If there ever was a radio show that screams out “Podcast me”, it is John Batchelor. John’s show(s) are currently 4 hrs of intensely dense information on each Saturday and Sunday night. No matter how intensely you listen, you will miss something important.
It isn’t a normal “call in” show – it is John talking to experts in various subjects about world events, the economy and history. John’s background is history (He works for the , so his strength is putting current events in the context of thousands of years of history – like explaining how Alexander the Great got bogged down in Afghanistan and what that should mean for our plans today. John works for (with?) the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California, which is how he is able to attract so many high quality guests.
Some terminology – a “podcast” is a subscription to a multimedia service. To use the analogy of newspapers, you subscribe to a podcast by signing up for an “RSS Feed”. The RSS feed is when you call the newspaper to subscribe, the Podcast is what the newspaper carrier puts something on your doorstep each morning.
There are several ways to subscribe – Internet Explorer 8.0 has the ability to subscribe (under Tools / Feed Discovery), you can download the free iTunes program from the Apple store, or several other methods. Firefox and Mozilla browsers also incorporate RSS feeds.
Once you have signed up for the RSS Subscription, you are notified when a new episode becomes available (or you can check, depending on the software). You generally can either tell the software to always fetch the media, or only download it when you ask for it. Depending on the software, if you download a file, you probably have to wait for the entire download before it will start to play (which can take several minutes)
If you use iTunes, it becomes trivial to transfer the podcast material into your MP3 player so you can listen to a prior show at your convenience, like while running or plugging it into the MP3 jack on most modern car radios. You can stop, rewind, and the dreaded “fast forward” through the material.
http://www.johnbatchelorshow.com/podcasts/
This page has an RSS link (in the upper right hand corner), but it’s a feed of John’s blog (also worth subscribing to). His audio is available from several of the stations (WABC is probably the best choice) that carry the show on a more timely basis than his own web site (the most recent show is from August 9th)…. posting the podcast on a timely basis is important if you want to develop a following.
For the entity doing the podcasting, the advantage is that it is much cheaper and simpler to do than live streaming. Since podcast download is done in the background, or done on-demand when the listener wants it, the download traffic can be much better managed and doesn’t require the high quality bandwidth of real-time streaming. Depending on the quality of the audio and the # of listeners, the cost to the streamer is about $.01 per hour
The advantage to you should be obvious (plus generally most commercials and local news are stripped from the podcast)
Podcasting still isn’t as obvious as it should be, but once you figure out how to do it, it will save you a lot of time and put you in control of listening – which makes me wonder why a radio station has any interest in doing it :) Look for some indications here in the future of trying to make it easier to find podcasts.
Thanks for the tips. I highly value Batchelor’s show, listening to all four hours while I work during the week. I see they just altered his site and had removed the links to the radio stations’ podcasts, but I tracked them down at WABC radio. I’ve never used an RSS feed before, but will experiment with it after having read your remarks here.