What You Need

To create an audio podcast, you need 3 things: a microphone, a pair of headphones and some recording software. Cheap microphones will work if quality isn’t important. Obviously, better mics produce better sound. Headphones are needed to monitor the sound without the mic picking up speaker noise or feedback.

Podcasting News has a great list of publishing software, most of it free. Audacity is a free, cross-platform open source audio recording software that seems to be popular. There’s an excellent tutorial on Audacity complete with screenshots at windowsdevcenter.com. for For more serious podcasters, you could also use industry favorites such as BIAS Peak (Mac), Sony Sound Forge (PC) and Apple’s GarageBand.

How You Do It

The first steps are to record your podcast and make any edits you want with your sound editing software. You should also edit your ID3 tags so that portable media players will be able to get important info about your podcast. You can edit ID3 tags in most media players such as iTunes or Windows Media Player. Once you have your file the way you want it, upload it to your server.

The final step is to prepare your link for syndication. For this, you need blogging software with support for enclosures. Enclosures are a method to let news aggregation clients know that a file attachment is associated with an RSS feed entry. If your blogging software doesn’t support enclosures, you can use a Feedburner account. The rest is easy — just create a blog entry like you normally would with a title, link to your MP3 file and a description. If you want to keep your podcast separate from your regular blog entries, you can use a service called Liberated Syndication which will upload your file and create the RSS feed in one easy step. Voila. Podcast.

Edited addition, March 11, 2007, 4:35am: Holy Moly! I was just wandering around in Aarron’s blog to see what I could learn and decided I’d be brave and try to download a podcast. Scratch everything above! He’s using a site called Talkr.com that automatically reads his blog posts and converts them into podcasts! I had no idea! Things you learn in the wee hours of the morning.

What Are They?

Ok, so maybe talking about podcasts on a blog about findability is stretching things a bit. However, since we have an opportunity to create a podcast for extra credit, I needed to know more about it. What better way to learn than to have to research the subject for these posts. So let’s jump in.

Podcasts are media files that are distributed over the web via RSS feeds. The name comes from Apple’s music player, the iPod. Like other web-delivered media files, podcasts can be either streaming or downloadable. Unlike other web media files, podcasts can also be downloaded automatically via RSS or Atom. Podcasts are usually thought of as either audio or video files, but they can also be text, images, PDFs or any other type of file.

Where Do I Find Them?

Basically, everywhere. Apple and Yahoo! both seem to have extensive catelogues of podcasts. There’s also a podcast.net, a Podcast Alley and a podcast.com. In addition, you can also get podcasts from NPR, CNN and probably all other news agencies. Conferences are using podcasts to broadcast their sessions, teachers are using them to deliver their lessons, and bosses are using them to deliver information to employees. If you’re interested in it, there’s probably a podcast for it.

How Do I Listen To Them?

First, you need some software for your computer that will download podcasts for you. This type of software is called an aggregator or sometimes a podcatcher or podcast receiver. Podcasting News lists over 100 different aggregators for PC, Mac, Linux/Unix, Palm OS, Pocket PC and just about everything else. Most are free downloads. There are some great step-by-step tutorials on the web that will walk your through using your software to subscribe to feeds. An especially thorough one is at windowsdevcenter.com. You can then listen to or watch your podcast with your favorite media player — either on your PC or with a portable device.