(Before spotting Matt’s efforts, I was using a rather more lo-tech solution: using wget to grab the MP3, set to run every Thursday afternoon with cron - I know, I know, l33t h4x0r stuff! - which is probably a better bet for folk not really digging the whole Podcast ‘revolution’ enough to download one of the Podcasting applications, or ‘receivers,’ to borrow a bit of last-century hi-fi talk.)

Update: All my dreams are coming true. The ones about alternative distribution methods for Radio 4 programmes, anyway. Ben Hammersly has the beginnings of an application that will record streaming radio, convert to MP3, then wrap that up as an enclosure in an RSS 2.0 feed, primed and ready for Podcasting applications to download and dump onto your iPod. Nice.

Over the years, I’ve found myself listening to more and more radio content on my iPod, especially when travelling, and have built up quite a collection of In Our Time episodes (rather laboriously, using iRecordMusic) and it’s a testament to the show’s consistent high quality that almost all episodes bear up to repeated listening (my frazzled lack of short- and long-term memory probably helps, too).

So, I hope folk respond well to the download trial - all the recent hullabaloo about Podcasting and iPodder has left me cold, simply because the Podcasted material available at the moment tends to be crushingly dull, unprofessionally produced and overly geek-focussed, but if the BBC expand this new service and offer up RSS feeds with MP3 enclosures, so that listeners could wake up each morning with hours of Beeb-quality listening automatically loaded on their iPods, I’d start looking for a way to pay my license fee twice over.