I heard Lyric FM was podcasting, so I went online to seek it out, looking for an RSS feed with enclosures, that’s the marker with which I think an audio archive becomes a podcast. But I found no RSS perhaps there never was one, I can’t find the MP3 either perhaps the link was taken down. The simplistic explanation of podcasting in the (Lyric/RTE) press release would have me believe it was just an MP3 archive for download as opposed to the usual smil(e) real media file that RTE does so well.
On the other hand Auntie BeeB is getting her teeth into podcasting with XML files! http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/downloadtrial/
The BBC site tells us “Podcasting is a way to “subscribe” to radio programmes and have them delivered to your personal computer[1]. The podcasts in this trial are free.” Is that free of charge or the Gnu type of free? It’s BBC .co.uk not .com so its not a BBC WorldWide trial. It runs until Dec 2005. Remember the BBC was the first news service to shut down its WML w@p service in Feb 2000! (it has since returned). I hope the great shows from the BBC are not PPV p’casts from 2006.
It’s odd to look at the BIG state broadcasters jitter over this new thing called podcasting. At least they are jittering, the independents have yet to even do the (jitter)bug.
[1] I don’t own an iPOD, so I don’t know if iPodders run podcatching software on the iPOD or just the host PC/MAC. I guess it’s the latter. This to me adds an extra failure point in the process. I schedule the catcher to download at 3am (hope it gets my shows) and then hope my iPOD syncs afterward to bring the shows down to my device, now I must keep up with the housekeeping of my host and the housekeeping of my iPOD.
[updated] I read that you must use a podcatcher to get the shows, then it sync’s to your i-tunes then i-tunes sync’s to your iPod. Too many steps. What if the net connection fails, the podcatcher fails, the i-tunes fails, the iPod fails, the file is part of a torrent and incomplete???
I use the XDAii Pocket PC to podcatch. The catcher software is on the PPC (www.feederreader.com) so the shows never hit my PC even at 3am.