PODCASTING

Podcast til your ears bleed!!




First off let’s cover a little background on what podcasting is. Podcasting was developed as way to use your Ipod as a tool or device to broadcast anything you would like to broadcast, such as your political views, humoristic tastes, research knowledge, music tastes, it even allows you to be able to set up a broad casting show. The word podcast was derived from taking pod from Ipod and cast from broad casting and combining them.

Podcasting is just another form of communication with the ability to be able to do it asynchronously. To simplify it, think of it as a sound based Tivo or DVR player. Different shows, programs and information can be downloaded onto your computer thru the use of a software application called an aggregator. Aggregators come in many forms and are provided by many of your online giants such as Yahoo, google, and Itunes. I choose to use an aggregator called Ziepod. I went with this aggregator because it was free and it also has the ability to podcast videos. I like the graphics of Ziepod, its very user friendly, the graphics are vivid and the format for downloading podcast’s to it is easy and quick. Many of the podcasts have commercial interruptions, but like a DVR, you can skip past them and move on to the content that your there to listen to.

There are thousands of podcasts, otherwise known as feeds that can be found on the internet. They are formatted in many different ways, but all of them allow you to search for your interests and have different libraries that cover a slew of content information form A-Z.

While podcasts on the surface seem like a cool alternative to entertainment, I have been finding that one of the biggest drawbacks to downloading feeds is that they are very dated. Most of the subjects that interest me were very hard to find up to date and current downloadable subject matter. It seemed like every time I downloaded a podcast, the feed was two to three years old, I had a hard time knowing whether or not a feed was current or not. Another problem was after trying to download some podcast’s, I would get error messages stating that the podcast was no longer available. Once again major PITA (pain in the ass). These providers need to develop a system that shows you how up to date these podcasts are before you take the time to copy and paste the feeds into your aggregator. Having said that, the feeds that I was able to download and listen to are cool and very informative, but you have to take this kind of information for what it’s worth, mostly entertainment value. Don’t be fooled into believing that the information and material discussed is always true and factual, just like Wikipedia can be changed and manipulated to give erroneous information, podcasts can achieve this same kind of misleading disinformation.

I have not taken the time, or I should say I don’t have the time to get involved in the making of my own podcast, but when I do have time, I think I will definitely give it a try. It seems like a fun project and I would love to put my sarcastic thoughts and ideas into a show type format and let the world laugh along.

Podcasting looks to be on the rise and will be another alternative to television, and radio. The beauty of it is being able to listen when you want to and can, which is a huge positive in the life of a guy like me who values time like the Pope values stepping through the gates to heaven.