Podcasting...
One of the hot topics in the blog world these days is Podcasting.
Podcasting is a way to automatically get MP3 files from the internet down to your portable device (doesn't have to be an iPod, or even a portable - it works just as well on a desktop). It's built on the same RSS technology that weblogs use, but instead of just passing text, it also passes MP3 files as enclosures.
In other words, with the proper application, you can subscribe to audio the same way you subscribe to blogs now. I hope you subscribe to blogs, as reading in an Aggregator is much nicer than going to the web page.
iPodder is the only one application that I know of that supports podcasting right now. There's a windows version, though it uses an impressively bad amount of memory and tends to be a bit flakey (on my system inside the corporate firewall, at least), but the price is right.
The iPodder folks also host a podcast directory, so you can find out what's available.
I've been playing around with this for a few weeks, and have a few comments.
First, the technological aspects are pretty cool. I like to listen to Car Talk, but I'm often busy on weekends when it's on. I can go to their website, navigate around to find the streaming content, and then listen, but it would be a lot cooler if an MP3 showed up on my system (or on my iRiver) automatically. This seems like a natural fit for NPR, and expect to see them move in this direction, though there could be some issues WRT local stations and revenue. NPR is, after all, still a business.
The social aspects are more interesting, but not really clear (to me at least) at this point. There's definitely the potential to make an "end run" around the FCC and the RIAA and send content directly to the people - and I like the freedom of expression that that provides. There's also the chance for the "Indies" to provide edited new music directly to portable devices - to provide an "iPod channel" to the youth. Given that connectedness of today's teens, this could be pretty big.
I've been listening to Adam Curry's "Daily Source Code" (yes, that Adam Curry), and he does a fairly entertaining show. Reality radio.
Comments
- Anonymous
November 19, 2004
Eric, here is another pretty nice podcasting client that happens to be written in .NET I believe:
http://www.dopplerradio.net/
It also could use a little polish, but it seems to work well.
Regards,
Michael - Anonymous
November 19, 2004
You can use NewsGator too. You can tell it to download enclosures automatically, then you can find tools that automatically pull Outlook attachments into a folder, so you can get the same affect. I listen to Podcasts everyday, using newsgator to pull them dow.
And as Carl Franklin pointed out to me, while podcasting is used for MP3s today, the RSS enclosures can be used for anything - such as a way to attach power point slides to a blog post about a presentation you did. - Anonymous
November 19, 2004
FYI, There is a MSFT podcaster (me :))... I'm actually on the official "pioneers" list as I've been podcasting for nearly 2 months! (I think I was the #13 podcaster in the directory).
Pleast give a listen and let me know what you think. There's a link from my MS blog and/or go to http://www.softwareland.org - Anonymous
November 19, 2004
There's also another .net-based "podcatcher" available at: http://rss.freeserverhost.com/nimiq08.zip - Anonymous
November 19, 2004
We wrote an article on integrating podcasting into a .NET application. If anyone is interested you should take a look :
http://www.nsoftware.com/kb/tutorials/podcasting.aspx - Anonymous
November 19, 2004
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
November 19, 2004
Apparently all of the podcast (podcatching?) clients will receive videos too. IPodder even downloads Adam Curry's show notes as OPML files.
Channel 9 podcasts their videos now. I wrote a little helper app (http://lundie.ca/sermonex/) to extract the audio from them, so they could automatically get on my audio-only device. - Anonymous
November 19, 2004
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
December 14, 2004
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
December 27, 2004
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