Podcast Beginnings

Podcasts are prerecorded audio content: You decide which content you like, and it's downloaded automatically to your PC or MP3 player. This happens in the background while you're doing other things (like sleeping).

Podcasting works on what blogger programmer Dave Winer (www.scripting.com) calls the "no click-wait principle." Winer and Adam Curry (MTV star and entrepreneur) noticed that having to wait for content to download when you clicked pretty much ruined the whole experience. They wanted to click some content and instantly start watching or listening to it. Because these media files are huge (100MB is not uncommon), the only way to do that is to predownload them—maybe at night and, preferably, automatically. Then, when you wake up, all this cool content is already there on your hard drive, ready to play.

This was the root of the idea for podcasting that Winer wrote about in 2001. It would take three more years for the rest of the pieces to fall into place.

The RSS connection. Blog readers had already noticed that keeping up-to-date with new blog content was impossible with just a Web browser. With RSS (Really Simple Syndication), however, software could quickly download and aggregate new content on hundreds of blogs. The reader had only to scan the predownloaded content for something interesting. No click-wait. As the inventor of RSS, Winer recognized that it could be used for downloadable binary content, too, such as big MP3s and video files.

To do this, he added a new XML tag, <enclosure>, to the RSS standard. An enclosure lets you specify that a binary downloadable file is available and gives a URL for the file. If the client wants to download the file, it knows where to find it.

Here is an example enclosure in the RSS feed for the Dawn And Drew podcast:

<enclosure url="http://mp3.dndshow.com/DNDS20041115.mp3" length="13420110" type="audio/mpeg"/>

Simplicity itself, the tag tells the client where to download the file, as well as the size and type. What happened next? Nothing. Almost nobody was using enclosures. Two more sparks were needed to light the podcasting fire.

The perfect pod storm. On Oct. 23, 2001, Apple introduced the iPod. Even though it was only for Mac users, the iPod was a huge bestseller. A short while later, Apple introduced iTunes for Windows and an iPod that worked with both platforms. With iPod leading the way, MP3 players were everywhere. People used them in the gym, at work, and out walking the dog.

Adam Curry had been thinking about all of these things and talking to Dave Winer about RSS and click-wait. The idea of on-demand audio was technically ready. There was a way to automatically download the content with RSS. There was an audio standard that you could play on any hardware (MP3). And many people now had players (mostly iPods) and were hungry for new, daily content.

Curry stepped up and filled in the last piece: daily, compelling content. He launched "Daily Source Code" (radio.weblogs.com/0001014). Each day Curry records about 40 minutes of talk about whatever he feels like. Listeners record and send him MP3 comments, which he plays as part of the show. Every day, thousands of listeners download his podcast and listen.

Listen To Podcasts

To listen to a podcast, all you need to do is subscribe to the podcast's RSS feed using a podcast aware feed reader such as iPodder (free; ipodder.sourceforge.net). Although not absolutely necessary, you should also consider installing iTunes (www.apple.com/itunes), which is available for both Windows and Mac. Once iPodder is running, subscribing to feeds is simply a matter of adding the URL of the feed you want. For example, if you want to subscribe to "The Dawn and Drew Show," select the Status tab and put the feed URL www.dawnanddrew.com/rss2.xml into the Add Feed Manually box and click Add.

The other way to add podcast feeds is to browse the Podcast Directory. Click Select Feeds From The Podcast Directory, and a browser opens that lets you explore various OPML (Outline Processor Mark-up Language) lists of podcasts. OPML is a format for storing outlines in XML (www.opml.org). Choose the podcasts you'd like to try from here and click Add Selected Feed.

Once you've subscribed to a few feeds, click Check For New Podcasts, and iPodder downloads the XML files for each feed. iPodder scans these XML files to find the <enclosure> tags and downloads the appropriate MP3 files. If iTunes is installed on your PC, a new Playlist is automatically added with the podcast. You can listen to it on your PC or you can plug in your iPod and the podcasts are transferred automatically (just like any other MP3 files).

Because the whole idea of podcasting is to have the content you want available when you want it, iPodder lets you schedule automatic downloads in the iPodder Scheduler tab. The best way to do this is to have all your downloads happen at night and then sync up your MP3 player in the morning.

Manage Podcasts

Every podcast you download creates a new entry in your iTunes playlist (if you are using iTunes), so you can quickly end up with hundreds of shows that you need to listen to (or at least erase). iTunes makes this easier with Smart Playlists.

Smart Playlists lets you generate playlists automatically from a set of rules that you define. For example, the set of rules could include all MP3 files with the ID3 tag genre set to a podcast that you have never heard. This is a good start for finding the latest casts in your collection.

Make Podcasts

To make your own podcast, all you need is a way to record MP3 files and a server to host them. Today's podcasters are using a wide variety of tools to produce their podcasts, with mixed results. What tools you choose largely depends on your budget, how much portability you need, and how professional you want to sound. Podcasts have been recorded on everything from cell phones to high-end digital recorders.

At a minimum, you need a way to record your cast into an MP3 file and server to host the audio files and the XML feed with enclosures pointing to that file.

