What Is Podcasting? (Part 1)

What Is Podcasting? (Part 1)

Many of you are wondering what this podcasting thing is. Here’s a brief primer on what it is and how to catch the wave.To understand podcasting, you must first understand RSS. Don’t worry, you don’t have to understand all of it, and you won’t be tested. But a decent idea of what RSS is helps.ADHERER

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and was originally devised to help news aggregators get the latest stories as soon as they were available. It is still used as such today and has gone even further. This blog, for instance is available via RSS. More on that later.

RSS is simply an XML file that is available on the web that has certain pre-defined characteristics. An XML file is a file on a computer that contains data. The special thing about XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is that the file contains both the data and the structure. See, back in the “olden days” of data storage, there were what’s known as “flat” files, where the data may look like this:

George W. Bush 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Washington DC
William Gates 123 Main St. Redmond WA

It’s pretty obvious what sort of data is in this file. It looks like there is a name in the first part, followed by an address, etc. But not all files contain such easily recognizable data. Consider the following:

6547924794
4856827128

Are those phone numbers? Social security numbers? Amounts? Account numbers? Who knows?

In comes the beauty of tagged information, or XML. XML files contain data wrapped in tags, which show what the data is. It is very much like HTML, the basic language of all web pages. A tag is a name for a piece of data that is contained in brackets, or the less-than and greater-than symbols ( < and > ). After the data, it has an end-tag, which is the same as the tag except with a slash added. So, the data in our first file above might look like this:

< Name > George W. Bush < / Name >
< Address > 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. < / Address >
< City > 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. < / City >
< State > DC < / State>

As you can see, XML is extremely verbose, which is a common complaint about it. But there are many benefits to using XML, but that is beyond what we’re discussing today. Okay, back to RSS. RSS is pre-formatted XML that is available on the internet. When there is an update, a new entry is added to the file. Special programs, called NewsReaders or RSS Readers, are used to periodically check various RSS XML files to look for any changes. Typing “rss reader” into google returns many hits, as well as Google’s own online reader at http://www.google.com/reader/view/

So, here’s a little trick. Point your web browser to http://www.firstservemedia.com/blog/feed and see what pops up. If you aren’t savvy in the ways of XML, it will look like gibberish. But that’s an RSS feed. Use this same link in an RSS Reader (this is called subscribing to the feed) and it will look much better, I assure you. Users of Mozilla and Firefox (and other browsers) can use their browser as a reader. Anywhere you see the little orange symbol with white curves, that means that a web page has a link to an RSS feed.

Next, how Podcasts and RSS feeds relate.

 

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