Podcasting: What is it?
- Quick poll - Who knows what podcasting is? Keep your hands up. Who could turn to their neighbor and explain it to them?
- A means of distributing audio content online
- Extends RSS technology to audio
- the same technology that allows people to subscribe to feeds of their favorite news sites and blogs (text content) now allows you to subscribe to feeds of audio content
- Automatic downloads of new content
- Time-shifted content - Listen to whatever, whenever, wherever!
- plain old mp3s - iPod + Broadcasting = many misconceptions
- listen on your computer, on your smart phone, on your media player
- Lots of content - first from independents, and now mainstream
How do I listen?
- A need to find
- A need to aggregate
- Focus on former, although some do both
How do I find the good stuff?
- Needle in haystack
Go right to the source
- You already know excellent producers of audio content.
- Many of them are already podcasting their wares.
- NPR
Look for the "podcast feed"
- On a typical website that features a podcast, you will likely find various buttons that indicate XML or RSS or Podcast or somesuch.
- The button is usually linked to the podcast feed URL.
- This is the URL you want to copy and paste into your aggregator.
One-click subscriptions
- Some content providers will try to make it easier to use one of the more popular podcast aggregation tools, by providing a one-click link.
- So if you end up using iTunes, yahoo or Odeo as your podcatcher of choice, you can look for these buttons
A Brief Tour of Podcast Discovery Tools
- So when you don't have a known item, whaddya do?
- All sorts of tools to help you find podcasts of interest
- We'll look at a cross-section of these tools, but know that there is a more comprehensive list of these tools at the URL at the bottom of the slide.
Podcast Alley
- The first podcast directory to come into prominence and in many ways still the best of the independents
- Browse by genre or do a keyword search
- Talk about metadata indexing now - not searching the content itself - in this case, just the title and description provided by the content creator
Podcast.net
- Similar directory approach - browse by genre
- Podcast.net gives the content creator the opportunity to assign keywords that become part of the searchable metadata of the website
- Podcast.net then allows end-users to subscribe to a feed of a key word, so for example, I can subscribe to a feed of the keyword library and receive notification of any new podcasts added to the directory that employ the keyword library
iTunes
- The first big player to enter the podcast space
- Serves as both a directory and an aggregator, allowing you to directly subscribe to the podcasts that you find
- Separate application that must be downloaded
- Employs the same basic metadata search approach, although it is worth noting that iTunes encourages content creators to use proprietary tags in their RSS feeds that generate metadata especially for use in the iTunes directory.
- One of the more polished directories, although Yahoo is there too.
Loomia
- Loomia's niche is that it has an interesting recommendations engine. It has the Amazon-style "People who like this also like x,y,z." You can also rate podcasts you like and it will try to find other podcasts with similar profiles.
- Allows listeners to add to the available metadata for a podcast by adding tags, similar to del.icio.us or Flickr - they are free text and anyone can come and apply a tag to a podcast - so the information base in Loomia is collaborative and dependent on the participation of the community - thus it's a little sparse at this point, but growing.
- This tool incorporates many of the so-called Web 2.0 concepts of socially developed information that make this an important player in podcasting, until someone comes along and does it better. There is a site called Odeo that also allows tagging and includes a directory and aggregator functionality.
Blinkx
- Hypes itself primarily as a video search tool, but definitely includes podcasts in search results.
- Claims to use speech-to-text technology that allows it to index the full-content of audio and video
- But it can be hard to tell whether you are looking at hits on metadata or on full-content
Podscope
Go out live
- Automated speech-to-text conversion allows for indexing of actual podcast contents.
- You can subscribe to the RSS feed of a search and automatically download podcasts that contain your search term.
- Supposedly will be powering AOL's podcast search which is expected this summer
Podzinger
- Similar to Podscope. Shows keyword in context which highlights the shortcomings of speech-to-text technology (read from slide)
CastingWords
- Transcribers for hire for people who want their transcriptions done right
Summary
- Go where you know
- Focus on the directories - note that Loomia is the future
- Try out the "full-content" tools
Podcast search
- Indexes metadata
- Looks at titles, authors, show notes
- Does not look at the actual content
- Loomia
- Attempts to leverage the power of community to make recommendations
- Allows users to tag podcasts - folksonomy
- Singingfish - all-purpose audio/video search engine
- iTunes - serves as directory and aggregator
- Odeo - tagging; directory and aggregator and podcast audio creation tool
- Human transcription
- 'castingWords
- Claims 42 cents/minute transcription in just a few hours
- podtranscript
Cybertour Presentation
Searching the New Digital Formats
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