Affiliate Marketing Tips

Archive for the ‘Podcasting’ Category

Anyone can easily find free podcast videos online.
There are numerous podcast directories online that can
help you find feeds to subscribe to, or you may find a
feed thats available from a site you enjoy. After looking
through the directories and finding a feed you want to
download, subscribe to it using one of the many free
podcast clients available. The podcast client will
automaticall download a small file called an RSS file,
which stands for Really Simple Syndication. The RSS
file tells your podcast client when there is a new file, in
this case a video, to download. Depending on your
client, the program will notify you or maybe even
download it automatically. Once the file is on your
computer, you’ll be free to listen to it any time it is
convenient.

Soon you’ll be on your way to downloading some of the
free podcast videos available online. Feeds are available
that publish on almost every topic, from independent
news shows to experimental videos, to scientific
information. Some colleges and universities even
podcast their most popular lectures so that students will
have a chance to watch and review from the comfort of
their computer chair.

The best part is that these free podcast videos, are of
course, free. All of these feeds are easy to find, and the
publishers, for the most part, do it simply because they
enjoy it, and are glad to give it away.

What is now called a podcast traces its orgins to the
first ipod podcasts, the creation of distributed mp3 files
that could be downloaded and played on Apple’s music
player, the iPod. When the iPod came out, and users
discovered what a wonderful thing it was for holding
music, some people had the idea of loading things that
weren’t necessarily songs. Some of the people that got
their hands on the iPod took the route of reverse
engineering the iPod and loading on different firmware,
or operating system, but others had the idea of sharing
small sound files that could be played on the iPod. The
technology for distributing the files already existed,
with RSS feeds. RSS feeds were a means of generating
machine readable files that could share information
between a server and a user. Many blogs already used
them to keep readers up to date with the latest posts, but
some hopeful podcasters had the idea of enclosing links
to sound files within the RSS feed and downloading the
file to the computer.

With the change in RSS feeds, ipod podcast took off,
and podcasting became a popular way to share files.
Users saw podcasting as a way to become radio hosts,
or dj’s, and a variety of podcasts began popping up.
Software was written to automatically check the RSS
feeds, extract the links to the podcast episodes, and
download the files. These programs became known as
podcast clients.

By this time, podcasting had moved beyond the ipod,
and they were not simply making an ipod podcast
anymore. Some people had figured out how to use even
the PlayStation Portable gaming console as a podcast
player. It was more difficult that downloading podcasts
to the ipod, since the PSP used a different format for it’s
files, but PSP podcasts began popping up. In addition,
podcasting made inroads to the wider audience of
people without iPods, who simply saw podcasting as an
extremely convenient way to receive news, music, and
entertainment over the internet.

Today, while the iPod podcast type still exists, fewer
people subscribe to podcasts as a way of gaining
portable media files they can listen to anywhere.
Although that is still an attractive part of podcasting, it
seems to be eclipsed by the ease with which podcasting
has become a content delivery system. Now, podcasting
has become tied up with the rising number of audio and
video blogs, where blogging is done not by post, but
through media files uploaded to the blog. These blogs,
and podcasting in general, take advantage of the
shrinking cost of broadband internet connections, and
the rising number of people with high speed access to
offer a picture of the internet rich with multimedia files.

A Podcast RSS feed is what allows the entire system to
function. To begin at the beginning, a podcast is a
regular distribution of audio or visual files, called
episodes, to a users podcast client. The people who use
a podcast are called subscribers, and the podcast client
is what allows them to subscribe to a feed. The podcast
client is a program that connects to the internet, looking
for a specific file the user has subscribed to, or told it to
look for. That file is an RSS feed, a machine readable
piece of coding that sends information back to the
podcast client. RSS feeds can be used to distribute
many kinds of information, and were originally used for
blogging and distributing blog posts to subscribers. As
time went on, however, a few people had the idea of
enclosing information about media files within the RSS
feed so that software could be written to find that
information and download the files described.

The Podcast RSS feeds became a hit, and podcast
clients were quickly written to allow people to use the
new encoding. Podcasting became a means of quickly
and cheaply sharing episodes with subscribers. Rather
than requiring subscribers to visit the site that hosted
the files everytime they wanted to know if a new
episode was released, users could rely on the podcast
client to do the work for them, keeping track of
numerous podcast rss feeds that interested them and
downloading the files to be viewed when they wished.

Podcast RSS feeds are now used to distribute a number
of different types of podcasts. Some producers use it as
way to share a comedy or news program that they
produce, others podcast in order to share music files
they create, and some podcast to share video files they
have created and to showcase their work. Podcasting
allows the producers to become radio or television stars
without the large investment in time and money that
wuld be required to do that. Because podcasting has
such a low entry cost, requiring little more than a server
and a domain to host the site and a way to record the
media, thousands of people who otherwise would not
have a chance to work in a media environment have a
chance to do so through their podcast rss feeds.

In this way, podcast RSS feeds allow media publishing
over the internet at a fraction of the cost of other forms
of media distribution, permitting people with much
smaller budgets to compete in some way. However,
podcast rss feeds are also attracting more established
companies and groups as well, bringing people from
NPR radio stations and news organizations like CNN
who use podcasting as yet another means to distribute
their product to end users.