iPod nano
I'm bad. For Christmas I received a shiny new iPod nano. I received it yesterday, opened it, loaded it up with my favorite podcast and started listening to it right away. It's so sexy looking that I fell in love with it right away. I might have some issues with the interface, the battery and the memory not being replaceable but as far as being a standard piece of equipment, you'd be hard pressed to find anything more standard.
I have a Rio, I've had it for some years but couldn't resist asking Santa Claus for a new little mp3 player. The fact that I subscribe to podcast using iTunes was a big factor in why I chose to go with an apple mp3 player. If you don't subscribe to any podcasts you can Google them and find out more on what you've been missing.
When you think of blogs you probably think of someone posting their thoughts on an online diary. If you're a bit savvy, you've already discovered that you can add your favorite blogs to your Google or Yahoo or (insert favorite portal) home page. This works through the magic of RSS. RSS is a way for people to make their posts accessible to third party software. Sites like Blogger make rss available as part of their software. Authors don't usually have to worry about it, it happens in the background.
Podcasting is a way to record audio files like mp3's and make them available to programs like iTunes which checks to see if new mp3's have been made available and can download them and synchronize the newly download file with a person's mp3 player, like my ipod. The idea is simliar to subscribing to a blog through your yahoo home page. Instead of using your yahoo page, you use iTunes and instead of subscribing to text posts, you subscribe to audio posts.
If you use blogger, you can add mp3's to your blog and make them accessible to people as podcasts. Even if you don't use blogger, you can still write the RSS file yourself and give people a link so they can subscribe to your podcast. Tomorrow I'll outline how to write your own RSS file so that people can subscribe to your audio files using iTunes.