Podcasting Is Still Not Quite Ready For the Masses

[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: In this issue of the Digest, our regular correspondent Monty Solomon has colllected a number of articles from the media of interest on 'Podcasting', the relatively new technique for audio presentations on the net. I hope you will find this collection of articles interesting. PAT]

By WALTER S. MOSSBERG July 6, 2005

The process of receiving, and creating, blogs has gone mainstream and become quite simple. Anyone can compose and post a blog -- a personal, diary-like Web site filled with text and photos -- in a matter of minutes using free online services like Google's Blogger or Microsoft's MSN Spaces. Last month, I explained how to do it in my guide to blogging (see

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But text blogs are yesterday's news. The hottest new trend in personal online content creation is something called a podcast, essentially a short personal radio show or audio blog. They can be downloaded and played back on a computer or a portable music player like Apple's iPod, whence the genre draws its name.

Podcasts range from slick productions offered by big media companies and amateur broadcasters; to clever and entertaining offerings from smart, undiscovered talent; to crude diatribes and snooze-inducing lectures by people the mainstream media proved wise not to hire. Some are just talk, some include music. Some sound like they were recorded on a 1971-vintage RadioShack cassette recorder, others -- even from amateurs -- are studio-quality.

These audio blogs, once the province mainly of techies, took a big step toward the mainstream last week when Apple began offering thousands of them, free, through its market-leading iTunes music store and iTunes music software. Anyone can submit a podcast for distribution through iTunes, and any iTunes user can download it. The company doesn't charge a penny for listing or downloading podcasts.

So, this week, my assistant Katie Boehret and I set out to see how easy it is to get and create podcasts. The good news is that, with its iTunes move, Apple has made receiving podcasts as simple as downloading music. The bad news is that neither Apple nor anyone else has made it nearly as simple to create a podcast and get it online as it is to create and post a text and photo blog. Until that happens, podcasting won't be truly mainstream.

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