Buzzsonic.com

Here’s a clever idea. Marketing and design specialists Ralston 360 have come up with a great angle to market their services, a streaming video that explains all the basics of Podcasting all wrapped up in a ‘virtual ipod’.

There’s also a free 14 page whitepaper, ‘Podcasting-the Pod Has Landed’ (in PDF format) on the website (in exchange for your email, natch!) which explains a bit more. They also have another free download, ‘To Blog or Not to Blog’ which kind of speaks for itself but is worth a look for newbies if you’re thinking of starting your own.

Thanks to Steve Rubel at the Micro Persuasion blog for the lead.

Related Reading

The Buzzsonic Podcasting Round-up (Buzzsonic.com)

We started writing about Podcasting over six months ago when it was still a niche buzzword. Since our last post on the subject there has been an incredible explosion in the fledgeling web broadcast medium.

You cant look at the interweb nowadays without stumbling across the words, Podcast, Podcasters, Podcasting or iPodders and the like. Least of all, easily the biggest boost for Podcasting this year came in June when Apple added support for Podcasting with the release iTunes 4.9 (the software is now up to version 6.)

Even since we last wrote on the subject back in May, there’s been a great amount of new and improved and streamlined resources for you to get involved, broadcast yourself, listen or just learn what all the fuss is about. What we decided to do here was get up to date and trawl around for the best sources of information, links and resources, wether you simply want to put your own podcast together, or just subscribe to some shows and listen for yourself.

Some Podcasting Background

Podcasting (Wikipedia)
How Podcasting Works (HowStuffWorks.com)
iPodder:A Brief History (iPodder.org)

Creating Your Own Podcast

Podblaze.com (Podcasting Resources)
Wave Pad (Free Audio Editing Software)
Audacity (Free Audio Editor and Recorder)
Liberated Syndication (Libsyn.com)
RSS Radio (Podcasting client)
Juice (Podcasting receiver)

Podcasting Directories, Shows & Resources

Odeo
Podcasting News
iPodder
Podsafe Music Network (Podshow.com)
Christian Podcasting (Christian Podcasts)
Dailysonic (MP3 Zine)
Podcast Alley (Podcastalley.com)
Podomatic (Podcast software & directory)
The Podcast Network
Podfeeder
Vital Podcasts
Podspider (Podcast Search)
Podcast Pickle (Podcast community)
Podnova
Gigadial
Yahoo Podcasts

Besides the ‘revelation’, and there was no pun intended there, that even Catholic priests are producing ‘Podcasts’ there’s been some more significant news this past week on the fast emerging Podcasting phenomenon. Within days of each other both Sirius Satellite Radio and Infinity Broadcasting announced separate plans to put podcasts on broadcasts for mainstream and satellite-radio distribution.

Infinity Broadcasting, one of the USA’s largest radio operators with more than 180 stations around the country (and the radio division of Viacom) announced late last week that they plan to convert San Francisco’s 1550 KYCY, an AM station, to listener-submitted content.

The station, previously devoted to a talk-radio format, will be renamed KYOU Radio and will invite DiY radio producers to upload digital audio files for broadcast consideration via the KYOU Radio website.

Programmes are set to start May 16th and the station is billing itself as the first in the world to get all of its programming from podcasts. KYOU will cover the cost of music-licensing fees from industry producers so podcast contributors can include music from major record labels.

Sirius said Monday it plans to add a four hour podcasting show to its satellite programming starting May 13 on the talk channel 148. The show, “Adam Curry’s PodShow,” will star the former MTV video jock who helped develop the technology. Podcasting was developed in part thanks to the work of Curry and his iPodder software..

Podcasting is a way of publishing sound files to the Internet, allowing users to subscribe to a feed and receive new audio files automatically. Podcasting is distinct from other types of audio content delivery because it uses the RSS protocol. This technique has enabled many producers to create self-published, syndicated radio shows.

Related Reading

Sirius Hops On Podcast Bandwagon [Wired.com]
The Freshest Podcasts in the Known Universe [Audio.Weblogs.com]
Gigadial-the Podstation Factory [Gigadial.net]
Priestcasting [Buzzsonic News]
Podcasting Catches On [Pew Internet PDF]
Podcasting (How to Get Podcasts and also Make Your Own) [Engadget]
iPodder Podcast Directory [iPodder.org]
DiY Radio With Podcasting [Doc Searl]
Who Owns What [CJR.org]

As an indication of how widespread the phenomena of Podcasting is becoming, early adopters are springing up in the most unlikely places. Father Roderick Vonhogen, Catholic priest of the Archdiocese of Utrecht in the Netherlands led Internet listeners on an intimate audio tour that allowed them to pay one last visit to Pope John Paul II before he was laid to rest earlier this month with his podcast show , “The Night the Pope Died” delivered in MP3 format and downloadable from his Catholic Insider website.

