Escape Pod
Every now and then you come across a website that has enormous potential (in a very small way). Though this one–Escape Pod–is mainly aimed squarely at my brother, I’m thinking anybody that enjoys a good yarn (and/or regularly spends time in traffic) can appreciate the merit of a genre podcast.
And you’ve got to love the name.
Escape Pod’s short and sweet raison d’être:
“Escape Pod is a weekly podcast bringing you fun short science fiction and fantasy. You can listen at your computer, on any MP3 player, or subscribe to receive each episode. We pay our authors, but we’re always free to listen.”
Browser’s Digest
Proof that old habits die hard (and early branding success in an emerging industry is critical), I still visit Yahoo!’s main page when I want a newsflash fix. Some eight years after I set up my first Yahoo! account, despite the fact that I’ve switched to Google for search (and within the last year, email), I keep returning to Yahoo’s homepage and find it hard not to.
So I’m on the hunt for a better alternative. My requirements for the destination are that it should have 1) fast-breaking posts, 2) pithy headlines (usually seven words or less) and 3) genuine newsworthiness (i.e., Lindsay Lohan’s desire to visit U.S. troops in Iraq should not qualify as headline material).
Nicholas Lemann’s grumpy* Wayward Press piece, “Amateur Hour” (The New Yorker 2006-08-07), turned me on (again) to a couple news aggregators that I had heard of and even visited once upon a time but which never managed to supplant Yahoo! as my principal quick-and-dirty glance at the headlines.
Namely, Arts & Letters Daily and Indy Media. But both of these are unsatisfactory though in different ways than Yahoo!
Yahoo! often fails on the 3rd point, but Arts & Letters Daily and Indy Media both fail on the 1st and 2nd points. MSNBC and CNN and ABC News, by contrast, all have solid breaking news streams but they’re so overwhelming with all their blinking banners and color. Yahoo!, in its defense, has a clean homepage that while snoozeworthy from a design standpoint is at least on the calmer side.
So, suggestions?
