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what is the best way to start a podcasting activity?

Posted on 25. Jul, 2011 by admin in Blogging

Question by abe: what is the best way to start a podcasting activity?

Best answer:

Answer by MJ23_4life
“Podcasting” is a portmanteau word coined in 2004 (see “History” below), that combined two words: “iPod” and “broadcasting.”

While the name was primarily associated with audio subscriptions in 2004, the RSS enclosure syndication technique had been used with video files since 2001, before portable video players were widely available. Atom, a recently developed web syndication format, supports rich media content by design, as does standard RSS 2.0 based upon XML 1.0 standards. In fact, any file with a URL, including still images and text, can be delivered via a web feed.

Use of “podcast” to describe both audio and video feeds seemed natural to some users, while others preferred to reserve the word for audio and coin new terms for video subscriptions. Other “pod-” derived neologisms include “podcasters” for individuals or organizations offering feeds, and “podcatchers” for special RSS aggregators with the ability to transfer the files to media player software or hardware.

Neither podcasting nor listening to podcasts requires an iPod or other portable player, and no over-the-air broadcasting is required. The name association came about simply because Apple Computer’s iPod was the most marketed, and therefore the best-selling portable digital audio player when podcasting began and was used by early practitioners.

However, the use of the “pod” name in 2004 probably played a part [1] in Apple’s development of podcasting products and services in 2005, further linking the device and the activity in the news media.

The editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary declared “podcasting” the 2005 word of the year in December, defining the term as “a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player”.[2]

From the beginning various writers suggested other names or alternative interpretations of the letters “P-O-D.” Technology writer Doc Searls had proposed “Personal Option Digital” in September, 2004. [3] The “Personal On Demand” interpretation was in international circulation as early as October 2004.[4] In July 2005, Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble mentioned that interpretation while countering reports that his company was pushing the word “blogcasting” to avoid mentioning an Apple product.[5] “Blogcasting” also implied content based on, or similar in format to, blogs, which was not always the case.

Another Apple rival in the portable audio and video market, Creative Technology, began using the “Personal On Demand” interpretation, while offering its own “Zencasts.”[6]

Other terms have been suggested, but had shortcomings — “audioblogging,” “audio magazines” and “webcasting” could describe other forms of media distribution, and “rsscasting” would be difficult to pronounce.

Podcasting as a medium was first associated with, but never limited to, audio data. As use of RSS enclosures for video spread in 2005, podcasting of video data was called, among other things, “video blogging”, “video podcasting”, “vlogging”, “vodcasting”, or “vidcasting”.
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Mechanics

The publish/subscribe model of podcasting is a version of push technology, in that the information provider chooses which files to offer in a feed and the subscriber chooses among available feed channels. While the user is not “pulling” individual files from the Web, there is a strong “pull” aspect in that the receiver is free to subscribe to (or unsubscribe from) a vast array of channels. Earlier Internet “push” services (e.g., PointCast) allowed a much more limited selection of content.

Podcasting is an automatic mechanism by which multimedia computer files are transferred from a server to a client which pulls down XML files containing the Internet addresses of the media files. In general, these files contain audio or video, but also could be images, text, PDF, or any file type.

A podcast is generally analogous to a recorded television or radio series.

The content provider begins by making a file (for example, an MP3 audio file) available on the Internet. This is usually done by posting the file on a publicly-available webserver; however, BitTorrent trackers also have been used, and it is not technically necessary that the file be publicly accessible. The only requirement is that the file be accessible through some known URI (a general-purpose Internet address). This file is often referred to as one episode of a podcast.

The content provider then acknowledges the existence of that file by referencing it in another file known as the feed. The feed is a machine-readable list of the URIs by which episodes of the show may be accessed. This list is usually published in RSS format (although Atom can also be used), which provides other information, such as publish dates, titles, and accompanying text descriptions of the series and each of its episodes. The feed may contain entries for all episodes in the series, but is typically limited to a short list of the most recent episodes, as is the case with many news feeds. Standard podcasts consist of a feed from one author. More recently multiple authors have been able to contribute epsiodes to a single podcast feed using concepts such as public podcasting and social podcasting.

The content provider posts the feed to a known location on a webserver. (Unlike the episode file itself, the feed is published to a webserver, usually not by other means.) The location at which the feed is posted is expected to be permanent. This location is known as the feed URI (or, perhaps more often, feed URL). The content provider makes this feed URI known to the intended audience.

A consumer enters this feed URI into a software program called a podcatcher or aggregator (the former term is specific to podcasting while the latter is general to all programs which collect news from feeds). This program retrieves and processes data from the feed URI.

A podcatcher is usually an always-on program which starts when the computer is started and runs in the background. It manages a set of feed URIs added by the user and downloads each at a specified interval, such as every two hours. If the feed data has substantively changed from when it was previously checked (or if the feed was just added to the podcatcher’s list), the program determines the location of the most recent item and automatically downloads it to the user’s computer. Some podcatchers, such as iTunes, also automatically make the newly downloaded episodes available to a user’s portable media player. (This is only the typical behavior of a podcatcher; some podcatchers behave—or can be set to behave—differently.)

The downloaded episodes can then be played, replayed, or archived as with any other computer file.

To conserve bandwidth, users may opt to search for content using an online podcast directory, such as FeedTheNetwork.com; Directories such as this enable people listen online and initially become familiar with the content provided from an RSS Feed before deciding to subscribe. For most broadband users, bandwith is generally not given a second thought, however, there are still a number of computers which are connected to the Internet using a dial-up connection.

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Tags: activity, Best, Podcasting, Start