Podcast: Ben Hammersleya, writer for the Guardian newspaper, coined the word in February 2004 while searching for “a new word meaning ‘listening to audioblogs’” (Copestake, 2006).

Definition:  Podcasting (or podcasts), “enables users to quickly and easily download multimedia files, including audio and video, for playback on mobile devices including iPods and other MP3 players” (Bausch & Han, 2006, p. 1). Lefever, L. (2010). Podcasting in Plain English Podcast. [VodCast]. Common Craft LLC.

How it works: Technically, a podcast works through an RSS feed (Really Simple Syndication) which pulls down an.xml file containing the Internet address of the media source. Lefever, L. (2007). RSS in plain english. CommonCraft. This is read by a podcast aggregator, commonly referred to as a pod catcher. Apple Computer’s iTunes [ is the most popular pod catcher (“Podcasting to Hit Critical Mass,” 2005). Juice, another well-known aggregator [ [

Need: A need to add audio to blogging. The spoken word could add a new personal element to the media of blogging. The ability to transfer larger pieces of information and faster connection speeds led to audio blogs. Instead of writing thoughts, people recorded themselves speaking and posted it to their blogs as an MP3 file. Some audio blogs naturally evolved in to the first podcasts history. A need to automate the delivery and syncing of this content to portable audio players. A need for more efficiency.

Research - People Tristan Louis Dave Winer Adam Curry

Lead Thinkers: Tristan Louis drafted the initial concept of what would evolve into podcasting in October of 2000 (Wikipedia, 2006, History of Podcasting). The concept proposed the theoretical framework for amending the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) specification to distribute data files (Wikipedia, 2006, Tristan Louis). Dave Winer, an author of the RSS format, developed the technical specifications for a new element called “enclosure” that would pass the URL of a media file to a RSS aggregator for download (Wikipedia, 2006, Dave Winer, Contributions ). Adam Curry helped develop and promote the medium (Wikipedia, 2006, Adam Curry, