Friday, April 24, 2009

Downloading Podcast News

With the rise of podcasting, many individuals and
organizations are finding that podcasting is a great way
to distribute information, from music and comedy
shows to talk shows, even podcast news. CNET is one
of the groups that is distributing a news podcast. CNET,
being an online technology site, naturally found a niche
distributing a tech news related podcast. CNET's recent
podcasts covered such topics as viruses that attack cell
phones, problems with Google's software, China's web
restrictions and the "Great Firewall of China", and the
FTC's attack on spyware. These news items were
distributed in a sound file called an mp3 file that is
downloadable to a listener's computer for listening
whenever they wish. While these files were available
straight from CNET's site, the majority of them are
shared through the use of an RSS file. An RSS file is a
small piece of XML coding that is downloadable by
programs designed to read it. These programs are called
podcast clients, and the user can input the address of the
RSS files that hold the information on the feed. The
feed will contain links to the media files of the podcast,
and will download the new updates automatically.

More sites than CNET are finding that podcast news is
an expoitable technology. The British Broadcasting
Corporation podcasts some of it's programs, as well as
the US radio network NPR. The NPR, because its work
is created by a variety of different groups, treats
podcasts differently from show to show. The NPR show
"This American Life" distributes a podcast of the show
through a site called audible.com, which allows feed
listeners to subscribe to the feed for a small fee and
download the show . The NPR Hourly News show, on
the other hand, shares a short 5 minute broadcast that
summarizes the news for free. Since the NPR is taking a
radio show and converting it into a file that is
downloadable by the user, little is lost in the translation.
The sound is designed to convey the entire story, and so
podcast subscribers are able to treate the podcast as
nothing more than TIVO for the radio. ABC's podcast
of the news show Nightline, on the other hand, is
simply the sound track from the television show. This
has been one of the criticisms of the Nightline podcast,
because by merely stripping the sound from what is
designed as a television show, much information is not
given to the users. Listeners have problems telling who
is who because they miss the visual cues that were
supposed to be there, and there is no truly easy way to
convert the shows. For this reason, some news shows
have been moving from audio podcasts to video ones.
They can take the video information directly from the
show that is broadcast, lower the visual resolution to
shrink the file, and distribute it online as a podcast.

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Wednesday, April 22, 2009

How to Create a Podcast

Podcasting is easy to get involved in for anyone who
wants to create a podcast. The first thing necessary is
access to a web server. The user needs to be able to
upload files to the server itself, so podcasting can't be
done from a simple blogging or journal site. It's
probably best to register a domain and find a host for
the site. Once the site has been set up and the user has
access to the host server, a small program called
dircaster.php should be customized for your site, and
can be used to automatically generate the RSS feed that
the subscribers will download. The mp3 files should be
uploaded to the proper directory after all the
information about the file has been attached. After they
are in the directory, the address of dircaster.php, as long
as it is in the same directory as the mp3 files, will
generate an RSS file that will tell your subscribers
where to download the latest podcasts from. To update
and and a new episode, create and upload the new mp3
file to the same directory. When dircaster.php is
accessed, it will recognize the new file and relay the
information on to your visitors.

With these steps, it is easy for anyone to create a
podcast
with a small expenditure of time and effort. The
site is easy to set up; domains and hosting are now
cheap enough almost anyone to have a small site, and
the programs necessary are all easy to find and use.

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What is Podcast Video?

A growing trend online is podcast video. While
podcasting was originally only for audio files, more
people are beginning to send video, especially with
broadband connections more accessible. To podcast
video, content distributors enclose it in a web
syndication file that users can download and view when
they want. Users subscribe to the different files,
checking them for updates regularly, and download the
new offers when they become available. Each file is
often referred to as an episode, and may be part of a
video blog, or vlog.

Podcast video, and other types of podcasting are thus
part of the blogging revolution. Individuals and groups
around the world, with a small investment in equipment
and time, can become content producers. Because it is
so simple to use and cheap to set up, many people are
getting involved. They can podcast video around the
world, becoming producers and directors for any small
niche they want to exploit.

Many of these podcasters have small audiences that
download their podcast video, but larger groups are
getting involved. News organizations and websites that
serve massive audiences are discovering that podcasting
and podcast video can distribute their content to
millions of people easily. These groups have found that
podcasting video is yet another way to distribute their
news and information. Since podcasting is so easy to
use, it's likely that even more people will start using
podcast video.

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