The iPod or any other portable digital media player is a fabulous device, besides listening to my favourite Jazz I can store photos, podcasts and video clips downloaded from You Tube. I can also put it to several other uses like use it as an external hard disk. All said its the podcast feature that really caught my attention. Its probably the best utility value you can get from any portable digital media player.
A podcast is a digital media file, usually in the MP3 format, distributed over the internet using syndicated feeds such as RSS and ATOM. In short people publish these media files so that they are available for download to anybody. A typical podcast is Ram Charan speaking on leadership available for download at the Harvard Business School Publishing (http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/). Adam Curry (http://www.dailysourcecode.com/), the video jockey on MTV was the first to create a podcast, strange as it may seem he is not the inventor of the podcasting technology, Kevin Marks a software engineer at Google was the contributor to the podcasting technologies like iPodder, now called Juice and available for download at Source Forge, which started the Podcasting revoution.
There are podcasts on every conceivable subject on the internet, Music being the most popular followed by Comedy, Podcasting, News etc. Apple’s itunes store is probably the best with its cool user interface. Other sites to download good podcasts are The Podcast Directory (http://www.podcast.net/); Yahoo Podcasts (http://podcasts.yahoo.com/); Podcast Alley (http://www.podcastalley.com/); IndiePodder (http://www.indiepodder.org/) and GarageBand (http://www.garageband.com/). Most Podcasts are free and you’ll need a lot of space on your digital media player to accommodate all of them.
To subscribe and download podcasts you’ll need an aggregator like Juice and a media player. Some players like Apple’s iTunes have built in podcast features. Once you have this installed you can subscribe to several thousands of podcasts as they are published and these get downloaded invisibly onto your computer. You can then sync your media player to load these podcasts so that they are available to you when you are on the go. So how’s it different from any other audio file? Well the power of podcasts is that you can subscribe to the feeds and as and when a new audio file is published the aggregator will download it for you. Imagine this. You have enrolled into a long distance learning program and you are expected to take 20 hours of lessons every week. Before the advent of internet you’ll have to wait for the post man to deliver the printed lessons. In the age of the internet you’ll have to wait for an email so that you can log-in to the univ’s site and listen to the audio files. In podcasting the aggregator regularly monitors the RSS feeds and downloads any recently published audio lessons.
To create a Professional quality Podcast you’ll need to record the audio in MP3 format using the software available from Garage Band (http://www.garageband.com/), Sound Forge’s Audio Studio or Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/). Having recorded your piece, You’ll have to then create an RSS feed that points to these files and publish it as a podcast on your website. A RSS file is an XML file with directions for aggregators. You can use MyRSSCreator (http://www.myrsscreator.com/) or Podcast RSS feed Generator (http://www.tdscripts.com/webmaster_utilities/podcast-generator.php) to create the RSS file. Use an FTP software like Mozilla FireFox’s extension FireFTP to upload the MP3 and RSS onto your server. Use an RSS validator like http://rss.scripting.com/ or http://validator.w3.org/ to validate your RSS and you are done. You’ll probably want to advertise your Podcast in the sites that I have mentioned above or to keep it simple email your friends telling them about the new craze that’s got onto you.
But then why would you want to create a podcast? You might be the professor in the long distance education program that I mentioned above; Your are a budding musician and have just recorded your first Ghazal and want to offer it to potential fans; You are a highly paid management guru, you just spoke at a seminar and your audience wants the complete recording of the speech; You are a techno lunatic, you want to tell the whole world on the conspiracy surrounding Indian Cricket or you just want to do it for fun, whatever maybe the reason Podcasting is the new broadcasting medium.
