Podcasting – It’s not about the iPod

I don’t have an iPod.  If you gave me one, I would give it back.  The reason is simple.  All of my music is archived as WMA files and not MP3.  The quality is higher and the file size is smaller.  The iPod won’t play WMA files because it is a format created by Microsoft. So I have a Zen Micro from Creative Labs.  Mine is orange.  Its five gigabyte hard drive can hold a few thousand songs or several hundred podcasts.

A podcast is a digitally recorded conversation between two or more people.  Typically, the sound is saved as an MP3 file.  This recorded broadcast can be played on an iPod… thus the name podcast.  Since a podcast is just digitized sound, it can be played on any device that will play an MP3… even a computer.  The MP3 can also be burned to an audio CD.  In this way, you can play a podcast through your car stereo.

That’s the technical side of the podcast.  The more important side is the content.  Imagine this.  A few experts sit down to talk about an interesting topic.  Someone places a microphone in the middle of the table and the conversation is recorded.  After the conversation is finished, it is made available to people that may be interested in the topic.  That is what podcasting is all about.

There are a lot of podcasts out there.  Feedburner alone handles more than 50,000 podcast feeds.  There are many sites that list podcasts by topic.  Here are a few links:

http://www.podcast411.com/
http://www.allpodcasts.com/
http://www.ipodder.org/

I listen to these podcasts: This Week in Tech (TWiT), Security Now, Cranky Geeks, Bit by Bit and EdTechTalk.  All these Podcasts deal with technology; the last two are about educational technology.

Usually I burn them to CD and listen to them in my car.  I use re-writable CD’s because each week all the podcasts are new.  In this way I don’t end up with a pile of CD’s that I will only listen to one time.  My car actually has a stereo that plays MP3 (and WMA’s) from a CD.  So I can easily fit a week’s worth of podcasts on one CD.

Since I started listening to podcasts, most of the new technologies that I currently use, I heard about first on a podcast.  For my own professional development, podcasting is at the top of the list.