develop decent audio tours. Many museums don't have the resources or choose not to spend their resources on developing audio guides, so there are many museums and exhibits that don't have audio tours. Now anyone interested can make one. Not all podcast tours will be good, but some will be. There is now opportunity for varied viewpoints to emerge. Competition among any tour guide developers should eventually develop a good selection for the museum goer. This could also be extended outside museums to walking tours of cities or other places of interest. [Audible.com already offers audio walking tours of the Big Apple in the Soundwalk series.]

Secondly, creating podcasts is a very democratic process, meaning that it is free and fairly easy to do. So anyone, including you or I, can create our own audio tours of our favorite places. Many people have amazing knowedge and insights that would make for great audio tours. Now, with a computer and a little drive, you can share your thoughts and insights with the rest of us.

All we need now is a directory of audio tours which may already exist. Podcastdirectory.com already lists a few audio tour podcasts. Podguides.net appears to be a good effort to coordinate and encourage these audio tours.

PS The LA Times also has an interesting article on audio tours.

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