From Harper’s:

In cel­e­bra­tion of its 25th year, the Harper’s Index–12,058 lines span­ning 300 issues–is now open to all for search­ing and brows­ing, with more than one thou­sand linked cat­e­gories. Some start­ing points: Adul­tery, Chi­na, Beer, Veg­eta­bles, Sweets,Amer­i­can Men, Amer­i­can Women, Cats, Dogs, Frogs, Bears, and Pan­das.

Radio­Be­ta is a newish ven­ture that allows you to reach radio sta­tions around the globe, to cre­ate your per­son­al playlists, and lis­ten to them for free. Just search by geog­ra­phy or genre, and then start lis­ten­ing in the play­er on Radio­Be­ta’s web­site.

Obvi­ous­ly, you will encounter many sta­tions on Radio­Be­ta broad­cast­ing in a for­eign lan­guage. To learn a new lan­guage, please vis­it our col­lec­tion How to Learn Lan­guages for Free: Span­ish, Eng­lish, Chi­nese & 37 Oth­er Lan­guages, and you’ll be on your way.

via Life­hack­er

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Here’s a lit­tle some­thing for con­sumers and pro­duc­ers of good cul­tur­al media.

BlogTalkRa­dio gives any­one with a com­put­er and tele­phone the abil­i­ty to cre­ate their own live radio show, and then lat­er turn the broad­cast into a pod­cast. So far, about 82,000 shows have aired on this free ser­vice, and about 2.4 mil­lion lis­ten­ers tune in each month. Among the broad­casts, you’ll find inter­views with Bri­an DePal­ma, Yoko Ono, Chris Ander­son (author of The Long Tail), Jodi Picoult (author of 14 nov­els), Jim­my Wales (founder of Wikipedia), Frank Rich (New York Times colum­nist), Phil Don­ahue (direc­tor of the new film “Body of War”), and David Mamet (famous screen­writer and play­wright). Some note­wor­thy shows host­ed by BlogTalkRa­dio include: the Smith­son­ian Chan­nel, Mr. Media, Movie Geeks Unit­ed, ZNE’s Cir­ca Arte, BC Radio Live, The Poor Chef, and 3 Chicks on Lit.

Last­ly, let me under­score some­thing that’s prob­a­bly already clear. This ser­vice seems par­tic­u­lar­ly use­ful for any­one who wants to cre­ate a broadcast/podcast but does­n’t want to grap­ple with the tech­ni­cal side of things. For exam­ple, me. Now if I could only find the time to pull one togeth­er. Get more info on BlogTalkRa­dio here, and check out their “Best of” sec­tion here.

The Ger­man pub­lish­er Ber­tels­mann announced that it will pub­lish annu­al­ly a 1,000 page edi­tion of Wikipedia start­ing next Sep­tem­ber. To be called “The One-Vol­ume Wikipedia Ency­clo­pe­dia,” it will sell for 19.95 euros (or rough­ly $32 U.S.) and fea­ture some of the most pop­u­lar arti­cles from the Ger­man ver­sion of Wikipedia. One euro per copy will go back to Wiki­me­dia, which runs Wikipedia. But noth­ing, as Read­writeweb notes, will go to the writ­ers who actu­al­ly cre­ate the ency­clo­pe­dia entries.

Because Wikipedia is pub­lished under a free license, its con­tent can be freely used and com­mer­cial­ized. And that’s pre­cise­ly what Ber­tels­mann plans to do. In Wikipedia, Ber­tels­mann has found a moth­er­lode of free con­tent it. It can then mon­e­tize that con­tent, keep most of the prof­its (a pub­lish­er’s dream), and kick 5% back to Wiki­me­dia, most like­ly as a way to under­cut the crit­ics. It’s all per­haps legal. But does it feel a bit unseem­ly? Just a touch. Or maybe you dis­agree?

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Thanks to a new pro­gram called Bri­tan­ni­ca Web­share, web pub­lish­ers — be they blog­gers, web­mas­ters, or writ­ers who post fre­quent­ly on the web — can now get free online access to Bri­tan­ni­ca and its 65,000 arti­cles. Nor­mal­ly, this ser­vice runs $70 per year. For more info, read TechCrunch’s scoop on the new ini­tia­tive. To sign up, click here.

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