The Experience Machine

YouTube for audio? Currently in Beta but looks exciting. 

"Broadcastr is a Social Media platform for location-based stories. It enables the recording, indexing, listening, and sharing of audio content. Just like in human memory, every story is bound to a place.

A smartphone can be quite a handy device when exploring a new city. It can give you directions, recommend a restaurant, or even act as a flashlight in case you fall into a sewer and can't see anything.

And now with an app called Broadcastr, your smartphone also acts as a walking tour guide. Here's a brief rundown of how the service works.

Something important, interesting or funny happens to you. (Note: this may involve close interaction with an overzealous flock of geese, but it is not a requirement.)

You decide to capture the memory, record a quick narrative with your smartphone and then upload the audio to Broadcastr.

Broadcastr stores the voice recording and links it to your GPS location.

When other Broadcastr users pass through the same area, they hear your recorded story on their phone.

So as you can see, Broadcastr is trying to build a global archive of audio clips that will provide a museum-like atmosphere as you travel. While the recordings available right now on the app are not all super captivating (check out this vivid tale about a burger joint near me in Boston), I like the idea behind Broadcastr and hope it can continue to grow.

The trees, subways, and streets may not be able to talk, but a location-based service called Broadcastr is giving them a voice. The GPS-powered app allows people to tape stories on their smartphones, then peg their recordings to specific locations on an interactive map.

"You can actually take a walk through a neighborhood and have those stories play back automatically based on where you are," co-founder Scott Lindenbaum says.

30 Plays in 30 Blocks  The New York Neo-Futurists wrote 30 plays for the 30 blocks from Houston to 29th St and put them on BROADCASTR.COM!

Join us, Sunday, April 17th at 3 PM, at Houston and 2nd for a stroll up 2nd Ave while the free Broadcastr iPhone app streams each our of plays into your ears, leading to a  celebration at Paddy Reilly’s Pub on 29th St. with drink specials, storytelling, and discounted tickets to TMLMTBGB.

Get the Broadcastr App.

Here's my copy of Olesha's Envy. It's not the lovely @nyrbclassics reissue.  I found it after a long day of used book spelunking just after the anecdote shared here.  This is number 2 of Travels with Miette's Books, and yes, I'm aware that both existing episodes have to do with failed romantic endeavours.  

"I give you Broadcastr, a new platform that allows anyone to record or upload audio, and then “pin” it to physical locations. Broadcastr then indexes and curates that audio for playback via Web or smartphone, where it can be filtered and shared in the usual ways. Think of it as a crowdsourced audioguide to anywhere and everywhere, as if the whole world was a museum: restaurant reviews straight from diners’ mouths, mix tapes for memorial sites, citizen journalism, etc. It also provides the infrastructure for a whole new era of collective oral history; if Broadcastr takes off, its big data will be fascinating.

...Today you can use Broadcastr to listen to New York City travel information from Fodor’s as you roam, or walk through Brooklyn and hear the latest local crime blotter, or wander from Houston to 30th Street and hear a different micro-targeted theatrical experience on every block. Think of it as audio-channel augmented reality.

...For my highly idiosyncratic money, the most interesting thing about Broadcastr is its ability to tie fiction to a place... But I do wish that it allowed contributors to restrict their audio so they can only be heard by people who are actually at the tagged places. Restriction breeds creativity. Imagine an audiobook that can only be heard as you walk through its real-world setting: that would be up there with Gibson Agrippa, or Geoff Ryman 253, Christian Bok's poems inserted into microbial genomes, in terms of tech-enabled experimental storytelling."