Catholic Insider and thousands of other podcasts can be found through directories like Podcast Alley , Podcasting News and Podcast.net while free software like iPodder, Doppler and iPodder X automatically downloads new shows as they become available. Listeners can transfer their podcasts to an Apple iPod or other portable MP3 player, and listen to them when and where they wish.

A recent survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that one in three U.S. adults who own an MP3 player have listened to a podcast, though the survey’s small sample size of respondents means that figure could be substantially lower, according to some critics. In all, 2,201 people were interviewed, including 208 owners of iPods or MP3 players.

Pew Internet researcher Mary Madden told the NewsFactor website. “Podcasting is clearly a growing online phenomenon,” she says. “It is part of the larger notion of the Internet being a democratizing medium. Anyone who has the basic tools, a basic grasp of technology, can do it. Podcasting is definintely mimicking blogging in a lot of ways,” Madden continues. “In a lot of cases, they are audio versions of someone’s personal rant for the day.”

Related Reading

Podcasting Catches On [Pew Internet PDF]
Six Million Podcasters and Counting [NewsFactor.com]
Podcasting In The Dark [Washington Times]
iPods and MP3 Players Storm the Market [Pew Internet]
Podcasting Tools [Podcasting-Tools.com]

We mentioned Podscope, the search engine for Podcasts last week. Connecticut based TV Eyes, the real-time broadcast search provider behind the venture had promised a launch this month and sure enough they kept their promise.

Pretty neat it is too, a very basic front end with just a logo and search box. We did a search for ‘new wave’ looking for a possible MP3 blog that was micro-broadcasting old punk chestnuts from the 70s. Nine results came back. Next to each search result you get a + sign, click on that and a drop down reveals a couple of buttons to play a clip, a link to the podcast site and another link which opens the originating site in a framed page with the choice of playing back the show via Windows Media or Quick Time players. Theres also a link to the RSS feed URL so you can plug the feed straight into your podcast software of choice and a link to download the whole show. We thought it was pretty cool.

Related Links

Podcasting [Wikipedia.org]
iPodder [Sourceforge]
Podshow [Podshow.com]
Podcast Alley [PodcastAlley.com]
How to Get Podcasts and Also Make Your Own [Engadget.com]

Everyone who is anyone now seems to have a ‘Podcast’ or is name dropping some obscure micro broadcast show nowadays. Others are already looking at the possibilities of “broadcatching”, put simply, podcasts with video besides just compressed audio content delivery.

Broadcatching refers to the use of RSS feeds and BitTorrent peer to peer file sharing as an alternative to distributing multimedia content on the Internet. Podcasting meets Tivo said some wise spark, other people have already labelled it Vlogging, or the self explanatary ‘video blogging’.

Latest sofware app for Windows users is a beta version of ANT which was released last week. ANT is an video RSS aggregator and player that has been available for Mac for a while now and has already been incorporated into a hack with the Sony PSP.

ANT can playback any media format and will sync audio with iTunes for playback on any MP3 portable. You can subscribe to any ‘Podcast’ or RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures and ANT will automatically download any audio and video content. ANT is currently freeware and still in Beta for both Mac and PC.

Thanks to Scobleizer

Related Reading

Experimenting With BiTTorrent and RSS 2.0 [Blogs.Harvard.edu]
How To Create Your Own Podcast [About.com]
PSPcasting on Your Mac [Engadget]
Video Blogging [VideoBlogging.info]
Ready For Your Close-up? Here Come The Vlogs [MSNBC]
Bloggers Add Moving Images to Their Musings [NY Times]
RSS meets BitTorrent meets TiVo [ScottRaymond.net]
BitTorrent and RSS Create Disruptive Revolution [eWeek.com]
BroadCatching Using RSS + BitTorrent to Automatically Download TV Shows [Engadget]

Fairfield, Connecticut based TV Eyes, the real-time broadcast search provider which has been indexing television and radio broadcasts since 1999, will debut a Podcast search engine called Podscope later this month. Every word within an Internet podcast will be made searchable which is equally applicable to video blogs and personal videos. Podscope will crawl the web to look for podcasts, when it finds one, it will create an index against every word within the content. Podcasters are also able to submit url(s) for crawling.

