Miles Matulionis, 39, a free-agent financial auditor, listens to Australian alternative-rock radio from his office in Calgary, Canada. Bruce Brothers, 40, a senior technical manager at Lotus Development Corp., catches up on episodes of Car Talk, on National Public Radio (NPR), while he's flying between Denver and Boston.
Forget "surfing" the Web. These days, the online world is bursting with great content for your ears as well as your eyes: tons of music, to be sure, but also newscasts, live feeds from company meetings and industry conferences, talk shows, sporting events, and more. So why just look at the Web, when you can listen too?
This edition of @Work is designed to help you find all the news -- and entertainment -- that's fit to hear. It also offers tips on finding the right hardware to make the Web a great listening experience, an in-depth comparison of the five best places to buy music online -- and even advice on how to direct your own Web broadcasts. So don't touch that dial. Here's Fast Company's playlist for the best of Web audio.
Most of the noise about Web audio involves music -- from MP3 to CDNow. (More on that later.) Serious businesspeople like a catchy tune as much as anyone, but their first order of business is information: What's up on Wall Street? what's new with the competition? what breaking news will people be chatting about at their next meeting?
Web audio is a great source of up-to-date information. To get tuned in, visit RealGuide (www.realguide.real.com) from RealNetworks, home base for streaming media, the leading Web technology. RealNetworks claims more than 38 million registered users of its Real-Player, with more than a million additional RealPlayers being downloaded each week.
The RealGuide site functions like a portal for streaming media. Its extensive directory offers links to literally thousands of sites, with brief descriptions of their varied content. Interested in the stock market? You'll find Bloomberg News Radio, Standard & Poor's Seminars, The Laughing Stock Broker, and much more. Want to track companies? You'll find the Intel Channel, with product announcements and earnings releases, and the Boeing Company in Motion, with news and information about the world's largest aircraft producer. Worried about your sex life? Check out Dr. Ruth Audio clips. (We certainly did!)
If you're a news junkie, and you can't go for more than an hour or two without a hit of headlines, then log on to Listen To The News (www.listentothenews.com). This elegant site is a directory of news broadcasts from around the world. In one place, you'll hear breaking stories from the Associated Press, the BBC, NPR, and CNN's Headline News, along with less widely available international broadcasts, such as Radio New Zealand, Good Morning Africa, and Radio Estonia. There's also a selection of more targeted news reports from the United States, like Latino USA and PlanetOut Radio, which provides daily coverage of gay and lesbian topics. The site is music to the ears of anyone interested in current events.
Listen To The News is a great source for business headlines as well, including market updates and company news from Business Week Daily, C-Span Radio, and the BBC's Business Review. But this site isn't just a list of streaming links. It also performs a useful editorial function: The front page lists top news stories of the day, with links to different radio reports on each story from around the world. It's like having someone scan various radio stations for you and serve up the best coverage, story by story. It's truly an only-on-the-Web service.
Of course, there's a big problem with listening to news or business seminars online: Being on the Web means being at your computer. And in this on-the-go business world, where we're seldom at our desks even when we're in the office, having to stick close to your PC can be a sticky problem indeed.
If you want to listen to Web-based news, but can't be stuck in front of your computer, consider subscribing to audio digests of the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times from Audible Inc. (www.audible.com). The service costs $6.95 a month or $49.95 a year, and it gives you some of the best information on the Web -- to go. While you sleep, your computer can load an average of 45 minutes of reading onto a palm-size PC like the Philips Nino 500, or onto a portable music player like the Diamond Multimedia Rio. Then, you can listen while you're stuck in traffic or pounding the StairMaster at the gym. The Wall Street Journal version also comes with a 10-minute afternoon market wrap.
Audible offers ideas as well as news. Every other week, you can download abridged audio versions of the Economist and the Harvard Management Update in addition to more than 3,100 audio-book titles from such top publishers as Simon & Schuster and Random House. Since you're not paying for the cassettes and distribution, the prices for these digital downloads are typically half of what you'd pay for a traditional tape or audio book.
Email
Digg
StumbleUpon
Facebook
Buzz Up!
LinkedIn
