Our direc­to­ry of arts & cul­ture pod­casts is now 50 pro­grams strong. Here you’ll find smart cul­tur­al pro­grams
from NPR, The New York Times, MoMA, Salon, Slate and the BBC. And you’ll find pro­gram­ming orig­i­nat­ing from the US, the UK, Cana­da and Aus­tralia and even France.

The pod­casts are all high-qual­i­ty, allow­ing you to spend your time expand­ing your intel­lec­tu­al hori­zons. While this direc­to­ry includes links to pod­casts on iTunes, it also includes direct links to RSS feeds so that you can use the pod­catch­er of your choice. Plus, we have added links to the web sites of the indi­vid­ual pod­cast cre­ators.

Final­ly, the For­eign Lan­guage Les­son Pod­cast direc­to­ry was also updat­ed this week to include links to iTunes, RSS feeds, and the web sites of the pod­cast cre­ators. We’ll soon be sim­i­lar­ly updat­ing the News and Uni­ver­si­ty pod­cast pages as well. Have a good week­end.

Arts & Cul­ture — Audio Books — For­eign Lan­guage Lessons — News &
Infor­ma­tion — Sci­ence — Tech­nol­o­gy — Uni­ver­si­ty Lec­tures & Class­es

See Dai­ly Fea­tures Below

Today (Sun­day, Decem­ber 10), the Nobel Prizes will be award­ed in Stock­holm, Swe­den. The Peace Prize
gets award­ed ear­ly in the day (1:50 pm Cen­tral Euro­pean Time), and then, sev­er­al hours lat­er, come the rest (start­ing at 4:30 CET). By click­ing on these links, you can watch the cer­e­monies live over the Net. Stock­holm is 6 hours ahead of the US east coast, and 9 hours ahead of the west coast.

Final­ly, you can also watch here the indi­vid­ual speech­es giv­en by this year’s Nobel Prize win­ners. Most were pre­sent­ed this past Fri­day in Stock­holm.

If you’re a news junkie, you might want to pre­tend that you nev­er laid eyes on this … because you might not be sleep­ing for a while. As promised, we’ve put togeth­er a big col­lec­tion of news pod­casts, all avail­able on iTunes. Here, you’ll find over 80 dif­fer­ent news pro­grams from major news orga­ni­za­tions, start­ing with The New York Times, and mov­ing to The Wall Street Jour­nal, the BBC and NPR, and, of course, the major Amer­i­can net­works (ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC). We also have cov­er­age from Aus­tralia, Cana­da, and Ger­many, and some of this con­tent is nice­ly offered in video. Enter the iTunes News Col­lec­tion at your own risk.

It’s nice to see some of our work get­ting a lit­tle appre­ci­a­tion. TUAW.com, oth­er­wise known as The Unof­fi­cial Apple Weblog, one of the 100 most pop­u­lar blogs in the coun­try, recent­ly spot­light­ed our pod­cast col­lec­tions, which set off a viral effect. Hours lat­er, del.icio.us users picked up on it, and the next thing you know, our pod­cast page was the third most pop­u­lar page on the social book­mark­ing ser­vice. And, from there, oth­er sites caught on. It’s amaz­ing to watch how the inter­net works in real time.

We’ll be the first to admit it. We’ve been going on some­thing of an iTunes tear late­ly. We told you first about the great uni­ver­si­ty pod­casts that you can grab on iTunes. Next, it was the cul­tur­al pod­casts. Now, it’s time for free for­eign lan­guage lessons.

If you search hard enough on iTunes, you can find pod­casts that will help you learn Chi­nese, Eng­lish, French, Ger­man, Greek, Ital­ian, Japan­ese, Kore­an, Por­tuguese, Russ­ian, and Span­ish. But, if you want to save your­self the time and has­sle, just vis­it our iTunes For­eign Lan­guages page, and you’ll find a sol­id list of pod­casts that you can load on to your iPod and keep busy for a good long while.

Spend some time on iTunes, and you’ll find some excel­lent cul­tur­al pod­casts, sim­ply hours worth of high-touch intel­lec­tu­al con­tent. And the excel­lent part is that the trove is grow­ing, and the qual­i­ty con­tent keeps on com­ing.

The rub is that it takes time to sep­a­rate the wheat from the chaff — too much time, if you hon­est­ly ask me. So, for the ben­e­fit of our read­ers, we’ve rolled up our sleeves, sift­ed through it all, and iso­lat­ed the high-val­ue con­tent that’s worth your time. Spend some time rum­mag­ing through our iTunes Cul­tur­al Pod­cast Col­lec­tion, and you’ll be sure to find among the cul­tur­al pro­grams and audio texts some­thing that piques your inter­est. Sep­a­rate­ly, you can also explore our Uni­ver­si­ty iTunes Col­lec­tion, anoth­er col­lec­tion of pod­casts from 25 of Amer­i­ca’s lead­ing edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions. Togeth­er, they should keep you think­ing, learn­ing and grow­ing for a while.

Also check out our list of Uni­ver­si­ty Pod­casts on iTunes. It includes lots of great cam­pus lec­tures and full-fledged cours­es.

There is a lot of buzz around pod­cast­ing these days. Last Decem­ber, the edi­tors of the New Oxford Amer­i­can Dic­tio­nary select­ed “pod­cast” as the word of the year (and they defined it as “a dig­i­tal record­ing of a radio broad­cast or sim­i­lar pro­gram, made avail­able on the Inter­net for down­load­ing to a per­son­al audio play­er”). Since then, the chat­ter has only picked up. How­ev­er, just how many peo­ple reg­u­lar­ly down­load and use pod­casts is a some­what dif­fer­ent sto­ry.

This week, the Pew Inter­net & Amer­i­can Life Project issued a new study show­ing that pod­cast­ing has­n’t quite been inte­grat­ed into the fab­ric of every­day life. Although 12% of those sur­veyed have down­loaded a pod­cast at some point, only 1% do so on a dai­ly basis. That’s a far cry (in terms of fre­quen­cy) from how peo­ple use their cell phones, TVs and the Inter­net.

Despite these low num­bers, I strong­ly sus­pect that dai­ly pod­cast usage will inex­orably climb in the com­ing few years. Just think about it. Over 20 mil­lion Amer­i­cans now own an iPod or mp3 play­er, and those fig­ures will almost cer­tain­ly con­tin­ue to rise. The ever-increas­ing num­ber of iPod/mp3 own­ers will get more com­fort­able adding con­tent to their play­ers. And broad­cast­ers will con­tin­ue the trend of using sites like iTunes as an alter­na­tive means of dis­trib­ut­ing their con­tent. Fast for­ward a few years, and here’s what you’ll have: A coun­try awash with iPods and dig­i­tal con­tent, and a nation of con­sumers who real­ize that they can use their mp3 play­ers to access content/information ful­ly on-demand. You’ll be able to access what­ev­er con­tent you want (no mat­ter how spe­cif­ic your inter­est), wher­ev­er you want, when­ev­er you want, with­out com­mer­cials and often for free. Con­tent with­out com­pro­mis­es. Who would want to miss out on that?

Check out Open Cul­ture’s Uni­ver­si­ty Pod­cast Col­lec­tion