Most podcasters will also want a way to mix in different audio sources, including music, prerecorded material, and even VoIP calls using Skype (www.skype.com). An excellent (and free) sound editor is Audacity (audacity.sourceforge.net).

If you want to get more serious about quality, invest in a good microphone and an external mixer such as the Eurorack UB1202 ($99.99; www.behringer.com). If you're doing streeters (on-the-street live interviews), invest in a good portable recorder such as the Edirol R-1 ($550; www.edirol.com), which lets you record straight to MP3.

Once you have your show in an MP3 file, upload it to your server and add an enclosure to your RSS feed.

by Paul Robinson

Mac Podcasting The great thing about the iPodder program is that it works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. However, if you are on a Mac, you may want to try iPodderX (www.ipodderx .com), which is a native Mac podcast feed reader. Another useful program only for Mac users is Audio Hijack Pro ($32; www.rogue amoeba.com/audiohijackpro), which lets you capture any sound your Mac is playing regardless of the source.

What's With The Name? Podcasting rhymes with broadcasting and started with iPodder and iTunes. But that doesn't mean podcasting is only for iPod users. Podcasts are MP3 files, plain and simple, and can be played on any computer or portable player that handles that format.

Q&A Doc Searls: Podcasting Connoisseur CPU: Why has time-shifted Internet audio content suddenly become so popular? After all, streaming radio is nothing new, and time-shifted commercial content from Audible.com has been available for a long time. Searls: Several reasons. First is the popularity of the iPod, and of portable MP3 listening in general. This past summer, we had a birthday gathering at our house at which our older kids and some friends, about 15 in all, showed up for a weekend. Seven of them brought iPods and took turns running playlists through our household sound system. I asked them what music they listened to on the radio. They treated the question as if it were absurd. Their main sources of music were other people with similar interests in music. They shared music through their computers and iPods. This reminded me of the transistor radio phenomenon, in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, which I remember well (I was born in 1947). Rock ‘n' roll exploded when portable radios came along. The cultural ecosystem of early Top 40 radio involved a number of elements we barely remember today. One was connected connoisseurship. Disk jockeys like Allan Freed, Scott Muni, Murray the K, Joe Niagra, B. Mitchell Reed, and others were authorities on the rock ‘n' roll genre. They knew the artists and knew the music and knew their listeners. They hosted live shows (like Allan Freed's at the Brooklyn Paramount). By the way, Allan Freed [www.alanfreed.com] was a disk jockey in Cleveland when he named rock ‘n' roll. Another was the underground nature of it. With rare exceptions, Top 40 stations had second-tier signals in their regional markets. WINS (where Freed showed up in 1957), WMCA, and WMGM in New York were all smaller than the big clear channel (no relation to the company by that name, which came along decades later) stations that played music for older folks. WXYZ in Detroit, WQXI in Atlanta, WMEX in Boston,WIND in Chicago, WITH in Baltimore, WOLF in Syracuse, KYA in San Francisco, WAIR in Winston-Salem, and KRLA in Los Angeles were all struggling also-rans before they became Top 40 landmarks. The great early record labels—Sun in Memphis, Chess in Chicago, and Motown in Detroit—were subcultural before they became household names. It was relatively easy for a musician or a group to break into "the industry" in those days, mostly because it wasn't much of an industry. Another was the role of the single: the 45rpm record. These were cheap and easy for young people to buy, to share, to haul in boxes to each other's houses, and to play at dances at the local high school. But the biggest factor was the transistor radio. Before ‘the transistor,' radio was anchored to home and cars. But once Sony and other (mostly Japanese) companies came out with these little boxes you could carry around anywhere, radio not only became portable, it became personal. Just like the iPod. Today the music radio is a vertically integrated manufacturing industry, in which a few giant companies, which own or control everything from recording through broadcasting and local performance avenues, produce music as a product for consumption, like boxed cereal. The economics of the industry are centered around creating blockbuster pop phenomena. While this has its appeals, it completely ignores the originally personal nature of radio, of music, and of the desire by listeners to connect with each other, with connoisseurs, and with artists. Napster, and music file sharing in general, are prime examples of how the demand side of the market for music has run around the failures of both the recording and the broadcasting industries. So, too, now, is the iPod. As for streaming, there are technical and legal problems that haven't been surmounted. First, there is no streaming equivalent of the iPod: nothing portable you can take with you. For all the virtues of satellite radio, both of the only two services (XM and Sirius) are still very much tied into the broadcasting and recording industries. Portables are expensive, hard to find, and often hard to use. And none are as small and portable as transistor radios or iPods. Second, the RIAA made sure, through the CARP process that followed passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright act, that streaming over the Internet would be so difficult, both economically and operationally, that live Internet radio has essentially been prevented as a business. As for Audible.com, it provides a nice service, but it's closed and one-way. Podcasting is the latest example of something that's very hard to understand from the standpoint of all the old industrial-age top-down producer-to-consumer regimes. It's a way the demand side finds to supply itself. This is true of blogging, of Linux, and of