ZDNet's podcasts: How to tune in

While this primer on ZDNet's podcasts mostly covers thedelivery part, I see podcasting's ability to make file size and download time irrelevantto 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 itwhichever way you like), ZDNet has published four podcasts; an "IT trends in 2005 piece with research outfit THINKStrategies principal Jeff Kaplan; an interview with MicrosoftSecurity Business Technology unit director Gytis Barzdukas regarding thecompany's recent forays into anti-virus and anti-spy ware solutions; a revealinglook at IBM's pledge to release 500 patents for unencumbered use featuring the pioneering open source attorney LarryRosen; and a behind the scenes peek into why Miles Wade, a systems architect in the oil exploration business, isre-evaluating his selection of Embedded Windows as the platform to power themission critical systems that his company puts on oil rigs.

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

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

So, to up the ante in the name of media transparency andintegrity, beginning with my interview of UserLand's CEO Scott Young for a textstory, we will begin experimenting by providing unedited versions of the rawaudio recordings that were made while doing research for our stories, columns,and blog entries (the interview with Scott Young can also be downloadeddirectly. Since we're just getting started with podcasting, we won't be able to applythis approach to all of our work. But, to better understand what it will taketo earn the trust of the public, there's no time like the present to put astake in the ground. For a complete explanation of our experiment in mediacredibility and transparency, please read my column "Can technology closejournalism'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 tothem in a way that they automatically show up on your computer for playback inyour media player (iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc.) or even better, on yourportable digital media player (Apple's iPod, Creative's Zen, iRiver'sjukeboxes, etc.). Then, just as with a DVR, you listen to that content at yourconvenience perhaps through your car stereo while commuting, through yourearbuds while you're walking your dog or on the train, or through your computer'sspeakers, in the background, while you work.

This concept is called time-shifted media consumption. Ibelieve that -- much the same way many people first resisted the idea of cellphones but then gave in -- time-shifted consumption's convenience and the wayit allows people to recover some of their most precious resource -- time -- willbe impossible to resist. In the future, I predict, almost all of the contentwe consume -- text (including e-mail and Web pages), images, audio, video, andother 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 broadcastsin addition to TV and movies coming from multiple broadcasters, all of those textdocuments, images, and audio and video files will be available to you on atime-shifted basis through the Internet from millions of publishers (not justthe ones your cable provider decides you can have). The Really SimpleSyndication protocol (RSS) will not only be the protocol you use forsubscribing to e-mail from your parents, the calendars of your co-workers, aproject's timeline at work, the status of your overnight deliveries, and some time-shiftedaudio or video broadcasts, but we will have universal RSS inboxes into whichall of this stuff arrives.

Those inboxes will have prioritization capabilities thatallows us to slide items around in such a way that the content entries turninto items on our To-Do lists (much the same way e-mail represents our To-Dolist today) and, as things get done (for example, a task for a project), itwill 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 itemsinto your calendar, and other people who subscribe to your calendar may even beable to see (if you choose to make the information public) what content you'reconsuming and when (sort of like Technorati and http://del.icio.uson 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 meInternet access). Only, with access to virtually every bit of content on theInternet, all your inboxes, virtual workspaces and projects at work, anddevices in your home (like your security system), RSS -- or its successor -- iscapable of way more than bringing audio and video broadcasts to you.

In podcasting, as with a DVR, you must make some indicationas to which time-shifted audiocasts (and eventually other types of "casts" likevideo) that you want to automatically turn up on your hard drive. The sametechnology used to subscribe to blogs and newsfeeds today -- RSS -- is alsoused to subscribe to podcasts. However, it's one thing to subscribe to a blogor a newsfeed with RSS because the text of the title, the summary, and even thefull blog entry or news story (the content) can appear in the XML-, text-based RSSfeed itself. Subscribing to podcasts or time-shifted videocasts is differentbecause the most important content -- the audio, video, animation, etc. -- isnot stored in text.

In order to get time-shifted broadcasts with RSS, thepublisher of the content must use special XML tags in its RSS feed to indicatethat an entry comes with an "enclosure." Within the enclosure tag, thepublisher must provide the direct Web address from which multimedia content (aspecific MP3 file, for example) can be downloaded. Then, your RSSclient/aggregator must not only be able to understand the enclosure tag (makingit an enclosure-aware client), but should also know what to do with theenclosure. For example, within the Net's podcasting community, not only doesthe open source program known as iPodder knowhow to give you a picklist (the equivalent of your DVR's TV Guide) of podcaststo 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 feedsfrom those podcast publishers to see if any new shows are available. (As ofthe time I wrote this piece, ZDNet's show, IT Matters, was not in the picklistof podcasts -- a situation that hopefully will be rectified as soon as possible.) All RSS aggregators, enclosure-aware or not, have a way of manually enteringthe 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 ofyour subscriptions, it downloads it to your system. From there, it gets synchedinto your portable digital media player, if you have one. iPodder's directoryof podcasts isn't the only such directory. iPodderX runs one thatintegrates with its RSS aggregator and Potkast.com devotes itself tothe task of making podcasts easy to find based on your interests. PodcastingNews also runs a very portalesque podcast directory.

iPodder, which I use (referred to in the podcasting worldas "iPodder Lemon" because the icon is a lemon) is free and is available forboth Windows and Mac and a beta version is underway for Linux. There areother enclosure-aware aggregators, including the $20 iPodderX (which has an embedded mediaviewer), and the alpha-stage iPodderSP for PocketPC-based smartphones, which takes the PC out of the equation andallows the smartphone to grab the multimedia content directly off the Internetover its cellco connection.

Doing a Google search on "podcasting" along with some termsrelevant to your particular setup such as "Windows" and "iRiver" (if that'swhat you have), will likely reveal some interesting tips on how to optimizeyour consumption of podcasts, including which software works best and how touse 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.