As it were…

Have you heard about podcasting yet? 

podcasting {verb}: An action commonly performed by farmers during the harvest season of snowpeas. The process by which snowpea "pods" are "cast" aside when shelling them for the peas within.

Ok, so this is a different kind of podcasting.

I’ve been hearing about it for some time, but shrugged it off.  Most of what I’d been hearing was about how easy it was to broadcast audio on the Internet with your iPod.  I don’t have one, and since I work at a radio station, I have cooler tools than an iPod to broadcast with.

But that’s only a little bit of what it’s about.  It’s really simply linking mp3s in an rss feed.  If you already have regular mp3s being made, creating an rss feed to serve them is all that it takes to be a podcaster.

But while that’s interesting from a geek standpoint, is the recieving end that gets really exciting.  The client machine has software that checks the podcast feeds on a regular basis, and if it finds new audio, downloads it.  If the client is on a dial-up connection, it can be scheduled for night downloads, so the audio is right there in the morning, no waiting.

Once this software downloads the audio, it can do any number of things with it.  Its original purpose was to put it on a portable digital audio player, specifically an iPod.  But what if you don’t have one?  Then simply have the audio files placed into a folder on the computer for easy listening later.

Quality audio from the Internet has long been desired by The People.  Podcasting makes it so that a person can do a one-time request for regular audio and have it delivered to their computer or portable digital audio player without any further thought about it.  THAT is what it will take for people to start getting your audio every day or every week.

I made a podcast for Mission Network News, which you can find at http://mnn.gospelcom.net/podcast/. Check it out and let me know what you think.