Thoughts on Podcasting

Reading through the articles, the area of online communication that caught my attention and made me want to learn more about it was that of podcasting. Even though it is still a very new form of online communication, podcasting has gone through huge evolutionary strides over the last eight years. A Podcast, as explained by Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasting), is: “a digital media file, or a related collection of such files, which is distributed over the Internet using syndication feeds for playback on portable media players and personal computers.” The word “Podcasting” seems to have originated from the idea that Apples’ iPods were the first to have scripts developed for their media player which allowed the broadcasted “radio-like” communications over the Internet to be listened to portably, however, RSS feeds actually came about in 2000.

Although Podcasting began with broadcasting only audio files to communicate with subscribers, it did not stay that way for long. Some people still enjoy the “radio-like” communication to this day, but others have upgraded to a type of podcasting that involves more media. Some examples of these upgrades are: Videocasting, where visual and audio media meet to bring a message through syndicated feeds; and Audiocasting, where the words of a written document can be transformed to audio by a TTS (text-to-speech) engine so that you may listen to them rather than read them (great for the visually challenged/impaired).

Some of the ways that people have learnt to use this type of online communication to better their lives is by using it to: send sick children their school lessons at home, provide people with affordable audio tours to establishments, and send out public safety messages. Although it is a great way to communicate our thoughts and feelings, it no longer is specifically used for talk shows and blogging. (Wikipedia, retrieved Nov 7, 2007)

In response to the O’Reilly article, found at: http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/digitalmedia/2005/07/20/WhatIsPodcasting.html, I would like to say that I found this article to be very informative and helpful. I especially liked the idea of giving the readers suggestions of programs to use for editing and other such production tasks, as well as the types of equipment to use for gathering the best quality audio that you can. I think that the article made it very clear to its’ readers that Podcasting is not an easy task to concur…but that if you take your time with it and experiment, you could have a lot of fun creating your own podcast.