The Philoso-Physician

The internet's most popular philosophy podcast now has a brand spanking new tool to create customized podcast feeds tailored to your needs! Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, has put together a web-based wizard called the Philoso-Physician. It exists to "diagnose" your philosophical needs and desires through a short series of questions.

You can either choose to narrow your search in the Philoso-Physician through choosing from a series of questions or a series of categories. With each option you choose broad samples at first, and then are asked to narrow the field within each broad option you chose. And it's all check -boxes. Click, click, click, done. The best part (in my opinion) is that the final page not only shows you the results of your "check-up" with the Philoso-Physician with a short description and link to each podcast that fits your requests, but it also can e-mail you a link to a custom .xml feed for all of those podcasts. For those of you who don't speak geek, that means you can copy and paste the link into your favorite feed aggregator like iTunes or Juice, and it will automatically deliver your search results to that program for easy loading onto your music player. I seriously recommend you go give it a try, especially if you're curious about rationalist philosophy, but intimidated about where to start. There are over a thousand podcasts, videos, articles, and loads of other content at FDR, so there's plenty of source material to narrow from!

Remember to paste the link for the .xml file into your aggergator to get it to work right. (Feel totally free to e-mail me for help with this if you're unfamiliar with the programs or technologically inept. I love to explain stuff like this to anybody)

Edit: 3/14/08 2:07 p.m. - There is now a fancy little demo of this application, available here.