Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
we talked about earlier in this topic? RSS is just a kind of XML, and XML is
just a text ile that uses a certain kind of markup language.) You subscribe to
podcasts in the same way you subscribe to RSS feeds.
Podcasts are audio iles, but you may also start hearing about vidcasts—
which is the same concept only using a video ile instead of an audio ile.
Vidcasts are in early development and the concept is very much the same,
so we'll stick with audio podcasts for the purpose of this section.
What do you need to listen to a podcast?
here are lots of diferent sotware packages out there for listening to podcasts.
A free program that might do the trick for you is iTunes, from Apple. You may
download iTunes for either Windows or Mac at apple.com/itunes/download/.
If you have an Apple-brand music player, like an iPod, you can use that to play
podcasts. If you don't, you can play podcasts from your computer.
Why should you listen to a podcast?
Podcasts are like blogs. hey're not quite as numerous (yet) but they're every
bit as varied. I suspect that no matter what your interest, you'll ind a pod-
cast that its. And podcasts are more portable. If you trap an interesting text
news story, you'll probably end up reading it at your computer desk. On the
other hand, if you ind a podcast series that's worth listening to every epi-
sode, you can load it on an iPod or a diferent music player, and take it with
you. You can listen to it in your car. You can listen to it while you're working
out. You don't have to sit in front of the computer.
You may have noticed that there are podcast series and podcast episodes.
hese equate to blogs and blog entries. A single podcast would be a blog
entry. All of the podcast episodes would be the blog. For the most part, you
might ind podcasts for which all episodes are appropriate to your trapping.
On the other hand, you might have an interest that's esoteric enough that
only individual podcast episodes suit your needs. As you'll see in the next
two sections, you have the option to ind both podcasts to which you can
subscribe and keyword-based RSS feeds of interesting podcast episodes.
Finding podcasts
Let's start with inding podcasts in general. As you might imagine, ind-
ing podcasts is a lot like inding blogs—you can look in search engines
and directories.
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