Thursday, June 14, 2012

What are Podcasts?

When people first get an MP3 player, (click here if you don't know what that is) they first ask the inevitable question "So now what?" I usually advise people to start with the music they already own, and after that they can buy music, audio books, movies, TV shows... but is there anything in this digital world you can listen to for free?

One of my favorite things to show people is the vast and eclectic world of podcasts. One reason is that podcasts are free! Yay, free stuff! The second is that you can find podcasts about just about any subject you're interested in. Gardening? Check. Cars? Check. Politics, games, parenting, nutrition, news, money. Check to all of those! Just looking for some light entertainment on your morning walk? Many radio shows like NPR also have their radio episodes available as free podcasts as well.

The third reason I enjoy showing people podcasts is because, once they become well versed with using their computer, they can make their own podcasts. Podcasts are not only free to make, but they can also be fairly inexpensive to distribute. There are a decent number of options for getting your podcast out to the world, more than I have time to list here, but they can range for free to expensive based on what you're looking to do.

Practical Tip of the Day:
In addition to all the types of podcasts I listed above, many colleges and universities are now recording their lectures or parts of their lectures and releasing them for free in podcast form. Ever wondered what economics at Yale was like? You can download either a video or audio version of that class to listen to whenever you'd like. Podcasts are a great way to spend long commutes or vacation travel time!

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