Do You iPod Your Podcasts?

Posted by Kenneth Ronkowitz on


So, the New Oxford American Dictionary declared "podcasting" the "Word of the Year" for 2005. Their definition is "a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player."

You subscribe to podcasts and they are automatically "pushed" to you on a regular schedule like a magazine subscription. (Why RSS - "Really Simple Syndication" which allows you to subscribe to podcasts, blogs etc. didn't take off in 2001 when it appeared, I can't explain.)

"According to a recent consumer survey conducted by Bridge Data, the relevance of portability to podcast usage has been vastly overstated. In fact, more 80% of podcast downloads never make it to a portable player or another device - they are consumed on the PC (or, worse, never listened or deleted)."

http://news.designtechnica.com/talkback109.html

So where are your podcasts?

I download podcasts (audio & video) every day. I open iTunes and it just happens. I have subscriptions to 24 shows right now, so someone is bound to have something new available that day.

I load most audio ones to my little Apple iPod Shuffle, listen to them that day, and then wipe them clean & replace them next time. My Shuffle isn't a video iPod, so the video ones stay on the computer where I watch them (actually, sometimes the video ones play underneath my top active window, so I treat them as audio only). Many video podcasts work fine as audio-only and unfortunately my iPod can't handle a video file in any way, so I can't move them to the Shuffle to even listen to them.

One of my favorite podcasts is This Week in Technology (TWiT) which is sometimes available as video (AKA vodcast, which I think sounds stupid). I don't think it needs the video. It works fine as radio. Yeah, it was nice to see what the regulars on the show look like - once. They broadcast A Prairie Home Companion on TV a few times and I thought it almost ruined the show for me.

We are experimenting with podcasts at NJIT (AKA coursecasting) and will be curious to find out how many students are downloading them and whre they are using them.

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