Zeitgeist Heads-Up: Podcasting

I have recently discovered "podcasting." Wow! Podcasting is a way of location- and time-shifting your reception of audible media. It's a new method of delivery, a democratic and supremely flexible alternative to broadcasting. Basically, podcasting uses web syndication, specifically RSS 2.0 (An Atom feed can be jury rigged with Feedburner [see below]), to deliver a media file as an enclosure in a blog feed. If you have iTunes, you can use a special aggregator (my fav is iPodderX) that has a script that will automatically place any new mp3 files into an iTunes playlist. Sync to your iPod (or other player), then you can hop a train or a bike or foot it and you can dig on some fresh, time-shifted homemade radio!

Rather than elaborate, I'll just point you to the Wikipedia entry for podcasting, which has a full explanation and some great links.

From my experience playing around for the last few days, and researching how to do this, here's some advice: If you want to syndicate some home brew content of you own, the easiest way to get started is with Feedburner. Get a free account, and then follow these instructions to set up your own podcast feeds. You can link them right off your Blogger or Typepad blog.

This is going to be BIG. Podcasting will do for radio what blogging has done for print journalism.

My first foray will be to post--at the rate of two a week--the web radio shows my Denison students produced last spring. And then I plan to produce some fresh content with friends here in NYC.