Westserve

Podcasting - you can do it here.

Richard Glover wrote a nice tongue-in-cheek piece in yesterday’s SMH about how some technology seems to be a backward step rather than a genuine advance.
He singles out podcasting as an example – mainly because the ABC is dipping it toe into that particular water. However, I suspect the real reason behind Richard’s article is his almost total inability to understand/use/handle any sort of technology! Sad really, for someone who’s a couple of years younger than me!
Podcasting is like RSS on steroids (see my post on RSS). Just as you can get text data through your RRS feeds, podcasting allows you to receive sound, and even video files the same way.

So, in the case of ABC radio, there might be a program or interview that you can’t hear live, but would like to listen to tomorrow morning on you way to work, using your MP3 player.

Assuming the ABC podcast that particular program or interview, you just subscribe to that podcast feed, and it will delivered to your computer and thence your MP3 player automatically.
If you use something like an iPod, with the next version of iTunes (for Windows and Mac), you can arrange things so that the whole process is automatic and you just grab your iPod from the dock, in the morning and the podcasts are on it, ready to go.

You will need different RSS Aggregator software that understands podcasting – something like iPodder. FOr Windows users, there is a very nice commercial program called Feeddemon which works well for regular RSS feeds and Podcasts.

So why am I posting about Podcasting? Because you can try it out in a very humble way right here.
As part of my exporing the whole concept, I’ve set up the Bible Talks on this site to be available as Podcasts.
On most pages on Westerve, you will see two icons for XML/RSS feeds on the lower right column. The one labelled ‘Bible Talks Only’ will also Podcast those talks.

So fire up that Podcast-aware Aggregator and let me know how it works…