What's a podcast, anyway?

"What's all this new crap I see on this guy's blog?" If you are familiar with podcasting, you may skip this post.

By using the Audioblog.com function in association with Blogger, I now have the ability to post audio and video to this blog and to publish that audio and video to any podcast-capable player in the world. I can phone in an audio post, or take pictures or movies with my camera phone and post those. Or I can upload stuff I've pre-recorded, like something I might do in my home studio. It's really pretty cool.

(And in case you hadn't noticed, then it is my pleasure to inform you that such technology will bring your movable-type printing presses to a great, grinding, bucking halt. And your lie-spewing TV newsrooms, too. That's too bad...)

But regarding this blog... In short, you may keep your life simple and find any of my text, audio, and video here at this blog at ckpi.blogspot.com.

But if you want to get fancy --and I sometimes like to get fancy, so maybe you do, too-- then you can subscribe to this CKPI "feed" by clicking on this button: Or you can paste this link into your podcast-capable player: http://ckpi.audioblog.com/rss/chris_king_pop_icon_podcast.xml

So what's a podcast anyhow? I kind of discovered this whole podcasting thing a bit late, so I'm still getting a handle on it myself. But I think this is true enough for our purposes: The term "podcast" derives from the Apple IPod. That's a portable audio player that plays music and audio programs from the Internet. You can connect your IPod to your computer and download all the new audio from the feeds that you have subscribed to. Subscribing to a feed is usually free and is as simple as telling your podcast-capable player to gather all the media for a feed. So every morning, I check my player and listen to all the feeds that I have subscribed to.

A podcast-capable player doesn't have to be an expensive IPod, or any other hardware player for that matter; many free music programs also function as podcast-capable players. Remember that I'm using Yahoo Music for the music for this show? The Yahoo Music Engine allows you to subscribe to podcasts. (It only does audio --no video.)

ITunes, by Apple, is a player that lets you listen to podcasts, in addition to listening to licensed music. ITunes does video as well as audio.

So... If you want to keep your life simple, just go to this blog. You'll never miss anything. But if you can tolerate some complexity in your life in exchange for convenience, then subscribe to the podcast using your player of choice.

That's it! Have fun.