Podcasting – The Next Wave in RSS Feeds

Even before RSS feeds for text content has become common and a majority of web site owners have implemented it, a new wave is coming. Look for Podcasting – RSS feeds for audio and video content.

Podcasting is derived from iPod and webcasting. It essentially consists of an RSS feed (version 2) that lets you know when new audio/video content is available. It can be used for posting content related to Internet radio, interviews, training material and any similar stuff that is not standard text files like HTML, PDF etc. It makes use of the ‘enclosure’ tag in the items to indicate the URL, type (audio, video etc) and size of the content.

As you can possibly guess by looking at the term ‘iPod’, you can listen to the audio file even when you are offline (not connected to Internet), on an iPod or through the standard media player of your computer system.

There are several tools to access podcasts but the most popular combination is iPodder and iTunes.

I should be preparing a step-by-step guide to installing the feed reading setup and then I will cover how you can create your own podcasts. So stay tuned…