iPod Casting - Pod Casting - Podcasting

Podcasting What is it? How do I do it? How do I get involved?

Podcasting is a blanket term used to describe a collection of technologies for automatically distributing audio and video programs over the internet via a publish and subscribe model. It differs from earlier online collections of audio or video material in the use of automatic distribution, usually through RSS feeds. Podcasting enables independent producers to create self-published, syndicated "radio shows," and gives broadcast radio or television programs a new distribution method.

In the podcasting model, the publisher publishes a list of programs in a special format, known as a "feed", on the web. A user who wants to see or hear the podcast subscribes to the feed in special "podcatching" software (a type of aggregator), which periodically checks the feed and automatically downloads new programs as they become available. Typically, the podcatching software also transfers the program to a desktop or portable media player.

Most podcatching software facilitates copying podcasts to portable music players. Any digital audio player or computer with audio-playing software can play podcasts. From the earliest RSS-enclosure tests in 2000-2001, feeds have been used to deliver video files as well as audio. By 2005 some aggregators and mobile devices could receive and play video, but the "podcast" name remained most associated with audio.

"Podcasting" is a portmanteau that combines the words "broadcasting" and "iPod." The term can be misleading since neither podcasting nor listening to podcasts requires an iPod or any portable player, and no broadcasting is required.

Aware of that misleading association from the beginning, some writers have suggested alternative names or reinterpretations of the letters "p-o-d". One alternative is "blogcasting", which implies content based on, or similar in format to, blogs. Another is "audioblogging." Yet another is "rsscasting". In 2005, the term POD has been described as "Personal On Demand" radio. Unlike traditional AM/FM radio, you can ListenAtYourLeisure.

Initial development
By 2003, web radio had existed for a decade, digital audio players had been on the market for several years, blogs and broadcasters frequently published MP3 audio online, and RSS file formats were widely used for summarizing or syndicating Web content. In 2001, UserLand founder and RSS evangelist Dave Winer responded to requests from customers Adam Curry and Tristan Louis for a way to deliver video or audio with their RSS feeds. Winer added a specific enclosure element to what was then his company's RSS specification, then to Radio Userland, a blogging system incorporating both a feed-generator and aggregator. (Ironically, the rival RDF Site Summary syndication format already supported media resources implicitly, although applications rarely took advantage of the feature.)

In June 2003, Stephen Downes demonstrated aggregation and syndication of audio files using RSS in his Ed Radio application . Ed Radio scanned RSS feeds for MP3 files, collected them into a single feed, and made the result available as SMIL or WebJay audio feeds.

In September 2003, Winer created an RSS-with-enclosures feed for his Harvard Berkman Center colleague Christopher Lydon, a former newspaper and television journalist and public radio radio talk show host . For several months Lydon had been linking full-length MP3 interviews to his Berkman weblog, which focused on blogging and coverage of the 2004 U.S. presidential campaigns. At the first Harvard BloggerCon conference, October 4-October 5, 2003, Kevin Marks demonstrated a script to download RSS enclosures to iTunes and synchronise them onto an iPod, something Adam Curry had been doing with Radio Userland and Applescript. Listening to Lydon's interviews on an iPod helped inspire Adam Curry to create a feed he called "syncpod," which was used for testing by Marks, Werner Vogels and other developers at the conference, some of whom became involved in open source iPodder development projects.

Curry's and Winer's podcasts, including several months of collaboration they called "Trade Secrets," spread interest in podcasting among other widely-read bloggers. Amateur blogs and open source developers continued as important factors in the popularization of podcasting before and after professional broadcasters and entrepreneurs with business plans adopted the form.

Possibly the first use of the term podcasting was as a synonym for audioblogging or weblog-based amateur radio in an article by Ben Hammersley in The Guardian on February 12, 2004 . In September of that year, Dannie Gregoire used the term to describe the automatic download and synchronization idea that Curry had developed [8]. Gregoire had also registered multiple domain names associated with podcasting. That usage was discovered and reported on by Curry and Dave Slusher of the Evil Genius Chronicles website.

By October 2004, detailed how-to podcast articles had begun to appear online. In November 2004, liberated syndication libsyn launched what was apparently the first Podcast Service Provider, providing storage, bandwidth, and RSS creation tools.

Prior to the Internet, in the decade of the 70's, RCS, Radio Computing Service provided music and talk related software to radio stations in a digital format. They continue to serve the radio industries, dominate the market at 80% and as well, provide on-line software called iselector.com prior to the origination of podcasting.

