I’ve had the house to myself this weekend, while Bobbie and Jake spend a bit of time with my sister Kerryn and her husband, Haydn in London. So I’ve spent large chunks of the weekend investigating podcasts – how to listen, what to listen to, and how to make a podcast and put it online.

First of all, it’s worth reiterating what I mean by podcast. There’s a useful definition here. Essentially, it’s a piece of audio that you can download – but more than that, it’s one that you subscribe to so that as each new show is available, your podcast software will automatically fetch it and make it available for you to listen to.

Typically, what you’d do is set your podcast software to download the shows you like while you sleep. In the morning, you just transfer them to your iPod, or similar mp3 device (I’m currently using a tiny little Creative Mu70 128Mb) and listen on the go.

Most of the shows are homemade affairs, but increasingly, public broadcasters are seeing the benefit of time-shifted listening and are making the shows available. I can really recommend NPR’s On The Media as one of the best.

I have to say, the biggest barrier to me as somebody who wants to start podcasting is the issue of server space and bandwidth. I’m lucky enough to have some webstorage at the university, but it’s on the slow side, and my bandwidth use is being fairly closely monitored. I suspect the speed issue has to do with the University’s fairly rigorous firewall – but I’m prepared to be completely wrong about that. Firewalls are not something I know enough about to be confident about statements like that.

That said, I had to try it out. I did intend to start podcasting Clayborne this weekend. You can already subscribe to the feed, and the first episode will be available in the next day or two. Unfortunately, as I mentioned on Friday, the folder of mp3 files is on the hard drive of my office computer and I came home without a copy.

But I couldn’t let a home alone weekend (with no family checks and restraints on my geek tendencies) go by without nutting out podcasting once and for all – so I made a repurposed version of the jazz show ‘It’s A Jazz Thing‘ as a bit of an experiment, and I’ve put it up as a podcast that you can subscribe to.

But the more I listen to podcasts, the more I realise that the medium is quite different to that of radio. How I listen to podcasts is different to the way I listen to radio shows. It’s more similar to the way I read blogs.

Podcasts tend to be more personal – more casual, conversational and – I guess – human than radio tends to be. So I think what I’ll probably end up doing is a podcast that’s more like this blog in tone – and far more speech-orientated than the jazz thing.

After all, there’s a lot to talk about – I have my portable minidisc so I can make these podcasts anywhere, and the editing software to trim all the crap out. Best of all, a speech-based podcast would be a much reduced burden on my outgoing bandwidth use, which I’m sure the University’s Content Lab people would appreciate.

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Saturday
108. Neil Young – Freedom Reprise (1989)
109. Mario Pavone – Remembering Thomas Knitting Factory (1999)

Today
110. Kenny Wheeler, Lee Konitz – Angel Song ECM (1997)