I have been reading quite a few blogs talking about podcasting in the past 2 weeks. Maybe its just the meme-of-the-month, but I enjoy listening to bloggers even more than reading them — the social presence is just so much greater when I can hear someone. Besides, now that blogging is apparently getting mainstream attention from the New York Times, I need something more bleeding edge to maintain my geek status.
If you haven’t heard of podcasting, Dave Winer sums it up nicely on the Trade Secrets blog (Trade Secrets is the Dave’s collaborative podcast with Adam Curry):
Think how a desktop aggregator works. You subscribe to a set of feeds, and then can easily view the new stuff from all of the feeds together, or each feed separately.
Podcasting works the same way, with one exception. Instead of reading the new content on a computer screen, you listen to the new content on an iPod or iPod-like device.
I like to think of it as a great combination of pirate radio and blogging. Anyone with a computer and a microphone can create a podcast, especially when armed with some great open source software like Audacity for doing the recording. Collecting all those podcasts, however, would seem a tedious job. One might ask, isn’t there some sort of program that could act as an aggregator. If the podcaster is putting the podcast audio file as an enclosure in an RSS feed, this is definitely possible. One program that I have just installed on my computer is iPodder. It is free, open source, and available on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. I am especially pleased that it is written in Python (my fave programming language).
Now, I just need to figure out how to record Skype conversations in Audacity, how to put audio enclosures in my RSS feed, then I can start podcasting some interviews.