While at Gnomedex this past weekend, there were numerous mentions of “PodCasting”. I had heard of this briefly in the last couple of weeks, but had not looked into it yet. There seems to be a lot of buzz around this simple but interesting concept. Basically, it’s an application of audio enclosures within an RSS feed. A special aggregator automatically downloads the audio files (perhaps overnight) and pushes them to the MP3 device.
A lot of people are now publishing internet talk shows and other content in this way and it seems to be gaining a ton of momentum. I’ve been following DotNetRocks (a .Net developers’ talk show) by burning MP3s to CD and listening in the car. Now they have PodCast feeds as well.
I don’t have an iPod (yet), so I’m using my Tapwave Zodiac instead, syncing the MP3 content to the main memory and an expansion card. Not quite as cool or automatic as an iPod, but I’ve already got the Zodiac! How about a new phrase: “ZodCasting”?
Some links for further reading:
- PodCasting How-To, including creating your own (Engadget)
- http://ipodder.org/ (Adam Curry’s site)
- http://www.podcasts.org/
- http://ipodder.sourceforge.net/ (Mac/Win iPodder software)
- http://ipoddernet.sourceforge.net/ (Win .Net iPodder software)