Home > Forums > I'm New To Podcasting > Podasting? What's that?
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What is "Podcasting", a brief history |
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| davids |
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Joined:11/23/2005 |
| posts: 8 |
| Location: United States |
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Posted: 01/28/2007 2:04:40 PM
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What is podcasting?
Technology has always brought improvement upon the past. With each step ahead we are moving through things that are simpler, safer, better. This is technology. Podcasting is also one such improvement technology. Here, the radio and the Internet are brought together into an updated streaming Internet radio.
Radio was once upon a time a craze with everybody. There were radio shows of all types and the fact that radio was relatively an inexpensive gadget, it became very soon extremely popular. As the Internet caught on and exchanging information in the form of audio and video files became cheaper, the radio lost ground. Soon, Internet radio was the order of the day. This method of sharing audio files was easy, convenient and available to anyone who chose to use it. Again, this process became highly popular with the masses.
In the meantime, cashing on this change in technology, Apple brought out a very ingenious little device through which you could hear music through Internet. The called it iPod. The iPod owes its existence to two men, Adam Curry and Dave Winer.
Adam was basically a software engineer who created the program, which enables a person to download automatically captured specific Internet radio broadcasts to a media player or an MP3. In a parallel and unrelated move Dave Winer created and promoted the RSS or the Really Simple Syndication, which propagated blogs into the popularity these enjoy today.
Then, Dave and Adam got together and use the RSS feeds to transmit files through the Internet. The podcasting was born!
The technology intervened again and the Internet was used to transmit and share both audio and video files through iPod. Hence, in simple words, podcasting is RSS that is used to specifically organize and distribute audio files. These audio files that are used in podcasting posses an RSS enclosure tag, which in turn can have any type of files, i.e. data file, image file, audio or video file. Podcasting today covers only the audio files as enclosure tags in the RSS feeds and the version of RSS is 2.0.
In other words, a podcast is an audio file, which is converted into MP3 that can be automatically uploaded with RSS file. These files can be stored in a server for downloading by subscribers who want to listen/ subscribe to the particular program/music/show. As soon as he you synchronize your MP3 player with the downloaded podcasts, you can listen to it anywhere you go or you can make CDs for your CD player, or computer or any playback device.
The podcasting is done on subscription basis ? both paid and unpaid. In fact this is the main difference between the Internet radio and the podcasting, i.e. the later can be downloaded automatically while the former needs to have a live Net connection to be used (audible). The automatic download is possible thanks to the program in the feed formats, whereby the specific URL is sought, found and indexed on list of episodes basis. Generally speaking, one podcast can be possible from one author, but of late experiments shows that podcasts can be done with more than one author if public/social podcasting process/concepts are used.
Podcasts are downloaded most commonly into devices such as cell phones, iPods (which started the trend and the name), MP3 players, computers, PDAs, etc. As mentioned earlier, one needs to subscribe to a podcast station, and the existing podcast software (which is also known as the news aggregator) is fed with the address; the software searches and automatically downloads the files that are updated by that particular station.
The beauty in podcasting is its simplicity. Anyone can listen to a podcast. Similarly, anyone can create a podcast. You can do it, too. All you need in to have some material written/planned/collected in advance; record the material in an audio file; convert it into an MP3; create an RSS feed ? a simple text file, which indicates what exactly is your file all about; lastly upload this MP3 file and the RSS feed through a server on the Internet.
As you can see podcasting does not involve too much expense or investment. It is though a lot of fun to create as well as use. To listen to a podcast is as simple. You will need to first download a news aggregator (RSS reader) with which you can synchronize your computer or wireless device; enter the URL of the podcast into the podcast software; check out what the results show and chose the one you are interested in and then you will have the content automatically downloaded every time there is something new on that matter.
It does not matter where you are, your podcast will be automatically downloaded and hence, there is no chance to miss anything you are interested in just because you were not available that time. You can have whatever content you want or need, anytime you need, anywhere you need it. Podcasting is simply great!
[Edited By davids on 01/27/2007 7:28:43 PM]
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| boo |
| Member |
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Joined:01/22/2007 |
| posts: 6 |
| Location: United kingdom |
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Posted:02/02/2007 2:18:46 PM
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What podcasting is.
I think it boils down to one thing, portability. Podcasts, or any MP3, are portable, and that's the nice thing about podcasts. Podcasts allow you to take anybodies radio show, or rants & raves and go wherever you want.
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