everything that naturally grows out of the essentially peer-to-peer, or end-to-end, nature of the 'Net. The whole open-source phenomenon is about the demand side supplying itself. CPU: Many podcasting critics have compared podcasting to text blogging and found it lacking. Is this a fair comparison? Searls: No. It's different. It's also newer. We don't yet have, for example, the metadata standards by which it's easy to link to specific points in a podcast, or even agreement that internal links (like anchor tags in HTML) are a good thing. Dave Winer, the godfather (if not the outright father) of both blogging and podcasting, thinks the rambling and personal nature of podcast monologues resist that kind of thing. Podcasting is also harder, and more time-consuming, than blogging, which is essentially emailing to the public. Podcasting at its best is a production challenge. You need to do ‘show prep.' Not hard in some cases, but not as easy as blogging. Or as cheap, if your podcast gets popular. Also bear in mind that blogging is just going into kindergarten and podcasting is a newborn. Both have a long way to grow. CPU: What is missing from today's podcasting from a technology standpoint? That is, what technology improvements will come to take podcasting to the next level? Searls: First, a worthy competitor to the iPod. For all its virtues (and they are many), the iPod still lives inside Apple's silo. Meanwhile, all the relatively open competitors are much harder to use. That's a problem that will, inevitably, be fixed. I suspect that many overlapping portable personal technologies will moosh together in cellular telephony, if that industry is open to it, and doesn't succumb to pressures from the record industry. Second, development of a well-known and understood suite of production hardware, software, and practices. Right now, getting started is pretty easy, but not as easy as it should be. Third, realization by the cable and telco industries that asymmetrical service to homes and blocking of outbound Web service (port 80) is essentially preventing a whole lot of business. Asymmetrical service has always been an affront to the end-to-end symmetrical design of the Web. (Read John Perry Barlow's ‘Death From Above,' written in 1995, for a clear idea of what a bad practice asymmetry is.) Cable and phone companies could easily make a good business charging a little more for symmetrical service and letting small podcasters and home businesses of all kinds flourish. I realize there are lots of potential problems here (hijacking by spammers, liability issues for carriers, etc.), but at some point we need to realize that asymmetrical service is based on an outmoded producer-to-consumer regime, the exclusive maintenance of which is costing more business than it enables. Third, the continued evolution of podcasting standards and practices. Again, this is a new phenomenon. CPU: Most podcasts today are essentially homegrown radio shows. Do you see the content of podcasts expanding into other areas? Searls: A huge variety of areas are represented just within the homegrown category. Ever notice who advertises in the right columns of your Google searches? Or who's doing business with an eBay or an Amazon back end? Homegrown, most of them. By the many thousands. Podcasting will go mainstream when broadcasters start picking up and leveraging podcasts in various ways. How or when that will happen is anybody's guess. CPU: What happens when commercial radio notices podcasting? Do you still listen to radio? Searls: I think noncommercial radio will notice podcasting first. Noncommercial radio programming is still mostly about programs, rather than the formatted music we hear on commercial radio. Podcasts are ideally suited to rebroadcast over noncommercial channels. Remember that NPR is just a source of programs for most public radio stations. Those stations can access other sources. Don't be surprised to see college radio picking up on podcasts first and turning local programs into podcasts, as well. I also expect to see podcasting adopted rapidly by churches and by religious broadcasters. Podcasting Sunday sermons and services is inevitable, if it isn't happening already. And noncommercial religious radio has always been extremely resourceful about using technology. They've been running rings around NPR affiliates for years. I still listen to the radio when I make coffee in the morning, or when I'm in my car driving around town. I like NPR shows and Howard Stern when I can get him (not easy here in Santa Barbara). And I'll listen to sports on radio, too. But radio has mostly abandoned me, as it has so many other listeners. Here in Santa Barbara, we no longer have a local news station. The one we had was a service provided by Bob Smith, a local TV station owner. As Bob was dying of cancer, he sold it off and now it's part of a Spanish music chain. Nothing wrong with that, but nothing right about losing a local institution. The local paper wants to buy a little local radio station, but the FCC's cross-ownership rules prevent it. Podcasting is still wild and free, and still mostly safe from regulation. The one area of caution I've heard surrounds copyright. All the podcasts I hear go out of their way to play non-RIAA music, to stay clear of the regulatory regime the RIAA has imposed on live streaming.

Perchlorate Percolates Milk & Lettuce Next time you sit down to a nice green salad with a big, frosty glass of milk, you might want to think twice before digging in. Research is showing that a substantial portion of the United States' supply of milk and lettuce may have been tainted with the same toxic chemical found in rocket fuel. The chemical is called perchlorate and has been found in 94% of the food samples tested. The chemical is most popularly used in the aerospace and defense industries and aids in the burning of rocket fuel. Its effects on humans include disruption of the thyroid gland, and it is also linked to slower development of children's motor skills. The FDA doesn't recommend changing your diet to avoid the chemical, but if you suddenly blast off after lunch, at least you'll know what to blame. Source: Wired News