With traditional media's rush to the web this year, many executives who were successful in television broadcasting or magazine publishing are now stumbling in ignorance when it comes to understanding how the Internet works.
Let me help out the problem with a few easy tips about an especially confusing concept, podcasting.
Podcasting is a simple way to allow users to subscribe to the audio content you make available on the web, and download it automatically to their iPods. Hence the word "pod" in podcasting.
If you are using a blog CMS like Wordpress, and uploading audio through it, you may be podcasting, and not even know it. Many feedreaders like Bloglines will detect the audio enclosure in the feed and provide their own flash based audio player for users to click on.
A specialized feed reader like Odeo is made specifically for subscribing to podcasts. One feature of Odeo that I enjoy is the ability to embed their Flash player in my own blog for my readers. For instance, here's a player that pulls from XXL Magazine's podcast:
Podcasting is powerful because it makes web-based audio portable and shareable, a definite break in the way multimedia on the web used to be treated, in the pre-YouTube era.
However, if a website owner is unintentionally podcasting, and wants the preserve bandwidth and/or force users to come only to their site to listen to the audio, their are ways to stop the blog CMS from spitting out enlcosures in the feed.
It is unnecessary to contact the individual users of the podcasts and threaten them with cease and desist letters. It is especially ridiculous to send C&D letters to someone about reused audio that is already infringing on the copyrights of music artists, i.e. the pirated tracks found on many music websites.
If you want to learn more about podcasting, and other new web technologies, call me at (646) 706-0570.
Big up for the site! If you want classic check http://musicselections.wordpress.com/. Peace
Posted by: Marty | 2006.12.10 at 11:29 AM