Geek 28 Sep 2004 03:54 pm
Podcasting
Apparently, this is the “new” thing out there: RSS 2.0 feeds with audio (usually MP3) enclosures containing, basically, the blog equivalent to radio shows. Adam Curry is the most prominent figure doing it (check he latest edition here), but there are others, like the Evil Genius Chronicles, IT Conversations and a few others.
The target audience here is people who have an iPod (or other MP3 player) and who drive to/from work, and hence spend a fair amount of time in an entertainment-free environment. There are programs that can automatically download the enclosures and add them to an iPod, so that when you go out in the morning the content is there, waiting for you to listen to it (the best one seems to be the iPodder, but I haven’t used it).
This is slowly approaching the idea of an “audio Tivo” with content created by regular people. The quality and content of the shows that are already out there is very good, even though we are still in the stage where most of the content is about the technology itself (that is, iPodder feeds talk mostly about iPodder-related technologies).
A few problems that I see as needing to be fixed before this becomes widespread: bandwidth (the publisher needs a lot of it to push his/her content out, and the listener needs some of it to get his/her feeds, which may be a problem in some (most?) countries), searchability (how do you Google for something that was mentioned in an audio post?), and ease of use (none of the software to do this automatically is very user-friendly at this point).
This won’t replace text-based blogging, but is very cool anyway.
