You've Got Radio!

         by Billy Mabray      November 2004 

One of the promises of the Web is that it is a place where anyone can create and share their creations. You can write anything you want and put it on a web page for everyone to see. You can take pictures, draw cartoons, or record your own songs and instantly make them available to the world.

In the past few weeks, some enterprising folks have taken instant publishing to the next step by distributing their own radio shows. It is called podcasting, and it has the potential to do for radio what TiVo did for television – bring it to you when you want, where you want.

Now, streaming radio has been on the Internet for a very long time. Even the idea of people recording their own talk show and putting it on a web site is not very new. What makes podcasting unique is how easy it makes it to take these shows with you wherever you go.

There are two pieces of technology that are crucial to podcasting: digital music players and RSS. For those who aren’t familiar with these devices, digital music players are portable audio players with a hard-drive built in. You can copy audio files from your computer to the digital music player and listen to them anywhere. The most popular is the Apple iPod, hence the name podcasting. Some digital music players can hold up to 10,000 songs. The other technology that makes this work is RSS, a format for distributing content. You subscribe to a web site’s RSS feed through your RSS news aggregator, and it lets you know when that web site has new content.

In the case of podcasting, you need a special aggregator that understands RSS enclosures. Enclosures are just links to audio files on the web. When the aggregator finds a new enclosure in a feed, it automatically downloads that file and saves it in such a way that it will be transferred to your digital music player the next time that player is connected to your computer.

What makes this so exciting is the possibility of never missing your favorite radio programs. The hard part is finding an individual or a radio station that produces a podcast – right now, most do not. Once you do find a podcast you want, you just subscribe to their RSS feeds, and every day the latest episodes appear automatically on your player. You no longer have to worry about what time the show is on, or if you will be able to get good reception.

If you are interested in learning more and trying it out, visit ipodder.org for more information, necessary software, and a list of podcasts. Of course, podcasting is still very new, so the current selection of shows is pretty thin. But the potential is pretty exciting, so you should expect to hear more about this in the near future – perhaps on your iPod.

Billy Mabray and his wife, Angela, own Smart Goat, a local software
development and Web design business.  They are members of the CCOKC. Comments or questions on the article are welcome and can be addressed to:   billy@smartgoat.com.