Apple Plants a Seed to Help Raise Podcasting
By Rob Pegoraro
Washington Post
Sunday, July 24, 2005; F09
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/23/AR2005072300051_pf.html
What, you don't have a podcast yet?
That's this year's version of, "What, you don't have a blog yet?" Podcasts
-- downloadable audio clips that you can listen to on your computer or on a
digital music player such as an iPod -- are riding an extraordinary wave of
hype.
Where blogs are supposed to make newspapers obsolete, podcasts are supposed
to turn radio into a dusty fossil.
And just as people last year were rushing to launch their own journals on
the Web, folks are now jumping into podcasting. Former senator and vice
presidential candidate John Edwards has a podcast, and so does Ward 2 D.C.
Council member Jack Evans.
Given time, podcasts may very well live up to the most optimistic
predictions offered about them. For now, though, the programming available
in the pod-verse teems with both brilliance and boredom. The software
needed to tune into this bounty also could use more work -- even after the
improvements in Apple's new version of its iTunes music program.
The basic idea behind podcasting is to work around the annoying reality
that until we get universal broadband Internet access, you can't tune into
Internet radio in most of the places you'd like to.
Podcasters abandon real-time streaming over the Internet in favor of
recording a program in advance, then letting users download it and listen
to it on their own time. A podcast is essentially shrink-wrapped radio,
almost always in the form of an MP3 audio file.
You can listen to that right in your Web browser, you can download it and
play it on a computer later on, or you can copy it to an iPod or most other
music players.
But listening to the wrong podcasts may leave you wondering why anybody
bothers. It's not that mediocrity is so much more prevalent among
podcasters than bloggers -- or newspaper reporters. It's just more obvious.
Simply speaking clearly and engagingly into a microphone is not always a
natural skill. Podcasters can also routinely make rookie mistakes like
forgetting to talk close enough to a microphone, or allowing feedback to
screech into the recording.
Cleaning up the aural equivalent of typos -- "um," "er" and "uh" -- is far
trickier in sound-recording software than in any word processor. Perhaps
because editing after the fact takes so much time, many podcasters seem
compelled to try to blitz through a podcast in a single take.
Scripts also often appear optional: Quite a few podcasts are ad-libbed --
even when their authors blather on for upwards of an hour.
All that combines to make for some spectacularly bad material: flat,
rambling, filibuster-length monologues with awkward pacing, stilted pauses
and maybe even a yawn or two. Listening to lengthy voice-mail messages on
your answering machine can be more fun.
Good podcasts, on the other hand, compete with anything you can hear on AM
or FM. They're more than just one person's yammerings; they're built of
lots of different bits weaved together artfully. (Some of the best podcasts
come straight from radio; National Public Radio stations have been
aggressively publishing their work in this medium.)
In radio, music is a major ingredient. But in podcasts, it's not. That's
because including a song in a podcast MP3 amounts to giving listeners a
free copy of it, something that most musicians and record labels do not
allow. To stay out of legal trouble, podcasters have to seek out "pod-safe"
music, songs whose copyright holders specifically permit redistribution via
podcast. Many just stick to spoken-word material instead.
Beyond content, the other part of the podcast puzzle is the software needed
to collect these audio downloads and transfer them to portable music players.
Until Apple's update to iTunes, podcast listeners would have to choose
between one of a few specialized programs to search for, download and
subscribe to podcasts. They'd usually then need to switch to a second
program to copy podcast MP3s to their music players.
Compared with that, iTunes 4.9 ( http://www.apple.com/itunes/ ) makes
podcasting breathtakingly simple. It includes a comprehensive, easily
searched directory of podcasts; although this directory is integrated into
Apple's iTunes Music Store, podcasts are free to download. Nor do
podcasters have to pay to be included; they only need to give Apple the
address of the site serving up their podcasts and some basic data about the
podcast's contents.
Listeners, in turn, just need to find an interesting podcast -- either by
locating it in iTunes, or by clicking an iTunes link on the podcaster's own
site. They then can hear a preview of it, download the current episode or
subscribe to the podcast. From there, iTunes will copy new episodes to an
iPod and can automatically erase old ones.
The interface does suffer a couple of hiccups, however. The iTunes podcast
directory is two screens away when you start up iTunes. And once you
download or subscribe to a podcast, iTunes takes you to the listing of
podcasts on your own computer without offering a "back" button to return
you to your prior spot in the iTunes directory. (Fortunately, but not
intuitively, clicking the "Music Store" icon will take you back.)
Further, a few podcast links in iTunes don't yield any downloadable files,
and the synchronization of downloaded podcasts to an iPod Mini had some
glitches of its own.
The most useful part about iTunes' newfound embrace of podcasting, however,
may not be what it does to simplify tuning in, but how it presents the
breadth of podcasts available. The most promising part about the podcast
business is that, unlike radio, it has infinite room for anybody; there
isn't a fixed set of channels that can be bought up by the big media
conglomerates. Podcasting may be a mess, but at least it's a mess that
everybody has the same access to.
================================
George Antunes, Political Science Dept
University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204
Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927
antunes at uh dot edu
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