Record Your Stories Anywhere With Broadcastr

Andy Hunter and Scott Lindenbaum, the guys behind Electric Literature, a site well-loved by this site, are launching an app, Broadcastr, that will allow users to record stories wherever they are. These stories will be linked to the location where they are recorded, and other users can hear them when they enter it as well.

Hunter and Lindenbaum unveiled Broadcastr Mediabistro’s eBook summit, and Galleycat has video of their presentation.

On the Broadcastr site, they explain:

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.
Whether dishing last night’s details to friends, uncovering local lore, perusing restaurant reviews, listening to travel guides, tuning in to citizen journalism, contemplating oral histories, or sharing hilarious anecdotes, Broadcastr amplifies all our voices. Users can take a GPS-enabled walk as stories about their surroundings stream into their headphones, like a museum tour of the entire world. Users can record their own content, create playlists, follow their friends, and share Facebook [sic].

Oooh, Facebook!

I have a lot of questions about Broadcastr, but I have no doubt that it will seriously change the way we travel and eat/drink. I like that it’s tied to place, and I think it will give the content a feeling of intimacy and insiderness. However, I think the content should be searchable and available no matter where the user is. Instead of only complementing a location, it could/should also let users make decisions about where they want to go before they go somewhere.

Although I’m certain it would violate copyright laws, it would be great if users could access audio versions of relevant short stories, novel excerpts, or even novels, in particular locations. That would be a great backdrop to an adventure. Maybe users should just start recording them as they go, and see what happens. Writers could also dictate or perform their own work, published or otherwise, so visitors to a certain area, say….Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, could hear what local writers are doing.

Correction: Broadcastr already does all this “and more,” I just didn’t know because no one thought to make me a beta tester…

(via Galleycat)

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