Podcasts

First of all, I was excited to learn something new. I never knew that the POD in "podcasting" stands for "Personal On Demand". It makes sense!

My only other experience with podcasts up to this point, was listening to "Savage Love" on my friend's computer using iTunes last year. I don't like leaving any task undone, so I focused my energy on "helping" my friend catch-up all of the archived sessions that she missed even though I was not too fond of the subject matter.

I love listening to NPR on the radio, so to complete Thing #20, I wanted to subscribe to one of their podcasts in order to find out how different it is to listen to via the computer versus the radio.

To find a podcast, I found the "Arts & Entertainment" category and chose "American Experience." I got ready to subscribe but realized that I did not have a program to listen to the podcast. I remembered that I used Bloglines to track my RSS feeds, so I logged on to my account to see if I could use it for tracking podcasts as well.

I found the instructions to add a podcast and then located the page where I could enter in a podcast URL. Then I copied and pasted the URL address of the American Experience podcast and subscribed; that was pretty easy. I noticed that I am the only subscriber. I find that hard to believe since it is such a widespread program.

Next, I added a feed to the "Tech Talk" podcast from the Post Gazette site. I read the blog frequently so the podcast should compliment written information well. Bloglines made this process easier when I went to add another podcast. All I had to do was click on the "add" button on the open tab, paste the URL into the blank box, and hit the "subscribe" button. Now the only problem is finding the time to catch up on all of the previous podcasts that I missed!

I'm glad that I found another use for Bloglines. I did not want to download any software to my computer or register for another website. I like sites that serve multiple purposes. Bloglines organizes all of the feeds in a structured way. The only problem is that the RSS feeds and podcast feeds are grouped together, which can make it confusing if I want to access one or the other.

I look forward to finding other podcasts to listen to on my home computer.