Visiting my parents place, and the power went out in the middle of the night. And I started thinking about what devices do and do not work. And I had an idea: The Emergency Podcast Network.

The idea being a localized (say. by zipcode) podcast that contains emergency info. It could include police/fire, utilities like power/water/gas/telephone/cable, evactuation info, etc.

For devices that can show text the info would be included as text files. Other devices could do the “text as filenames in playlist” trick. Devices that can show images could include maps.

You could do a map trick, and figure out the zipcodes a trip will take you through, and download all the approriate info.

Since it would be a huge number of localized podcast, the audio info could be generated with speech synths or phone menu style prerecorded snippets.

It might actually make a podcast that would be useful.