Kurt Shintaku's Blog

I was talking to some customers the other day and was surprised to discover that they didn’t know what Blogcasting (aka podcasting) was.

If you’d like a quick overview of Blogcasting, check out our web site on the topic here:
http://www.microsoft.com/events/teched2005/podcast.mspx

For the undoctrinated, podcasting is kinda like a ghetto version of "TiVo for audio on the web".  Blogcasts are audio files filled with different content from different places.  These audio files are downloaded on a scheduled basis via special "blogcast" software on people’s computers and often times replicated to people’s portable music players.

Podcast content ranges from:

• Music with DJ’s
• Talk radio formats
• Technology discussions
• Soap operas
• …and other miscellaneous rantings & ravings from assorted lunatics on the web.

Some blogcasts are actually sponsored by vendors or 3rd party companies that get advertising consideration for their monetary contributions to the "show".   Others have absolutely no support whatsoever other than the person doing the ‘blogcasting’, so needless to say, there’s an awful lot of garbage out there to listen to.  It makes it difficult to sort the ‘wheat from the chaff’ without kissing a lot of frogs.

Personally, I download 10 or so blogcasts daily that I’ve found to be ‘interesting’ to my Toshiba Tablet PC M200 and subsequently sync the content to my Pocket PC Phone or my Rio Carbon. 

(The Rio Carbon by the way is a GREAT Music Player if you don’t have one.  It’s SUPER thin and light so it makes a great workout-at-the-gym device.  It also supports Windows Media format which typically compresses 50% smaller than MP3 format allowing you to store twice as much content as an iPod Mini, has 20hrs of play back battery time, stores 5GB of audio content, shows up as a hard drive on Windows computers, and costs only $120 from http://www.broadmarkets.com/store/mp3players/riocarbonr.htm)

Here’s a few of the Microsoft blogcasts that I download daily:

• The Microsoft Log – http://microsoft.quicksurf.com/wp-rss2.php?cat=7
• Major Nelson’s XBox Live – http://feeds.feedburner.com/MajorNelsonblogcast-wma
• The Tablet PC Show – http://www.thepodcastnetwork.com/tabletpc/feed
• The Microsoft Developer Show – http://www.thepodcastnetwork.com/msdev/feed
• The Media Center Show – http://www.thepodcastnetwork.com/mediacenter/feed
• IT Conversations "Microsoft" section – http://www.itconversations.com/rss/category-rss.php?k=microsoft&e=1
• Microsoft TechEd Podcast – http://www.microsoft.com/winme/TechEd/TechEdPodcast.xml

Here’s some non-MS specific podcasts that I listen to:

• Geek News Central – http://www.geeknewscentral.com/podcast.xml
• Ziff Davis’ Between the Lines – http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/wp-rss2.php?cat=12

Here’s some Windows XP blogcast/podcast client software that I use:

• Doppler – http://www.dopplerradio.net/?page_id=64
• iPodder – http://www.ipodder.org

For Windows Mobile Pocket PC or Smartphone:

• Skookum – http://msmobiles.com/news.php/3759.html
• smartFeed – http://www.smartfeed.org/