Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you had a good holiday season and spent some time away from the keys.
A few developments of note this morning- first, NetNewsWire's new beta adds podcasting support, so users of this Mac-based feedreader can get their podcasting jones on in a common environment with their RSS feeds. Nice update and I'll check it out for a while, although personally I've settled down on Sage again after brief trips thru NetNewsWire, PulpFiction, FeedDemon (which I still do use from time to time) the combination of Sage and Firefox Bookmarks Synchronizer keep all my machines in synch rather nicely. Since I'm an audiobook junkie, I don't listen to podcasts *that* often anyway. Check it out ASAP if you're a NetNewsWire junkie, tho- although I had a few little bugs here and there it seems to be shaping up nicely. If you're not RSS-wired, you may note that recent surveys show the mainstream web world is becoming much more interested in exploring the 'blogosphere in recent months. Great time to engage!
Forgive me for asking but WTF is podcasting? I'm using the NNW beta and I read the blurb but it doesn't really tell me what it *is*...
In short, IIRC it's a term coined by Adam Curry for using RSS feeds to point at audio 'blogs (in mp3 format- for downloading and listening to on your iPod), the term is a not-terribly-cunning amalgamation of 'iPod' and 'broadcasting'. I'm not sure that's a great definition tho, but fortunately I just noticed there's a related wikipedia entry available I should probably read:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasting