A lot of people have been asking about the art of podcastingand what is it. Well, ever since January of 2005, ZDNet has been launching allkinds of podcasts. Well, what the heck are podcasts? Well, let me tell you.
First of all, you need to know something about digital videorecorders or TiVo because that's kind of where podcast came from. You've gotthis TiVo player, right, and it's connected via a cable to your cable networkprovider, with a rather low cloud here cable. And basically what you do is yougo to your TiVo and you say, "I want to watch 'Desperate Housewives.'"Now TiVo takes care of everything else, it goes out, finds 'DesperateHousewives,' brings it down, records it and then you get to take your nicepretty 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, exceptthe cloud that the content comes from is the Internet. It's the same cloud thatthe Web comes from and that blogs come from. Now, the way you tune into aprogram, 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 justtune into those pages using a technology called RSS. Well, if you want to tuneinto podcast, which are audio interviews and audio programming, you just set upa special piece of software called iPodder, and you tell it to tune intospecific programming on the Internet like ZDNet's, of course. So over RSS, yougo into the Internet. Here's RSS and it automatically downloads all thiswonderful audio content for you. Not only does it download it into your PC, butif you want, it'll download it into your MP3 player and guess what, you can useyour MP3 player, take it in your car on the way to work, plug it into thespeaker, so you can listen to it. Don't use headphones. It's very dangerous todo 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 away to save time and one other moral to the story is, you don't need an iPod tolisten to the content, even though they call it podcasting. In fact, maybe oneday, we'll just take the pod out of podcasting.
