As you begin your online career or expand your reach to a growing audience, you may be considering podcasting. This article takes a look at what podcasting is and explains some of the technology in terms anyone can understand.
Various podcast definitions are available by searching the term on Google. The one I like the most, however, says the following. A podcast is a media file that can be played on a computer, mobile device, or media player. The file itself can consist of audio or video and is usually obtained by downloading it from a site (website) set up just for that purpose. Although the term podcast is sometimes associated with a popular provider’s device, the term podcast came before the device and has been used according to Wikipedia since around 2005.
Other terms used to describe a podcast are terms like “RSS”, “podcast client”, “aggregator”, “blog”, “syndication” and “digital audio files”. Looking at the definition and usage of these terms along with more descriptions of podcast usage should help us understand what the meaning of podcast is when it comes to using podcasts to convey a message.
First of all, RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication, which is defined as a web feed technology that automatically detects when a site’s content is updated and, through subscriber and aggregator feeds, distributes it to another site or a digital content player. A web feed allows feed readers to automatically go to one site for new content and then post updates about that new content to another site. This provides a way for users to keep up with the latest and most up-to-date information posted on different sites. A feed reader is a software package that allows you to read the code in which RSS feeds are written. This can give you a central place to read updates from news feeds, blogs, email, etc. Feed readers are increasingly included in browser software or as part of personalized home pages.
A podcast client is the software used to access and download podcasts. Podcast clients are also known as media aggregators, programs designed to automatically access a file or online source and download the audio or video file associated with it. An aggregator (also known as a feed reader) is a website or software program that collects and displays web content such as news headlines, blogs, and podcasts from various website sources on a single website (location). It uses RSS or other types of feeds to find content and allows you to subscribe to feeds, allowing new content to be downloaded automatically when it becomes available.
Blog is a shortened version of the word weblog, material published by a website owner that contains posts of all kinds of content, including images, text, video, audio, and even links to other sites. Often a blog will allow readers to participate through comments or guest posts. Syndication is the extraction of content from an RSS news feed on a website that makes the information on a website available (usually in digest form) for a wide range of uses, such as RSS feeds. Syndication also makes news updates, blog posts, and podcasts immediately available to a web audience.
Finally, digital audio files for our purpose refers to a file that contains digital audio which is defined as follows. Analog audio signals are converted into digital samples, each sample is assigned a value from a range of 65,536 possible values (16 bits). This converted analog signal is saved in file format and can be played on many digital audio players, such as an audio CD player or, if converted to the correct format, on MP3 players, media players, etc.
Now, with these basics about the world of podcasts, you have a foundation to start investigating how podcasts can be useful for your needs.
