Podcasts (#21)

With my new iPad, I've been playing around with it and have found that I can search and subscribe to podcasts right through iTunes relatively easily.On my new iPad, I went to iTunes, and selected Podcasts. There, there are a more than 20 substantive categories, so I chose Health. There I found 24 podcast options, with the number of ratings on each of them. I chose the Discovery Health Channel, as they bring you the latest health news, tips on living well, etc. There are 70 episodes displayed with the amount of minutes for each, so I chose Heart Health, with Dr. Peeke.

Podcasts are short broadcasts of information (bite size chunks ;-) that one can either listen to or watch. They were originally made for downloading to the ipod so that people could listen to information or be entertained wherever they took their ipod. Thus the name podcast. Now anyone with an MP3 player can download a podcast. The iPhone and iPad can also play podcasts.

Most savvy communicators now include podcasts as part of their offerings. So you'll have NPR and other new agencies offering podcasts. Not just of news but entertainment shows like Car Talk. Even the president of the United States has a weekly video podcast you can download. Once he did it while flying in Airforce One to an international meeting which was cool, but a bit hard to hear him with the airplane background noise.

iTunes is an application that helps you search for relevant podcasts and download and manage them for your iPod, iTouch, iPhone, etc. But it's not necessary to have iTunes as you can download a podcast from the relevant website directly.
Subscribing to a podcast is when there's a regular podcast and you want your iTunes, for example, to download them at the regular interval.

Using the example above, my daughter subscribes to the President's weekly podcast and her iTunes will download it weekly. She sets it to delete a podcast after she has listened to it so every week it will download and then deletes the old one if she has listened to it. If she hasn't, it will keep it. The managing of the podcasts downloads and storage can thus be automated!

Podcasts allow us to be entertained or informed while we are "offline" because they're downloaded to an ipod. And because the information is in chunks, you don't get bored or run out of time with the podcasts.