I’ve become sucked into the world of podcasting. It’s best described as audio blogging.
Producers need only a microphone, some time, and some bandwidth to get their message out to the masses. There’s music, news, commentary, comedy… just about anything imaginable being podcasted.
All you need to get started is an aggregator, like iPodder or HappyFish. I use both of these, and podcatcher for UNIX. iPodder seems to be the most robust and friendly, but has this annoying reliance on iTunes. HappyFish has a sync feature that works great with my Rockbox, but it’s finicky about XML syntax and doesn’t work with all my feeds. I’ve had some success in getting feeds to validate their xml and make it work.
Some podcasts to get you started:
Adam Curry: Daily Source Code A podcast about podcasting. A good place to start.
Science@NASA Feature Stories
Dave Emory’s radio show Anti-fascist conspiracy theory at its best
These links are direct to the RSS feeds of the podcasts, so wait until you have a podcast aggregator installed before you do anything with them. Otherwise, they’ll fill your browser with gibberish.
UPDATE: Most of the aggregators listed don’t work anymore. Now all my support is behind iTunes and Google Reader.