Podcasting is term which I really dislike as it connects the practice of downloading audio files to a particular portable media player, the ipod. Yes, the practice of encapsulating the whole thing in a feed (RSS) occurred at a time when the ipod was/is the dominant portable audio player, but I don’t see that as a compelling reason to bow to a given company’s PR department. I guess I am just one of those people who says vacuum and tissue not “Hoover” or “Kleenex”. Hopefully it will pass, but Apple resides deep in the tech/cool zeitgeist (not undeservedly mind you, but in this case it’s perhaps not the most appropriate). I see this less as the rise of a new medium than the realisation that streaming media is not the best solution to many “problems” it was trying to solve.
My second gripe, before I get on to how cool it is, is that people are still using MP3 and not an Ogg container with Vorbis (better than MP3) or even FLAC (a lossless codec which I use ripping CDs) encoding. An MP3 decoder can’t be bundled with free software programs because it violates the patent (which notably they didn’t enforce until MP3 became popular). Notably CBC is trialling Ogg Vorbis and the BBC has people working on an open source video codec.
Here is a screencap of the feed reader I use for linux, Liferea:
You can see I am subscribed to a number of blog feeds which are automatically updated, which is a nice central way to keep an eye on things. You can also see I have ABC, BBC and CBC radio feeds (aka. “podcasts”) from the experimental trials. The way Liferea handles opening files isn’t great, it just sends it to the default system browser, so I just pass a copy of the URL of the mp3 file to wget and download it. Before Liferea I was just opening the xml and getting it from there, but that’s hardly a fun way to do it.
This opens up the interesting topic of what effect this sort of “download and keep” system will have on the media. It seems that the publicly funded broadcasters and the amateurs already have a viable model, I am not sure what commercial broadcasters are going to do. They are starting to take a look (and at other things too). I suppose in some of the networks news is run at a loss anyway and just serves in a network prestige role, but others will have some difficulty making a transition. On a slightly unrelated note I just saw Network recently, which I recommend highly (esp. the character Arthur Jensen’s speech)
Interesting commentary on some things newmedia (more blogs) from onlineopinion contributer Hugh Brown in his pieces here and here. There is also a directory, podcast.net, which I have yet to check out fully, but it looks very nice.
