Lewies Blog

For those of you who don’t know, podcasting is a term for blogs that offer audio files with there posts. It is called podcasting because people would listen to the audio files on there iPods while they were on the go. So for most people, you would be broadcasting to iPods. I don’t have an iPod or even an MP3 player, so I just listen in on my computer.

There are many types of podcasts out there. I have one that I have been experimenting with called Lewies Dreamy Audio. I wake up each day and talk into a digital voice recorder about what I had dreampt of. I haven’t done it for a while, but I may start back up again soon.

I find that most podcasts range from five minutes to thirty minutes. The longer ones usually have small breaks throughout the show playing portions of songs from different artists. A few of the really good shows have a custom introduction that sounds as if you are listening to a radio show.

Podcasting may change the way we think about radio. You don’t need to worry about setting up a special web server to stream audio. You don’t need a broadcasting license either. It is usually just a bunch of static MP3 files. It is much easier to start podcasting too. There are a few sites that will do everything for you. All you need is a web browser, a microphone, a voice, and something to talk about.

There is a new podcasting service on the block. I was looking at some of my statistics and saw that someone came to my blog from Talkr. I hadn’t heard about this and decided to check it out.

I was amazed. Truly amazed. This service takes the RSS feed from your blog and converts it to audio. You can hear an emotionless digitized female voice read everything from each post. I added another feed for my friends blog, Aurorealis. It took a few minutes before the server gave me an option to subscribe to two of her feeds.

Apparently the service converted her feeds into audio while I was waiting. I was able to immediately download MP3’s from each of her most recent posts. The service also offers an RSS podcast feed that you can subscribe to as well. I have a hard time comprehending what I read. This service just made it so much easier to understand. You start to get used to the digitized voice after a few posts.

I have recently found out that the iTunes software provided by Apple now supports podcasting. This is really big news! Before, I would either import my MP3’s manually or use something like iPodder to do all the work for me. I bet it will not be long before the Microsoft Windows Media Player supports subscribing to podcasts as well.

Last on the list is Odeo (prounounced like rodeo). I finally got my invitation for the beta program last week. They have a nice directory for browsing different channels. Just like every other service, they also support tagging and form a topological map so that you can navigate through related content. I was able to claim my dreamy audio feed and will start looking for a icon to display with it tonight. They have a lot of cool feeds on the site.

Tags: Podcasting, Podcasts, iPod, MP3, Audio, Radio, Broadcasting, Streaming, Services, Talkr, RSS, iTunes, iPodder, Windows Media Player, Odeo, Channels

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 29th, 2005 at 6:56 pm and is filed under Entertainment, Life, Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.