Genealogy 'podcasts'?

[James W Anderson]

Anyone know of any genealogy 'podcasts' out there? I've looked, but
haven't found any. Here's some info for those who haven't heard of
this yet.

For the uninitiated, a 'podcast' is an RSS feed with an audio file in
mp3 format sent as an enclosure. Adam Curry, who once was a 'VJ' on
MTV came up with the whole thing just about eight months ago, and
already there are 10,000 podcasts out there, and one survey calculated
that there are 6 million listeners listening to one or more of these.

How it works.

1. A person or group who wishes to put together a podcast first
records it. Some do it with a basic microphone, rather cheap at music
stores such as Guitar Center, but if you want it to sound better go for
a better-quality microphone that may cost more. You record it using
podcast recording or other recording software that you can find on
computer websites and sound recording sites.

2. You convert it to mp3 format, via other software or sometimes with
software included in your recording program.

3. You use a software tool like iPodder, which is the first of these,
and there are quite a few of them already, some are free, some have
varying cost to them. Other sites that have software or info are
feedburner.com. Google for it and you'll find these, ditto for all the
other stuff mentioned.

4. You then using an RSS encoder put the mp3 file in the RSS feed as
en enclosure.

5. The file is then uploaded to your server. If you have subscribers,
the RSS feed then sends them to the recipients' computers, some get it
immediately if they are online, others get it later. Some even get
back podcasts by clicking on links on your site. Most commonly these
are blogs, or other similar media sites, and there are sites like
libsyn.com that are now storing them quite cheaply for you, and even
free storage sites popping up.

The recipient can transfer it to their iPod (Podcast(ing) got its name
from iPod + broadcast{ing) = podcast(ing)) or other mp3 device. The
recipient can also listen on their computer, or burn it to a CD to play
on a portable or other CD player that can read mp3 format CDs.

Where can you find podcasts now? Try a search on a subject at
http://www.podscope.com/ or browse the index at podcasting-station.com.


Some broadcasters are doing this now with their newscasts, such as KSL
in Salt Lake. Just go to ksl.com, and go to the radio station page
(KSL-1160) and look for the link. They send one out daily, you pick
what daypart newscast you want to subscribe to, for example.

I think that this has some distinct possibilities for family history.
Although it is just audio, one could record the society meeting
presentation about how to do a certain type of research and put that
out there. Or if you know how to do a certain thing you could record
one regularly on how to do it. And there's a whole load of things that
I could think of now that it would take too long to describe here.

It's not rigid like radio. So you can do anything with it.