ZDNet's podcasts: How to tune in

While this primer on ZDNet's podcasts mostly covers the delivery part, I see podcasting's ability to make file size and download time irrelevant to multimedia publishing and consumption as an opportunity to go very deep (National Public Radio-deep) on IT matters.

So far, in a series we're calling IT Matters (noun or verb, take it whichever way you like), ZDNet has published four podcasts; an "IT trends in 2005 piece with research outfit THINKStrategies principal Jeff Kaplan; an interview with Microsoft Security Business Technology unit director Gytis Barzdukas regarding the company's recent forays into anti-virus and anti-spy ware solutions; a revealing look at IBM's pledge to release 500 patents for unencumbered use featuring the pioneering open source attorney Larry Rosen; and a behind the scenes peek into why Miles Wade, a systems architect in the oil exploration business, is re-evaluating his selection of Embedded Windows as the platform to power the mission critical systems that his company puts on oil rigs.

Not only do we have more podcasts planned on issues regarding IT matters, but we also see podcasting as an opportunity to address a serious problem in the media.

On the heels of several media catastrophes--including RatherGate, Jayson Blair at the New York Times, biased coverage of the war in Iraq, and revelations that supposedly objective journalists and bloggers were nothing of the sort-- Harvard's Berkman for Internet and Society is holding a conference starting on Friday, Jan. 21, on the topic of Blogging, Journalism and Credibility. One major problem in the media is how sources are often misquoted, not fully quoted, or their quotes are often taken and placed out of context (sometimes purposely, sometimes by mistake).

So, to up the ante in the name of media transparency and integrity, beginning with my interview of UserLand's CEO Scott Young for a text story, we will begin experimenting by providing unedited versions of the raw audio recordings that were made while doing research for our stories, columns, and blog entries (the interview with Scott Young can also be downloaded directly. Since we're just getting started with podcasting, we won't be able to apply this approach to all of our work. But, to better understand what it will take to earn the trust of the public, there's no time like the present to put a stake in the ground. For a complete explanation of our experiment in media credibility and transparency, please read my column "Can technology close journalism's credibility gap?"

The idea behind podcasts, much like digital video recorders (DVRs) such as the TiVo, is to find your favorite programs and subscribe to them in a way that they automatically show up on your computer for playback in your media player (iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc.) or even better, on your portable digital media player (Apple's iPod, Creative's Zen, iRiver's jukeboxes, etc.). Then, just as with a DVR, you listen to that content at your convenience perhaps through your car stereo while commuting, through your earbuds while you're walking your dog or on the train, or through your computer's speakers, in the background, while you work.

This concept is called time-shifted media consumption. I believe that -- much the same way many people first resisted the idea of cell phones but then gave in -- time-shifted consumption's convenience and the way it allows people to recover some of their most precious resource -- time -- will be impossible to resist. In the future, I predict, almost all of the content we consume -- text (including e-mail and Web pages), images, audio, video, and other forms of multimedia -- will be consumed digitally on a time-shifted basis, most often through very portable, battery-operated devices.

Much the same way our cable networks carry music broadcasts in addition to TV and movies coming from multiple broadcasters, all of those text documents, images, and audio and video files will be available to you on a time-shifted basis through the Internet from millions of publishers (not just the ones your cable provider decides you can have). The Really Simple Syndication protocol (RSS) will not only be the protocol you use for subscribing to e-mail from your parents, the calendars of your co-workers, a project's timeline at work, the status of your overnight deliveries, and some time-shifted audio or video broadcasts, but we will have universal RSS inboxes into which all of this stuff arrives.

Those inboxes will have prioritization capabilities that allows us to slide items around in such a way that the content entries turn into items on our To-Do lists (much the same way e-mail represents our To-Do list today) and, as things get done (for example, a task for a project), it will knock those items off the list and notify the other systems and people (through RSS) on a need-to-know basis. You'll even be able to map those items into your calendar, and other people who subscribe to your calendar may even be able to see (if you choose to make the information public) what content you're consuming and when (sort of like Technorati and http://del.icio.us on steroids). Audience measurement companies like Nielsen Media Research will compensate you for access to this information.

RSS is not only the next killer application of the Internet, it is the next cable TV network (yes, good-bye cable TV networks, just give me Internet access). Only, with access to virtually every bit of content on the Internet, all your inboxes, virtual workspaces and projects at work, and devices in your home (like your security system), RSS -- or its successor -- is capable of way more than bringing audio and video broadcasts to you.

In podcasting, as with a DVR, you must make some indication as to which time-shifted audiocasts (and eventually other types of "casts" like video) that you want to automatically turn up on your hard drive. The same technology used to subscribe to blogs and newsfeeds today -- RSS -- is also used to subscribe to podcasts. However, it's one thing to subscribe to a blog or a newsfeed with RSS because the text of the title, the summary, and even the full blog entry or news story (the content) can appear in the XML-, text-based RSS feed itself. Subscribing to podcasts or time-shifted videocasts is different because the most important content -- the audio, video, animation, etc. -- is not stored in text.

In order to get time-shifted broadcasts with RSS, the publisher of the content must use special XML tags in its RSS feed to indicate that an entry comes with an "enclosure." Within the enclosure tag, the publisher must provide the direct Web address from which multimedia content (a specific MP3 file, for example) can be downloaded. Then, your RSS client/aggregator must not only be able to understand the enclosure tag (making it an enclosure-aware client), but should also know what to do with the enclosure. For example, within the Net's podcasting community, not only does the open source program known as iPodder know how to give you a picklist (the equivalent of your DVR's TV Guide) of podcasts to subscribe to (based on the iPodder directory that's found on the Internet, once you subscribe to a bunch of podcasts, it regularly polls the RSS feeds from those podcast publishers to see if any new shows are available. (As of the time I wrote this piece, ZDNet's show, IT Matters, was not in the picklist of podcasts -- a situation that hopefully will be rectified as soon as possible.) All RSS aggregators, enclosure-aware or not, have a way of manually entering the URL of an RSS feed to which you want to subscribe. Here is the feed for IT Matters and here is the current IT Matters home page.

When iPodder detects that a new show is available for one of your subscriptions, it downloads it to your system. From there, it gets synched into your portable digital media player, if you have one. iPodder's directory of podcasts isn't the only such directory. iPodderX runs one that integrates with its RSS aggregator and Potkast.com devotes itself to the task of making podcasts easy to find based on your interests. Podcasting News also runs a very portalesque podcast directory.

iPodder, which I use (referred to in the podcasting world as "iPodder Lemon" because the icon is a lemon) is free and is available for both Windows and Mac and a beta version is underway for Linux. There are other enclosure-aware aggregators, including the $20 iPodderX (which has an embedded media viewer), and the alpha-stage iPodderSP for PocketPC-based smartphones, which takes the PC out of the equation and allows the smartphone to grab the multimedia content directly off the Internet over its cellco connection.

Doing a Google search on "podcasting" along with some terms relevant to your particular setup such as "Windows" and "iRiver" (if that's what you have), will likely reveal some interesting tips on how to optimize your consumption of podcasts, including which software works best and how to use some hacks to eke out an even better user experience from your gear.

You can write to me at david.berlind@cnet.com. If you're looking for my commentaries on other IT topics, check my blog Between the Lines.