Sunday, January 16, 2005

Podcasting Thoughts

At Audio.weblogs.com*, you can find the 100 latest podcasts (a podcast is an MP3 broadcast with RSS enclosures**, which you can listen to on your computer or download for mobile devices). Among them today is an interesting German podcast by Nicole Simon [MP3], who talks about... podcasting (here's her RSS).

Nicole is right audio blogging does not offer the recipient to easily skip parts, nor is it possible to consume multiple audio feeds at once***. She's also right the choice between text blogging and audio blogging is not an either-or situation (you can just do both).

I hope the more audio and video blogging will lose its "newness" the more we are able to skip the meta-talk (podcasting about podcasting, video blogging or vlogging about video blogging, and so on.) I also include audio and video here from time to time, and I feel the more you just do that, the more your brain adapts to the medium and you will actually focus it on something other than the medium itself. It's like when you learn driving a car: at first, you will focus too much on the gear and steering wheel, not so much on the street and the fact you aim to reach a specific location.

*Sites like Audio.weblogs.com and Ipodder.org at the moment work simply because podcasting itself is interesting. As soon as it gets more common, we need to split up general listings into categorized sub-listings. Time tought us even categories reach their limits, after which only the flat hierarchy of a search engine like Google (with infinite categories made up of your keyword combinations) provide meaningful way to get to content.

** This is how you would include the file in your RSS:

<enclosure
        url="http://example.com/me-talking-2.mp3"
        length="4016227" type="audio/mpeg"/>

And this is where you can ping.

*** However it is possible to do other small tasks while listening to a podcast, like low-level computer work – which you can't do while reading.

Podcasting Thoughts by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (0)

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