The Oxford English Dictionary has defined Podcast as follows: " a broadcast that can be downloaded from the Internet to a personal audio player. "
Certainly this is what the name implies, and you can listen to Podcasts on an iPod. But I wonder if the real attraction of audio blogging is to listen to the podcast on your PC with speakers or headphones attached. This is what I do. It’s much more instant. It helps. if course, if the podcast is streamed so that you start to listen to it before the file has completely downloaded.
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Hi,
Charles from Industry Blogs here. I was just checking out your site and have to comment on this post about podcasting…
To me it seems that there are two real innovations with podcasting:
1) The automation of the last ‘two feet’, ie. the podcatching software to automatically download from the internet directly into a playlist to your audio device. For example, I use linkroll.com to tag any audio files I find online and want to listen to. These are added to my linkroll RSS feed as enclosures. I am subscribed to my linkroll RSS feed with my podcatching software and at night it automatically downloads all the audio I have tagged and adds it to my iPod playlist…I don’t have to think about the download or wait for it to happen, I just tag what I know I want to listen to later (kinda like a VCR or a TiVO), and when I next sync it is all there. Which leads to the second innovation…
2) By automatically downloading the audio to my iPod I can listen to it later at anytime, anywhere. I typically pickup my iPod and play it through the car stereo in the morning on the way to work, catching the latest Daily Source Code or whatever I tagged the day before. This is great for the same reason TiVO is great…I don’t have to sit down at 8:30pm every Thursday to watch a show I like…just TiVO it and watch it when I want to.
Obviously people have been recording audio and putting it online for years, but I think that it is really taking off now for these two reasons. It has suddenly become much easier (podcatching software) and convenient (time shifting) to grab any audio online and listen to it anytime, anywhere (portable audio devices). I convergence of drivers.
Anyway, just my $0.02.
Cheers
Charles
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[...] Escaping into a reality you never were aware of! … ok, so that is over the top, however I must confess I have become a podcast addict since leaving Afghanistan recently and rediscovering the delights of broadband, (sorry again guys!), all downloadable from i-Tunes at no cost. [...]