23 Things #21 Podcasting

Okay, down to the wire…

Podcasting, for those who don’t know is basically an audio file with RSS. This allows one to develop audio shows, on just about anything from informative podcasts, to news gathering, humor, interviews, poetry readings or whatever and then one can subscribe to these podcasts using an RSS feed reader. You can save an audio file in various formats, but saving it as an MP3 is best in order to allow the most users to access the broadcast using whatever multimedia player they have on their computer. You don’t need to subscribe to listen to a podcast, that is only a feature podcasts allow you to do. If you want to listen depending on what your multimedia software is, such as Windows Media Player, GOM (my favorite), Realplayer, or whatever else you might have, you can save it to your computer and open it to play the file. Some multimedia programs will let you automatically listen to the file if you simply click on the podcast.

I thought it was pretty hilarious that the link we were given to check out search services for podcasts was for Yahoo Podcasts, just happen to have a large message at the top of the screen that they were closing down the site effective October 31st. Apparently, a podcasting division must not have worked out for them. On the other hand their well known music service, Yahoo! Music Engine (aka Yahoo! Music Jukebox) apparently has a plugin to allow you to subscribe to podcasts. It would appear that they were using this to help develop their podcasting web directory. One thing I really liked about Yahoo’s Podcasting service was their clear explanation of not only how to subscribe to podcasts, but how to create your own podcasts. I felt this was one of the clearest explanations I’ve seen so far. (Note: I’ve created links to some of the things talked about on Yahoo’s Podcasting service, but once the site goes down these might not be effective anymore.)

In any case Yahoo isn’t the only place where you can go to find podcasts, there are plenty of other directories on the Internet, including podfeed.net, pluggd, or pod-planet to name a few. Of course, the monster of them all is Apple’s I-Tunes podcasting service, which helped make podcasting so common throughout the world.