Website of the Week: Broadcastr

Whenever a new social media platform begins to make its way around the internet, my initial reaction is always the same: this site is intrusive, a haven for exhibitionist narcissism, and borderline creepy (for examples, see Chatroulette and even to some extent Twitter, which I'm still not totally on board with yet).

Broadcastr holds promise to be quite different. This is a social media platform I can see being interesting and even useful as a writer, listening to stories and perhaps sharing my own. The concept is simple: record your story (using either your computer or an iPhone app) and then post that story to Broadcastr. All posts are geo-located, so that a person wanting to hear what's going on in Bangkok for example, can do so by simply finding the little pinpoint on the map. Some of it is nonsense, but I've come across quite a few stories that are interesting and seemingly real. They come across as the little gems that Ira Glass might pick up for This American Life.

Electric Literature (warning: link currently NSFW) is behind the project, which only lends itself to Broadcastr being a worthy medium of storytelling. So stop with the 140 character bit, and record something funny, or sad, or beautiful, and add it to Broadcastr.