My friend and colleague Andy Bowers at Slate.com shares word that Slate has launched a service they call "textcasting," starting with their "Today's Papers" feature. A "textcast," Andy explains, is a podcast in which the main thing being delivered to your iPod is text rather than audio. You read the text on your iPod's screen. Snip:
[T]he iPod is not currently configured as a text reader, so we've done our best to work around the device's limitations. (Here's hoping Apple will make its cash cow more text-friendly in future releases.) That said, I've been testing the TP textcast for several weeks now, and I find it very easy to use. Plus, I love that Today's Papers just shows up in my iPod automatically each day.
Here's a little more detail on how the textcast works: The text is actually contained in a 15-minute audio file. (It's 15 minutes of silence, which is how we make the file so small.) Play the file as you would any other podcast, and then hit the iPod's center button two or three times until you reach the description field, which contains the full TP text. You can scroll through the text using the iPod's scroll wheel.
