What in the world is a Podcast?

I was at the Tampa Bay SBS group meeting last night and a few guys asked if there was supposed to be any video in these podcasts. While I'm sure plenty of folks would pay for some video of our Queenie, no, there is no video in podcasts. Not to mention that Chris and I "have the face for the radio" and would effectively have to kiss our audience goodbye. But the guys I spoke to are pretty active SBSers and if they didn't know what to expect out of a podcast then its likely that most people out there don't get it either so let me see if I can sum up what a podcast is, how to use one, etc. What is a podcast? Podcast (personal on-demand broadcast) is a recording of a radio show you can download off the Internet. No video, just sound, and usually quite low quality to make it a smaller download. Unlike a streamed audio file, podcasts are intended to be downloaded and listened your own pace, time and place – on your computer, on your mp3 player, on your media center PC or while driving. Files are quite small (less than 20 megs for over an hour of talk) and traditionally involve one person with nothing to say recording a show for someone that has nothing to do. SBS Show is technically an icecast because we always have guests and more than 1 person talking which basically makes it a lot like talk radio except without Garliq commercials. So I just download this? You can, but that is not the preferred form of transfering these. Much like blogs the cool thing behind podcasts is that they are wrapped in xml/rss enclosures and come with a wide set of tools to make subscription to these shows easy and effortless. For example, the SBS Show has a feed which is integrated into places like Yahoo and Itunes. You can just go to these sites, subscribe to "SBS Show" and those clients will automatically download the mp3 of the show when it becomes available to your mp3 player or your computer. You can also use series of aggregators which are programs designed to collect podcasts and download them for you so you don't have to navigate to places like www.sbsshow.com every week – its done automatically. Got it! What now? Once you have the mp3 file you sit and listen to it. Or in Joey's case you put it on an mp3 player and take it to the gym. There is a big misconception that podcasts are somehow related to Apple, they are not. You do not need an Ipod and for the love of god don't give money to Apple. Any dinky $30 mp3 player will be a champ at playing back podcasts, after all, they are just mp3 files. You can play it at the office, in the gym, on your way to work/client/wedding/during sex. It is just a very versatile form of distributing information and quite entertaining at that – for those of you in the business world think about getting useful technical and business information without powerpoint. Whoa, sounds pretty complex. Dumb it down. Ok. Go to podcasts.yahoo.com and search for SBS Show (or click here) – Scroll down the list until you find the show you wish to listen to. Click listen and enjoy. Now lets say you had an mp3 player or wanted to listen on your computer. Well, go to http://www.sbsshow.com and click on the download link and either save to the mp3 player or open with the media player of your choice. If thats too complex just open up a recent version of iTunes, click on Podcasts and in the search field type SBS Show – list will drop down, pick the one you like the most and hit play. Thats it! But wait, I'm a power user! Wooohooo. Okay, in that case you'll want to subscribe to podcasts and really waste some hard drive space. First thing you need to get is an aggregator which will collect these podcasts for you. They are called podcast aggregators or podcatchers. Yes, they are all free. At the simplest level there are Yahoo Media Player and iTunes. Both will collect podcasts for you. If you'd rather put the mp3's on something more exotic, such as a Media Center PC or a PocketPC (or a Linux workstation) there are things to that as well. My personal favourites are Doppler which is available both for your Windows desktop and your mobile PocketPC. If you're looking for something cross-platform there is always iPodder. Whichever software you select you'll need to find a feed. Feed what? We ain't on a farm boy! RSS/XML feed is the file that podcasters use to format their podcasts for syndication. They include the link to the file, date it was made, length of the recording, brief description, etc. It is how iTunes tells you what you're about to get. While most people will never see this because 99% of people use Yahoo and iTunes I figured I'd mention it. Let's say you're browsing around a random site and you really find a podcast that you're really interested in but you're experiencing an out-of-attention issue. You can't find it in iTunes but they have this little RSS/XML orange icon. Well, that means they published their podcast feed. Right click and copy the address and paste it into your aggregator. Few minutes later you'll be downloading a collection of that podcasts recordings. Subscribe to the SBS Show Overview Don't buy an iPod. If you've found stuff you enjoy lisitening to online you can use an aggregator to subscribe to your favourite digital radio shows and listen to them at your own pace. And no, SBS Show has no video's of Susanne you can download.