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Downloading Podcast News
With the rise of podcasting, many individuals andorganizations are finding that podcasting is a great wayto distribute information, from music and comedyshows to talk shows, even podcast news. CNET is oneof the groups that is distributing a news podcast. CNET,being an online technology site, naturally found a nichedistributing a tech news related podcast. CNET's recentpodcasts covered such topics as viruses that attack cellphones, problems with Google's software, China's webrestrictions and the "Great Firewall of China", and theFTC's attack on spyware. These news items weredistributed in a sound file called an mp3 file that isdownloadable to a listener's computer for listeningwhenever they wish. While these files were availablestraight from CNET's site, the majority of them areshared through the use of an RSS file. An RSS file is asmall piece of XML coding that is downloadable byprograms designed to read it. These programs are calledpodcast clients, and the user can input the address of theRSS files that hold the information on the feed. Thefeed will contain links to the media files of the podcast,and will download the new updates automatically.
More sites than CNET are finding that podcast news isan expoitable technology. The British BroadcastingCorporation podcasts some of it's programs, as well asthe US radio network NPR. The NPR, because its workis created by a variety of different groups, treatspodcasts differently from show to show. The NPR show"This American Life" distributes a podcast of the showthrough a site called audible.com, which allows feedlisteners to subscribe to the feed for a small fee anddownload the show . The NPR Hourly News show, onthe other hand, shares a short 5 minute broadcast thatsummarizes the news for free. Since the NPR is taking aradio show and converting it into a file that isdownloadable by the user, little is lost in the translation.The sound is designed to convey the entire story, and sopodcast subscribers are able to treate the podcast asnothing more than TIVO for the radio. ABC's podcastof the news show Nightline, on the other hand, issimply the sound track from the television show. Thishas been one of the criticisms of the Nightline podcast,because by merely stripping the sound from what isdesigned as a television show, much information is notgiven to the users. Listeners have problems telling whois who because they miss the visual cues that weresupposed to be there, and there is no truly easy way toconvert the shows. For this reason, some news showshave been moving from audio podcasts to video ones.They can take the video information directly from theshow that is broadcast, lower the visual resolution toshrink the file, and distribute it online as a podcast.
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