Nice Podcasting movie from Lisa Williams that explains what it is . (via Susan Mernit)
Several MP3s summarizing Poynter's PLus 10 Conference held last week. These would be Podcasts if they were attached to an RSS feed alerting you to their existence. And that friends is what it is about. To quote from Lisa;
"Podcasts are just Mp3s. You can treat them the way you would treat any other Mp3. The thing that’s different about podcasting is the delivery method – instead of copying songs from your CD collection or downloading a song online, you have an RSS reader that goes out and scans for new podcasts and downloads them when there’s something new. But the end result is the same; you still have an Mp3 file to do whatever you do with all your other Mp3 files to get them onto your player."
The push of RSS feeds and newsreaders are both a new and old idea. I am reminded of Backweb, You Don't know Jack, Screaming Media, syndication companies like King Features, news agenices like Reuters, and even the Yahoo desktop search beta and scroll I've just downloaded as forms of push media. The big and possibly paradigm shifting (I really wanted to use that word today) idea is the voice of many independent media providers that can reach out and tell their stories. That once found and subscribed to they can deliver their content to you. Maybe it's both push and pull, self selective, customized, democratizing, field leveling, and dilutive. Maybe it's just more of the same with new terminology. Maybe none of this is terribly new but perhaps the timing is better than it was a few years ago? Maybe we should keep calm and not get too carried away again as it evolves so as to let it seep into the ethos of the web and then from there make profound change possible ?
Is there a service that can take the blogroll of many sites I like and create a guide with annotations? Is there recommendation engine for blogs I might like - if you like this food blog you might like this one. If you like this podcast perhaps you will like this one?
