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On Podcasting…
A few days ago I jotted down some of the blogging advice I’d picked up over the past seven years of doing this. I think if you just use common sense, you won’t get yourself in trouble down the line. Even seven years ago I made sure that I was careful not to say anything in this blog that I wouldn’t say to someone’s face. Or better, that I wouldn’t want them to read somewhere down the line. I’ve also been careful not to put too much of my personal information online, in regard to the blog. Again, just common sense. And it’s a good thing too, because there are all kinds of services out there that have kept archives of everything ever published on the web. Even killing spiders and robots won’t stop them.
One of the neatest things to happen in the last seven years are all of the new features that can be integrated into blogs. In 1999, I was typing entries out and handcoding each page, adding new sidebar information for each update. These days the software does everything for me. I simply open my blogging software, type up an entry and go on with my day. This alone allows me to post shorter entries more often, rather than an all-inclusive entry at the end of the day.
The newest technology for bloggers is a podcast. Wikipedia describes it as follows:
Podcasting is the distribution of audio or video files, such as radio programs or music videos, over the Internet using either RSS or Atom syndication for listening on mobile devices and personal computers. The term podcast, like “radio”, can mean both the content and the method of delivery. Podcasters’ websites also may offer direct download of their files, but the subscription feed of automatically delivered new content is what distinguishes a podcast from a simple download or real-time streaming (see below). Usually, the podcast features one type of “show” with new episodes either sporadically or at planned intervals such as daily, weekly, etc. In addition to this, there are podcast networks that feature multiple shows on the same feed.
Back in 1999, we called them audio entries. We’d simply record our entries as a media player or realaudio file and save it to our server, where our readers could download them and listen to us. And then there were video entries, the same thing but through our webcam. An old idea made new through technology. With faster bandwidth and internet connections, people can download your “podcast” almost instantly. And the fact that you can subscribe to your favorite podcaster is the big distinction.
Speaking of audio entries, I played around with them when I first started this site. I’d heard Beverly create one and decided to play around with the software to figure it out myself. Bev and I swapped a few files back and forth and our audio entries were born. In fact, Bev, I recently found one of your first audio entries on some old disks I was tossing out. Email me and I’ll send it to you, if you want to hear yourself from ten years ago. Dang, how time flies.
So those were the early podcasts. Simple audio files that our readers could download and finally hear what we sounded like. Scary. I’ve never really had the urge again to record my voice and stick it on this website, but did manage to find a neat tool that will allow me to create podcasts of my entries so that readers can listen to the site, rather than read it. It’s kind of a neat feature. You’ll have access to the podcast link through my website—the image next to the title. And I may even start podcasting through iTunes.
To think, we were doing this ten years ago and here we are again—podcasting.
If you listen to the podcast, you’ll notice that it’s a computer generated voice. I think she kind of sounds like the female computer voice on Quantum Leap. What was her name?
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This entry was posted on Monday, March 27th, 2006 at 10:16 am and is filed under Weblog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.