I’ve talked about Podcasting before, but there was a new version of Ipodder released this week, Steve Jobs announced that the next version of Itunes would support podcasts, so I thought it was time for a recap.

Quick recap: Podcasts are like homemade radio shows that you can download (or subscribe to) and can get automatically put on your ipod. (with the help of software programs like Ipodder.

I can’t make up my mind about podcasting. When I first heard about it, I thought it was pretty cool and tried it out. Then I got tired of it. Then I got into it again. And now I’m tired of it again. I think my problem with it is that I don’t have that much time to listen to them. I really only listen to them when I’m driving because they are too distracting to listen to while working (since they are mainly talk). And even then, they have to compete with the music on my Ipod and my XM Radio. But even if it is not my bag, it is very exciting in other ways.

Just like the World Wide Web allowed anyone who can write HTML (and these days anyone with a word processor) to publish whatever they want. Web pages competed with other forms of print publishing like newspapers, magazines, and books. Blogs are yet another step in the self-publishing print phenomenon. Podcasting is taking this self-publishing phenomenon to a new level with things that can compete with radio. Now anyone can (with very little equipment) broadcast their own radio station. And that is powerful…

Podcasting is also exciting in the way it uses and fosters new technology. When the first podcasts were being done, there was no subscription mechanism. That technology had to be developed. And the technology is so damn simple that it can’t be inflexible. There are a lot of possibilities for non-podcasting audio sources to re-use this technology.

And some people are. I just found out this week that IT Conversations (which records technical talks at conferences and things for free download) uses this RSS Enclosure technology to syndicate your “queue” of talks. This means that I can queue things up at work, and it is ready and waiting for me to sync with my Ipod when I get home.

This same idea could be used with audio feeds from NPR and BBC. Both of these radio networks have streaming audio (which I have on occasion converted to MP3) that you can listen to on your computer. But like I mentioned, I really want to listen to them in my car. All they would have to do is implements some kind of queue thing like
IT Conversations has for their content.

To be fair, Audible has weekly (and even daily) audio news programs and has had proprietary software to do this subscription model for quite some time. But now we have an open standard that can be used to implement the same thing. I would love to see Audible switch to an open technology (but am doubtful that it would happen). When companies use open technology, everyone involved (both the company in question and everyone else who uses it) benefits by having so many eyes look at the problems.

All this just goes to show that you can’t predict in what innovative ways new technology will be used and employed.

Oh Yeah, the new version of Ipodder in amazing. I must have been using a really old version, because this version is slick and very feature rich. New features that I noticed are the ability to manage your subscriptions through a remote OPML feed (so all your RSS feeds are managed in one place). With this feature you could subscribe to a new Podcast from your office and have it ready for you when you get home. The individual feed management is also much improved. You can set a window so only to most recent 14 days worth of shows is available (I used to do this by hand).