Dare I speak..?
So, since I got GlitchX that new 512MB SD card, I’ve been doing a lot more stuff with it. One of the things I’ve taken to doing is listening to podcasts. What are podcasts, you ask? Well, the term comes from a combination of broadcasting/webcasting and the iPod, which is the listening device of choice for digerati with more money than me. Boiled down to its simplest terms, it’s an MP3 file of whatever the person who makes it wants: talk, music, commentary, whatever. Sort of like web radio, but with a twist: instead of having to tune in at a specific time to listen to the show, the show itself is uploaded as an MP3 file in a blog, and you download and listen to it whenever you feel like it. So what’s so revolutionary about it? Well, not much, really, until you combine it with the RSS Feed capabilities of most blogs, and then it gets cool: by subscribing to the feed where the podcast is posted, it gets automatically delivered to you without you having to seek it out, but you can still listen to it whenever you feel like, instead of having to listen at a specific time. Best of both worlds, really. There’s some cool stuff out there, too, currently I’m enjoying Engadget’s weekly rant on techie stuff.
So here’s the deal, now that I’ve been putting audio in my weblog posts, with the whole little Play Button on top of my posts, I’ve sorta gotten an itch to do a little weekly podcast of my own. I used to tape little ‘radio shows’ for myself obsessively as a kid, and I can feel the urge to do it again rising. I could probably tape them while I’m on the move, too, with the Resco Sound Recorder app on GlitchX, which allows me to tape in pretty high-quality MP3 sound without having to worry too much about file size. Good stuff. Of course, I do wonder if anyone would bother to listen, but really, not having too many people reading my blog in the first place hasn’t stopped me from posting random shit like this, so why should I let it stop me from podcasting? I’ll think about it in any case.. if I do it, it would probably be a weekly thing, to give me enough time to come up with something to talk/discuss about at least. On the plus side for those of you with slow connections, since podcasting generally involves only voice, you can fit a lot of show in a tiny file: a 30-minute show can easily fit in a 7MB MP3, and my podcasts would likely be much shorter. So you should be able to download them, or even stream them, fairly easily from even a dial-up connection. We’ll see, I’ll think on this one for a bit.
