The new beta of NetNewsWire (my favorite RSS reader) supports podcasting, among other things. I don't have an iPod (when I was going to buy one a year or so back, I also really needed high-quality recording for band practices, so I went for a Sharp MiniDisc recorder instead), so I wasn't all that interested in being able to download music and audio clips to listen to offline (the purported primary market for podcasting). But since I downloaded the NNW beta to use, I decided to check this option out. Surprisingly, I really like it.
NNW (like many other RSS browsers) periodically downloads new posts to weblogs so I can read them without connecting to the actual website. With podcasting support, I can essentially sign up for periodic updates of small (or even large) chunks of audio I might not normally track down the streams for. And my DSL connection at home is relatively fast, but a little uneven, so streams sometimes break up. But since NNW lets me subscribe to feeds and downloads them to disk (and then dumps them directly into iTunes), I find I'm listening to a lot of interesting things I might not normally track down:
None of this is exactly earth-shattering, on the face of it, but it does expand the scope of easy web publishing into the audio sphere (simple as uploading a script to a folder on your server, then uploading MP3s). It seems like one of those seemingly little gaps that get opened in a technology that might promise big changes. Enough to make me want to funnel some consulting income into an iPod purchase, if nothing else. (Yay, Capitalism.) (Underdog, you didn't see that last paragraph.)
Here's a list of freeware and shareware podcast clients if you're not using NNW: Wikipedia entry on podcasting. Or check Engadget's How-To for podcasting or a Wired article.
Posted by johndan at January 3, 2005 09:24 PM
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