Podcasting 101

A lot of people have been asking about the art of podcasting and what is it. Well, ever since January of 2005, ZDNet has been launching all kinds of podcasts. Well, what the heck are podcasts? Well, let me tell you.

First of all, you need to know something about digital video recorders or TiVo because that's kind of where podcast came from. You've got this TiVo player, right, and it's connected via a cable to your cable network provider, with a rather low cloud here cable. And basically what you do is you go to your TiVo and you say, "I want to watch 'Desperate Housewives.'" Now TiVo takes care of everything else, it goes out, finds 'Desperate Housewives,' brings it down, records it and then you get to take your nice pretty little eyebrows, and you get to watch that at whatever time you want. You can watch it at 6 o'clock, 3 o'clock, it doesn't matter.

Well, now podcasting is pretty much the same thing, except the cloud that the content comes from is the Internet. It's the same cloud that the Web comes from and that blogs come from. Now, the way you tune into a program, it's the same way you tune into blogs. Blogs are just pages, right? You just have these pages and if you're an Internet user over here, you just tune into those pages using a technology called RSS. Well, if you want to tune into podcast, which are audio interviews and audio programming, you just set up a special piece of software called iPodder, and you tell it to tune into specific programming on the Internet like ZDNet's, of course. So over RSS, you go into the Internet. Here's RSS and it automatically downloads all this wonderful audio content for you. Not only does it download it into your PC, but if you want, it'll download it into your MP3 player and guess what, you can use your MP3 player, take it in your car on the way to work, plug it into the speaker, so you can listen to it. Don't use headphones. It's very dangerous to do that and, you can listen to all of the audio programs you want to use.

This is called time-shifted consumption of content. It's a way to save time and one other moral to the story is, you don't need an iPod to listen to the content, even though they call it podcasting. In fact, maybe one day, we'll just take the pod out of podcasting.