Audience, The Podcaster and A Summer's Midnight Breeze
According to Wikipedia (which by the way is more accurate than most any encyclopedia we might name) the idea of podcasting is defined by the nature of transmission, the practice of aggregation, and directing those aggregated files to an instrument that can be played at the will and the time of its potential audience. Now got that? Wikipedia (which you must read if you didn't get it here) says all that in about 400 words.
But what it means is this. Fifty people record their own voices each in a file of its own. Each of those fifty people locate the file as an enclosure (put it in an envelope) so that it can be transmitted to those people who subsribe to that feed. When your podcatcher calls the feed and finds an envelope, it is downloaded. Your podcatcher will go to as many of those 50 feeds of those fifty people as you like. When you connect your MP3 player to your computer you can then move all those Podcast files to your mp3. Then at your leisure you have a fantastic array of information, programs, whatever was put into those envelopes. Gone are the days when you have to listen to a radio at a set time to get the news, find more about second mortgages, or the state of the war in Iraq.
Forget about that for a minute and lets think about midnight on a hot summer night. It is 39 degrees C, your bed is wet with perspiration, you are so hot that you decide to get up and suck an ice block from the freezer. Ahhh! You can feel it already. That lovely sweet juice running down the inside of your neck. You swallow and the coolness of that juice is oh so good. But then you remember, since I cannot sleep what do I do? Yes, you guessed it, your podpaper, or is it your poddio, or your podzine whichever it is most like is waiting and ready to listen to.
There in the middle of the night you don your stereo headphones connected to your MP3 player (or if you are like me you now have an MP4 player on which you play your MP3 stuff). You sit out on the front verandah where you hear the hoot of an odd owl or two, and the screetch of a parrot being annoyed by its neighbour, and the sound of a father Kookaburra calling a loud warning sound to his sleeping wife and potential progeny. You start the MP4 player, the sound drowning out the sounds of the night, and there in its five hour array, you have podcast after podcast, after podcast, after podcast. You make a mental note, to unsubscribe to some of these feeds because there is too much to listen to.
This all stimulates my mind enough to begin thinking. When I set up my podcast (which dear reader I will do very soon) who will be my audience, and when will they assemble to listen to my dulcet tones? Or is the whole idea that by unleashing the broadcast of sound from the ever present regimen of time, we create for ourselves an unknown audience, in an unknown time, and with no idea of the overall effect, if any, of what it is we had to say. Will my podcast then be able to be used by whomever, wherever, for any reason?
Working in a fast company is going to my head, I think. I need to sit in a cold bath for a bit and cool it all down.
But what it means is this. Fifty people record their own voices each in a file of its own. Each of those fifty people locate the file as an enclosure (put it in an envelope) so that it can be transmitted to those people who subsribe to that feed. When your podcatcher calls the feed and finds an envelope, it is downloaded. Your podcatcher will go to as many of those 50 feeds of those fifty people as you like. When you connect your MP3 player to your computer you can then move all those Podcast files to your mp3. Then at your leisure you have a fantastic array of information, programs, whatever was put into those envelopes. Gone are the days when you have to listen to a radio at a set time to get the news, find more about second mortgages, or the state of the war in Iraq.
Forget about that for a minute and lets think about midnight on a hot summer night. It is 39 degrees C, your bed is wet with perspiration, you are so hot that you decide to get up and suck an ice block from the freezer. Ahhh! You can feel it already. That lovely sweet juice running down the inside of your neck. You swallow and the coolness of that juice is oh so good. But then you remember, since I cannot sleep what do I do? Yes, you guessed it, your podpaper, or is it your poddio, or your podzine whichever it is most like is waiting and ready to listen to.
There in the middle of the night you don your stereo headphones connected to your MP3 player (or if you are like me you now have an MP4 player on which you play your MP3 stuff). You sit out on the front verandah where you hear the hoot of an odd owl or two, and the screetch of a parrot being annoyed by its neighbour, and the sound of a father Kookaburra calling a loud warning sound to his sleeping wife and potential progeny. You start the MP4 player, the sound drowning out the sounds of the night, and there in its five hour array, you have podcast after podcast, after podcast, after podcast. You make a mental note, to unsubscribe to some of these feeds because there is too much to listen to.
This all stimulates my mind enough to begin thinking. When I set up my podcast (which dear reader I will do very soon) who will be my audience, and when will they assemble to listen to my dulcet tones? Or is the whole idea that by unleashing the broadcast of sound from the ever present regimen of time, we create for ourselves an unknown audience, in an unknown time, and with no idea of the overall effect, if any, of what it is we had to say. Will my podcast then be able to be used by whomever, wherever, for any reason?
Working in a fast company is going to my head, I think. I need to sit in a cold bath for a bit and cool it all down.
posted by Walter at 5:53 PM
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