Prior to online music digital distribution, the midi format as well as the M-Bone, Multicast Network was used to distribute audio and video files. The M-Bone was a multicast network over the Internet used primarily by educational and research institutes, but there were audio talk programs like podcasting today. Source: Publisher: National Association of Broadcasters, Internet Age Broadcaster I and II. Author: Peggy Miles and Dean Sakai))

There were many other jukeboxes and websites in the mid 1990's that provided a system for sorting and selecting music or audio files, talk, sequeway announcements of different digtal formats. There were a few websites that provide audio subscription services. Some of the software programs were simple, some were complex.

The development of downloaded music did not reach a critical mass until the launc of napster.com, another system of aggregating music, but without the subscription services provided by podcasting or video blogging aggregation client or system software.

Independent of the development of podcasting via RSS, a portable player and music download system had been developed at Compaq Research as early as 1999 or 2000. Called PocketDJ, it would have been launched as a service for the Personal Jukebox or a successor, the first hard-disk based MP3-player. See appropriate section in the Personal Jukebox article.

The word about podcasting rapidly spread through the already-popular weblogs of Curry, Winer and other early podcasters and podcast-listeners. Fellow blogger and technology columnist Doc Searls began keeping track of how many "hits" Google found for the word "podcasts" on September 28, 2004, when the result was 24 hits. There were 526 hits for "podcasts" on September 30, then 2,750 three days later. The number doubled every few days, passing 100,000 by October 18. As of November 14, 2005 Google reported 99,700,000 hits for "podcasts".

Capturing the early distribution and variety of podcasts was more difficult than counting Google hits, but before the end of October, The New York Times reported podcasts across the United States and in Canada, Australia and Sweden, mentioning podcast topics from technology to veganism and movie reviews. USA Today told its readers about these "free amateur chatfests" the following February , profiling several podcasters, giving instructions for sending and receiving podcasts, and including a "Top Ten" list from one of the many podcast directories that had sprung up. The newspaper quoted one directory as listing 3,300 podcast programs in February, 2005.

Those Top Ten programs gave further indication of podcast topics: four were about technology (including Curry's Daily Source Code, which also included music and personal chat), three were about music, one about movies, one about politics, and—at the time number 1 on the list—The Dawn and Drew Show, described as "married-couple banter," a program format that USA Today noted was quite popular on American broadcast radio in the 1940s. Such "couplecasts" have since become quite popular among independent podcasts (those not derived from a preexisting radio show).

In March of 2005, John Edwards became the first national-level US politician to hold his own podcast . (He may be the first major politician to have a podcast; given the nature of podcasting, we may never know.) Within a few episodes, the show had all the features of a major podcast: a web site with subscription feeds and show notes, guest appearances, questions from the audience, reviews and discussion of other media (in this case books), musical interludes of podsafe (noninfringing) songs, light banter (sports and recreation talk), even limited soundseeing from on location.

By mid-2005, the medium had acquired a bittersweet form of validation: a backlash. Some experienced internet users declared podcasting to be either nothing special (just a variant of blogs and mp3s), or already past its peak (because of growing exposure, and/or adoption by unsavvy internet users).

In June, 2005, Apple added podcasting to its iTunes 4.9 music software and iTunes Music Store, staking a claim to the medium. The iTunes software downloads and organizes podcasts, and loads them on the iPod, taking the place of a separate aggregator application. In addition, iTunes 5 interfaces with the online Music Store, which compiles and distributes the content. As of October 2005, the Music Store is free of charge to both the listener and creator.

A little over a month later, U.S. President George W. Bush became a podcaster, when someone added an RSS 2.0 feed to the previously downloadable files of the weekly radio addresses at the White House website.

As is often the case with new technologies, pornography has become a part of the scene - producing what is sometimes called podnography. Other approaches include enlisting a class full of MBA students to research podcasting and compare possible business models, and venture capital flowing to influential content providers.

The growing popularity of podcasting introduced a demand for music available for use on the shows without significant cost or licensing difficulty. Out of this demand, a growing number of tracks, by independent as well as signed acts, are now being designated "podsafe". (See also Podcasting and Music Royalties.)

In September 2005, the first podcast encoded in full Dolby 5.1 Surround Sound, was created by Revision3 Studios with their 14th episode of Diggnation. The Dolby encoding lasted for only a few minutes of the podcast.

Source: wikipedia

Yahoo! News: Digital Music
Digital Music

Sony seeks to harmonize music, electronics (AP)
10 Oct 2008 at 10:37pm

AP - Now that Sony Corp. and Bertelsmann AG have broken off their troubled relationship, known as Sony BMG, the Japanese company hopes to harmonize its consumer electronics and its music, a duo that was badly out of sync.