One of the major shifts of the internet age is what the people in the marketing department would probably enjoy calling 'location-neutral content on-demand'. No longer slaves to the morning paper (get your news up-to-the-minute online! or SMSed to your phone!) or the TV schedule (VCR! TiVo!), we watch and read and listen to what we want, when we want.
Recently, we dipped a toe into the swirling waters of RSS, the technology that allows you to subscribe to websites and be alerted when they are updated. RSS works for text, but for audio feeds there is a new cocktail of cleverness that automatically downloads audio files to your computer and onto to your MP3 player. This is Podcasting.
So say, for example, that you really like listening to a radio show on the BBC, but you're unavoidably busy when it's being broadcast. No problem, just install a podcasting application, for example ipodder, an RSS application which now comes with podcasting software built-in. (Note: The 'pod' bit in the word 'podcasting' originally derives from iPod, the Apple mp3 player, and while it is probably true that the majority of podcast-listeners are Apple users, there are plenty of options for PCs too.)
Then, go to the BBC radio website and find their podcasting feed, follow the instructions for how to subscribe to the feed in your chosen podcasting application, then leave it to do its thing. Periodically, the application will check for new feeds, and download the new programme. It will then, depending on your system setup, save the episode to a directory, or directly to whatever music wrangling application you use, for example iTunes and sync up with your mp3 player, ready for you to listen to at you leisure.
There are already a slew of podcast programmes out there and more are appearing every week, the BBC, for example, has most of their radio shows available for download, and many other networks offer comprehensive titles to their podcast list.
Amateur podcasts, of which there are a couple of thousand to choose from at the moment, are quite hit and miss. To be honest, more miss that hit as a rule, but there's always a nugget of gold to be found in there somewhere, it's just a matter of looking. Good places to start in your hunt for your perfect podcast are
podcast.net as well as
www.apple.com/itunes/podcasts/.
It's probably only a matter of time before podcasting takes off much in the same way as blogging did. There will no doubt be millions of voices vying for your attention before you know it.
Published on 20th March 2007
