Podcasting

As I promised, I am going to discuss what Podcasting is and why it is pretty interesting. If you remember in my article about syndication, news sources and blogs that offer syndication feeds can make life a lot easier for their readers by allowing them to subscribe to the news sources and manage the content in one place. Podcasting does this same thing for audio links (with a cool twist).

Through the use of a recently developed addition to the basic RSS script, now these scripts can contain references to audio. Adam Curry, the ex DJ from MTV, has been a pioneer in this development and has helped engineer a client that (much like a syndication reader for textual content) looks for updated audio links. Even more fancy, this reader (iPodder) automatically downloads the audio file and creates a playlist in iTunes seamlessly. Thus if you set your iPodder to check links over night, you can just plug in your iPod to your computer in the morning and automatically download fresh audio content for your daily listening pleasure.

So much for the technical discussion of podcasting - but what does this do? Well, it allows anyone with access to a microphone and some basic audio engineering skills and some software (a lot of the amateur stuff is free) to create audio content or shows. Currently there are about 3500+ of these regularly updated shows available and the number has been steadily growing since the introduction of the iPodder software last summer.

Admittedly, most of the people doing these shows will probably not keep it up but you can find some decent directories of what's out there at iPodder.org. Yea - it's amateur, but it's a great alternative to the garbage you hear on the radio these days. Plus, it's bound to get better with time.

There are a few shows that are pretty popular right now. The 'grandfather' of podcasting, Adam Curry does a show most days called The Daily Source Code which is pretty compelling. He's kind of a half tech-geek/half music nut with a great radio presence and personality. For anyone starting out with podcasting, I would highly recommend this show. More risque is the Dawn and Drew Show. They are a husband and wife team who just get on daily and talk about anything under the sun from their rural house in Wisconsin. The dialogue can get pretty raunchy but funny. They are pretty good but I find I do get bored a bit and generally don't make it through their complete shows. I like Viva Podcast which is also a husband and wife team and a similar format (the guy is fairly techy and straightman-ish and the woman is more artsy). Viva Podcast is a bit more mature and interesting (to me anyways). I also enjoy a daily podcast called The Daily Download with Chris Rockwell. He literally records his shows while on the crapper every day. As disgusting as this premise sounds (and it is sometimes), he's surprisingly compelling, thoughtful, and entertaining.

The cream of the crop is a guy named Michael Geoghegan with a broadcast called Reel Reviews. He does movie reviews (usually about one or two a week) and he is really good. He reviews movies that have been around for awhile but does a lot of research and brings a lot of passion to his broadcasts. He's sold me on a few movies (most recently he did an incredible detailed review and background of Apocalypse Now) and has a very radio-ready demeanor.

If you don't have an iPod or a mobile MP3 player, all of these broadcasts are available for downloading and listening to on your computer at their websites. And it's all free (for now)....