Textcasting - the next big thing!

Slate has launched a service they call "textcasting," starting with their "Today's Papers" feature. A "textcast," is a podcast in which the main thing being delivered to your iPod is text rather than audio. You read the text on your iPod's screen - like an "e-Book". From Slate:

Print, meet your cool new friend: the iPod. Starting today, we at Slate are making one of our most popular features available in a brand-new format. We call it a "textcast," a podcast in which the main thing being delivered to your iPod is text rather than audio.

The idea is simple: Subscribe to our new Today's Papers textcast feed just as you would to any other podcast. Every morning, we'll deliver to your iPod a small file containing the full text of that day's summary of the top stories from the nation's best newspapers. You can then read the text right on your iPod's screen. (Note: At the moment, this service works only with iTunes and relatively recent iPods with screens.)

Here's a little more detail on how the textcast works: The text is actually contained in a 15-minute audio file. (It's 15 minutes of silence, which is how we make the file so small.) Play the file as you would any other podcast, and then hit the iPod's center button two or three times until you reach the description field, which contains the full TP text. You can scroll through the text using the iPod's scroll wheel.