Listen Notes brings search and selection to consume later on your phone to the world of podcasts. We’ve had that for a decade with internet articles using Pocket or Instapaper.

Selection to listen to later on your phone

No longer do I just read The Economist and Time. I read widely from tens, if not hundreds of publications. Curators like Arts & Letters Daily, The Browser, Marginal Revolution and Pocket provide a sense of the article and I click Pocket’s browser extension for the ones I want to read later.

But podcasts have been stuck in the old paradigm where you subscribe to one publication and get all their content.

Listen Notes breaks through this. Clicking its Listen Later button adds an individual podcast episode to your personalised podcast feed. That episode then appears on your phone to listen to later.

There is a one-off set up effort that will take you about two minutes:

• You sign up to the site.
• You add your Listen Later RSS feed to whatever podcast app you use. If you’re new to this, the stock Podcasts app is fine, but I’d recommend Downcast.

Thereafter it is as simple as clicking the Save button.

Search

Listen Notes’ search has revolutionised listening by allowing us to find episodes on anything we’re curious about. It’s perfect, for example, for finding interviews with authors about their books, which I find is the fastest way to hoover up the key ideas in books.