my colleague christian had sent me a link to ipodder: basically a really simple syndication (RSS) client that knows about “MP3 audio enclosures” — think of audio blogging instead of text blogging. the process of offering MP3 audio “blogs” is known as podcasting…and wikipedia describes it quite nicely:
a podcast can be thought of an audio magazine subscription […] it can also be thought of as the internet equivalent of timeshift-capable digital video recorders (DVRs) such as TiVo, which let users automatically record and store television programs for later viewing.
despite podcasting being a fairly recently developed idea and technolgy, there are already a number of feeds available all over the internet with new ones popping up daily.
unfortunately, ipodder for linux doesn’t seem to be ready for time prime yet — when i try it, it doesn’t really work as expected. so i look for a better linux client…and find bashpodder.shell which is a couple of lines of bash shell script using wget. leon pennington has created a very nice GUI configuration tool for KDE to make the setup process more GUIish.
setting it all up takes a couple of minutes and i’m in business: the first podcast feed i subscribe to is the observer podcast…and then WGBH’s morning stories…and then BBC radio 4’s in our time…and then…
