I know, I know, I should be writing about the radio.
But Barack Obama was just on TV, and if you think Public Television is serious, you haven’t seen anything until you’ve watched a nomination acceptance speech in high-definition. That stuff is serious.
So now I’m sitting here trying to think of what I want to write about, but it’s hard to think about news stories while basking in the soft, warm glow of a restored optimism.
Which makes me wish that NPR.org had a shuffle mode.
Who cares if I’m mixing stories from 1987 in with the commentary on Obama’s speech tonight, as long as it’s interesting?
I want to find connections between news events that I hadn’t realized existed, the way my iPod will make me realize, entirely to my surprise, that Jay-Z’s “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” sounds way awesome right after Elvis Costello’s “Radio Radio.”
More than that, I want to be lazy when I start writing these posts. It’s usually pretty easy to listen casually and to remember something from that day that’s awesome.
I think this can be done; NPR has released an API for interacting with their content. It is, sadly, well beyond my abilities to make it happen. I’m not even 100% sure what it means - I have a serious guess that is not “Awesome Penguin-esque Inscription.” Someone, please, do me a favor and make this happen?
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Fun idea. I spent a few hours on it, so here ya go.
http://www.jgrosman.com/unbound/podcast.php
You’ll get a brand new set of NPR stories every day, from 2005 till that day. I couldn’t go back any further because there aren’t any MP3s for those stories.
Let me know if you have any problems with it, or feature requests.
Check out my other NPR API app at http://www.jgrosman.org/alltweets
I work as a programmer at NPR, but I did these on my own time.
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[…] on a request by Radio Sweethearts to create a completely random NPR podcast, I created NPR Unbound. It does basically that. I […]
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