iPodarmy

Shortly after I launched this site last week I got an e-mail from my pal Mike D. He was curious to know what I thought was so special about podcasting. It’s obvious that podcasting is kind of a buzz-word right now, and many, like Mike, are wondering what all the fuss is over.

Well, if I were to sum it up in a word, that word would be “content.”

Podcasting is just a technology that enables yet another way to digitally distribute content. It’s a pretty nifty technology, but it’s not much more than that. As with blogging, it’s the content that is the most important aspect of it, not the technology itself. For some reason early adopters seem to become infatuated with the enabling technology, so much so that at times it overshadows that which it enables. That seems to be the case here with podcasting right now.

At least that’s how it seems from the outside looking in.

So what’s the deal with podcasting?

We’ve established, in my opinion anyway, that it’s the content, the podcasts themselves, that make podcasting worth talking about at all. But having established that, I’ve got to say that the technology, while not all that impressive, is pretty useful and does work very well as an enabler to get syndicated audio content out to an audience.

When I explain it to people who aren’t geeks I compare it to TiVo. You find some shows you like, set up your “TiVo-like” software to download them into your iTunes or whatever and you listen when you want.

At its core, a podcast is simply an audio file which can be produced in various ways. The content itself, in the case of my own podcast for example, is a bunch of mp3 files AudioHijacked into one big mp3 file. What makes that mp3 file into a true “podcast” is the ability for me to publish it via RSS and have people pull it down automatically via podcatching software.

What makes it somewhat special is the fact that you can subscribe to it, have it pulled down to you via the Web when it’s updated and then listen at your convenience. Again, kind of like TiVo, except it’s pretty much open to anyone. That’s pretty much all a podcast is. I mean, there is more, but basically that covers it.

Content, Content, Content

At the end of the day, I decided to do a podcast because I want to share music with people. The technology enables me to do that. That’s pretty much it. I consider it special because it’s allowing me to do something I enjoy and that is hopefully going to turn some people on to some good music. If I could clone myself (and my iPod) and have my clones go to people’s houses and play music for them, I’d do that. But, for now anyway, I’m stuck with podcasting.