Podcasting News continues to bring eight or ten fascinating items to my Bloglines account each day. Today’s haul includes notice of iPREPPress.com’s new study guides for the iPod. (The debate is over: the iPod is a platform.) The capsule description is interesting:

Read study notes directly on the iPod’s screen. Use the scroll wheel to navigate. Underlined text is hyperlinked to audio annotations and other text passages that provide more detailed explanations when pressing the iPod’s select button. Or just listen to your favorite tunes in the background while reading on-screen.

The last item is piquant. There used to be a craze for playing Mozart to babies in utero to make them smarter. Maybe there’ll be a booming market, or at least a fad, or perhaps a special section of the iTunes store, for music to study by. As a headphone listener from way back, I’m not being entirely facetious here, though I always found it a little too crowded to have text and musical voices in my head at the same time. Nevertheless: if you’d like to try it for yourself, there’s a free download of The Declaration of Independence on the iPREPPress site. Kate Smith or Green Day?

And speaking of music (segue time), Podcasting News also reports on Liz Phair’s new podcast, “The Liz Phair Podcast.” (Witness the complex irony of the straightforward at work.) Liz is playing music, reading original fiction, chatting with friends, and experimenting with soundseeing tours. I hope more musicians go in this direction. Pete Townshend, one of rock’s best writers, was a pioneer in Rock Star blogging and videoblogging: his account of The Who’s 2000 tour was consistently fascinating and often quite moving. Some of the populist intimacy rock promised at its 60’s zenith could reappear in interesting ways in Web 2.0. Or it could just be more effective supply-chaining and marketing. Or both.