While the podcast medium has not ushered in much of a revolution so far– downloadable audio files have been around for years now, and their marriage with RSS has not made it that much easier to skim them, as it has for bloggus bloviatus, the common blog– there is one use where the aspect where podcasters make a brilliant use of the format. The best reason to move an audio track to portable music player– such as an iPod (hence the name), or in my case, the Creative Labs MuVo– is that you can carry it to the place where the recording was originally made. And such a place would not be someone’s home-office-studio, but a public, walkable place, like a museum or a downtown tour.

I’ve never used the audio guides from the museum; maybe due to a hypochondria about earwax, or just not wanting to feel ignorant. And the $6 price tag never helped. Perhaps I might be interested if there were some underground competition?

And that use came to the attention of me and many others last May, when the the New York Times, that stuffiest of old media dinasaurs, reported on the phenomenon. One such example was the students at Marymount College who assembled the Art Mobs project to develop their own guides to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Perhaps the podcast-audio-guide would have spread to Boston in the ensuing three months? or We have techies, we have arties, though we did just have a summer. Well I thought someone would have gotten around to it, so I started asking around. As with my experiment in June 2004 (Who does the President eat with?), the constructive thing to do is to post the results. And here’s where I’ve been asking:

• Craigslist, the popular free classifieds site
• Universal Hub, the Boston-based blog aggregator
• Boston.com message boards
• Berkman Center Blogger’s Group
• emailed Katie Getz, editor at Bostonist
• and I emailed some people in the Radio Open Source community.

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Update, Friday: A Mr. Noakes signed on below and directed me to Sound Seeing Tours. Erica George of the Berkman Center reported that the Berkman bloggers had made an “art mob” sortie to the Institute for Contemporary Art, but did not produce an podcast for audio tours. I invite all Boston-are art students to be the first pioneers.