Podcasts 101

From a simple guestbook to now popularly known as blog, everyone from all around the world is now capable of writing and/or recording articles they want to share to their audience.

It evolved from simple write-up content sharing to now audio and video podcasts. While I myself am not too familiar with both the terms and tools for podcasting, I'd like to share what I had just learned a while ago about it.

Podcatchers - In simple terms, podcasts are just audio or video clips uploaded by people who want to share their knowledge about a certain topic. These podcasts may be streamed or downloaded by their audience. As for the audience on the go and with portable media players accompanying them, podcasts need to be downloaded or streamed thru their media players. One tool I'd like to recommend, although this is the first time I have actually installed a podcatcher is Juice, formerly known as iPodder. You can schedule downloads for your favorite podcast sites to ensure that fresh new episodes are downloaded immediately.

Podcast sites - Right now, I can only recommend the links that my former classmate referred to me for the latest in the IT industry. A bit of a warning though, you may find some sites geeky.

Dr. Dobbs' Podcast
http://syndication.sdmediagroup.com/feeds/public/cmp_podcast_all.xml

Attack of the Show's Daily Video Podcast
http://www.g4tv.com/attackoftheshow/podcasts/5/Attack_of_the_Show_Daily_Video_Podcast.xml

The Naked Scientists Naked Science Radio Show Podcast
http://www.thenakedscientists.com/naked_scientists_podcast.xml

PSP Podcast - Portable Gaming Revolution
http://feeds.feedburner.com/psppodcast

Podcast Player - VLC player is still the most preferred podcast player, imho. For convenience sake, I'd recommend this one as you are able to play a lot of audio and video formats here. You can download it on http://www.videolan.org

Podcast Portable Player - You have successfully downloaded the podcasts and you want to listen or watch it when you're away from your PC. There's iPod, Creative Zen and Zune to choose from besides other portable players. But if you want wifi capability, then iTouch is the one for you. You don't have to plug your iTouch to your PC just to download podcasts. Once set-up, it automatically downloads podcasts directly saved to your player.

That's it! Hope you learned something about a newbie's first hand experience in podcasting.