18 December 2004

General - Podcasting

Since getting one of my birthday presents, an irock!, I have been finding "podcasts" to listen to. That may not be totally accurate, I learned about podcasting from an article in the Christian Science Monitor about the same time that I got my irock. The irock is a small FM transmitter that you plug into the headphone jack of your mp3 or CD player or iPod. It transmits whatever you have recorded to your radio, in stereo, for your listening pleasure.

Podcasting is downloading mp3s of content and listening to them at your leisure on your mp3 player. iPod are really good at doing this I guess. Since I don't have an iPod, I use my Dell Axim x5 PDA. It plays mp3s so I use software that I got from ipodder.org to subscribe to content and download it for me. Then I transfer it into a compact flash card and voila! I can listen to it on my trucks radio while traveling or on my stereo at home (from my desktop).

Now that I think about it, I think my bro-in-law Brendon actually posted about it a couple of months ago on his blog as people were starting to do audio blogs. However, it has begun to explode into people doing their own radio shows and posting them to a blog interface for people to download. It has been fun so far experimenting with what is out there. I'll probably post something on a few of them as I get some time and find some regular ones that I like. So far, The Miller Report is pretty good. He plays some local bands and has running commentary on his local (Grand Forks, ND) and world politics. I have also found ICM Raw (Independent Christian Music and News) which is pretty good as well and plays independent Christian bands from around the US.

So if you have ever had a hankering for having your own radio show, now's your chance through podcasting to try your hand.

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