Pod Casting
My friend (and boss), Bob Long, loaned his iPod to me for the VS Live trip.
I initially put all of my music on it, and thought that was pretty good. Truthfully,
I don’t listen to music all that much and I thought this was really just a novelty
that might be fun. I had heard a little about podcasting so I googled about
it and came up with some amazing things.
How I Think This Stuff Works
What I have learned so far is that in the RSS 2.0 feeds, there are “enclosures“,
which are essentially byte blob attachments embedded within a post. The enclosures are
most likely to take the form of plain MP3s or may be a special format for iPods,
offering more granularity and meta tagging within the enclosure.
I ended up using the Nimiq aggregater to hook up to some RSS 2.0 feeds.
The enclosures are automatically downloaded and placed into a directory that is subscribed
to by my iTunes library. Then you sync the iPod and off you go.
I would prefer using my standard aggregator, Negator, but frankly Newsgator has become
something that isn’t all that simple anymore and doesn’t easily offer automatically
pulling enclosures ( I think ).
Content is King
The technology here is only mildly interesting. The real meat is in the content.
I am blown away by the quality and volume of available content. These feeds
tend to be offered in multiple enclosure formats to make everyone happy. Here are
some of the things that I have found so far.
What other Tech content is out there that I have not discovered? This is a whole
new world for me and I am very excited about it. Throw me a list of your favorite
podcasts. What are some other cool tools, etc., that I am missing?
Hardware
What’s your favorite player? Are there better options than the iPod itself?
Is there really a need to go over 20G? I am particularly interested in the iRiver
players, but I think there is something out there with a radio in it. Is there
anything with the ability to sync Outlook?
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