Thing Nineteen -- Just Listen

I have listened to the occasional podcast, but had never subscribed to a feed. Like everything else, I hadn't done so because of time restraints and the fact that my work environment is not conducive to listening to audio (shhhh, I work in a library, you know). Looking around on Podcastalley.com, I did find a really interesting podcast called The Naked Scientist Naked Science Radio Show -- a tongue-in-cheek broadcast of real science with a bit of humor thrown in. For my blog, I added the podcast feed from my favorite radio station, which does lots of music artists interviews (Cities97 and Studio C).

Finding a podcast in the directory was a bit frustrating at first, as I couldn't tell until I looked at the entries whether or not it was active or not (found many that looked interesting, but had ceased adding new content). I also tried adding a vodcast -- a Nova series, only to find that my browser lacked the most current plug-in to play the video.

At my library, we have done something similar to podcasts -- we have been recording workshops using Breeze (Macromedia/Adobe) and posting them to our web. Breeze is closer to vodcasting, in that it is a recording of live presentations with powerpoint. The limitations of this, of course, is that it is not part of a feed, so whenever we add new content, no one gets notified (however, the web page does have a furl/del.icio.us tag capabilities).

This is something that our instruction department should revisit in the very near future and see where we can increase our presence in the podcast/vodcast world.