I feel like I'm the last guy on the planet that learned of this. But in case I'm not and the rock I've been hiding under is large enough to cover a couple of y'all, here's something I learned of this week.
From what I understand, podcasts are audio (and now video, in some cases) broadcasts over RSS feeds. As un-specific as that. It's generally one or more people in their basements recording an MP3 and making it available on whatever server they can find.
Whether any of that made sense to you is irrelevant. The important part comes.
Up to a little while ago, finding podcasts was a pain. There was no single repository you could search to find them. Actually, there was but it wasn't known or promoted to the general public.
With iTunes 5.0, Apple has introduced podcasts to a much broader audience. iTunes now has a podcast search function (through their music store) which allows you to search for, find and subscribe to podcasts. Subscribing is free and unauthenticated (you don't need to register or provide any information) and tells iTunes to check for updates to that podcast every minute / hour / day / week / whatever. Podcasters now have a means of reaching a much larger audience, including the less technologically savvy.
That audience now includes me.
Before Mr. Electrifying Daddy told me about podcasts, I didn't have a clue what they were. Even after he explained I didn't really get it. Until I tried it for myself.
Once you filter out all the crap, of course, this thing is pretty freaking cool. What amazes me the most is how, by having iTunes do the work, your podcasts are integrated with your iPod.
So picture this, what I think is the target goal of these technologies:
In your automated house (where a computer runs most of the electronic devices), you have a computer running 24 hours a day. Apple figures you're gonna use iTunes as your "jukebox" application, the thing that will serve music to your house, so that too will run all the times. You subscribe to the news podcast from CNN or CBS or whathaveyou so that iTunes will download it every night or morning, whenever it is updated. When you come home from work, you put your iPod in its cradle to be sync-ed and recharged. So when iTunes downloads the latest news podcast, it's automatically transferred to your iPod. When you leave for work in the morning, you grab the iPod. Sitting in the train you can now listen to the news instead of fumbling around with a large newspaper.
Now that I find really cool.
It absolutely does not apply to me because I could hardly care less about the news. And I work from home anyway. But I did find podcasts worthy of mention:
For the technology geeks out there: This Week in TECH (a.k.a. TWiT) and Diggnation. The weekly podcasts last between 30 minutes and one hour, more or less, of two or more guys talking about the tech stuff that made the news over the last week. They also give you a bunch of links to cool stuff you probably didn't see.
For the blues fan: The Roadhouse. A weekly one hour show of the best blues you never heard. All about independent artist creating some of the best blues you would never hear otherwise.
So far those are the only ones I found. I haven't had a chance to search for stuff in more depth, but I'll try and share the cool ones I come across.