“With a looming explosion in such user generated rich content as Podcasts and video blogs, there is a growing need to empower consumers to find and subscribe to programs that meet their diverse interests, commented Allen Weiner, Vice President and Research Director at Gartner. “Searching and indexing these varied audio and video programs will not only benefit content-hungry consumers, it also adds legitimacy and velocity to this burgeoning space.

Podscope isn’t the first speech recognition search technology. HP’s Speechbot has been online for years in demo form using speech-recognition technology to create a searchable transcript. BlinkxTV which we featured here last December also uses speech-recognition technology to create searchable text transcripts.

Related Links

Podscope: New Search Engine Will Allow You to Keyword Search Every Word Spoken in a Podcast [SearchEngineWatch Blog]
Pod Catch [PodCatch.com]
BBC To Massively Expand Podcast Trials [iLoveRadio.org]
Podcast Lab [PodcastLab.com]
Podcast Alley [PodcastAlley.com]
Busy Podcasters Guide [iPodder Sourceforge]
Podcasting (aka How To Get Podcasts and Also Make Your Own) [Engadget.com]
Podcasting Power [MercuryNews.com]
A Look At Other Video Search Tools [SearchEngineWatch.com]

Quite a few things that we’ve missed whilst we’ve been ‘away’, even since the end of January and the last proper posts here under the old URL, the buzz surrounding ‘Podcasting ‘ has gone from a speculative whisper to a very loud shout, to the point where the grassroots internet broadcasting+P2P+RSS craze has even spawned its own Expo , ‘The Portable Media Expo’, which will debut in California this November.

Weblog pioneer Dave Winer probably explains it best here:

“Think how a desktop aggregator works. You subscribe to a set of feeds, and then can easily view the new files from all of the feeds together, or each feed separately. Podcasting works the same way, with one exception. Instead of reading the new content on a computer screen, you listen to the new content on any capable mp3 player on the computer or hardware player such as the iPod. Think of your player with podcasting as having a set of subscriptions that are checked regularly for updates.”

The latest variation on the Podcasting ‘theme’ is ‘Skypecasting’ which has been picking up mentions over the last few weeks on various websites with many people pulling their quotes from a spartan mention on the News Target website. Though the word seems to have been originally penned by Stuart Henshall on his Skype Journal back in December of last year where he revealed a straight forward how-to.

“The SkypeCasters’ recipe is simple and we have written it up in detail. Add together Skype, Virtual Audio Cables, Windows Sound Recorder, a simple Wav to mp3 converter MT_Enclosures and iPodder and you can be Podcasting later today! The solution will cost you $40.”

The Skype software was founded by Niklas Zennstr�m and Janus Friis, the creators of Kazaa and boasts 29 million users. Skype is the largest of the new breed of companies offering voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, which lets Internet connections double as telephone lines by treating calls no differently than e-mail.

The new development is being done without Skype’s active input. But Skype has made some of its source code public so developers can tinker with new applications, such as Skypecasting, Skype spokeswoman Kelly Larrabee told CNet, “We’re aware of this and encourage developers to help facilitate it,” she said.

Related Links

VoiP Gets the Podcast Treatment [CNet News]
Hot Recorder [HotRecorder.com]
Skype + Podcast Recorder = SkypeCasters [SkypeJournal.com]
iPodder [Sourceforge.net]
Skype + Podcast Recorder = SkypeCasters ( 8 page PDF instructions download) [Henshall.com]
Adam Currys Weblog [Curry.com]
Pod Show [PodShow.com]
iPodder Podcast Directory [iPodder.org]

Needless to say the closed nature of the Apple iPod software hasn’t stopped the Open Source mob getting their hands dirty with a whole collection of unofficial hacks and software add ons enabling geeks to do things that the standard Apple gear restricts you from doing. One of the main reasons after market firms like Belkin and Griffin can charge $50 for add on devices that enable the recording at a strictly low-fi 8khz.

Philip Torrone at Hack A Day has come up with a hacked work around that enables high quality recording for no cost using the Linux based user interface Podzilla.

iPod Linux Links

WikiPodLinux [iPodLinux.org]
Linux for the iPod Review [XLR8YourMac.com]
iPod Linux Forums [iPodLinux.org]
iPod Linux Installer [Sourceforge.net]
Free Your Music [Hymn-Project.org]
iPodHacks [iPodHacks.com]
Using an iPod with Linux [MIT.edu]
myPod Project [Sourceforge.net]
Podzilla and PTK [Dotink.org]
iPod Mini with Linux [Freedos.org]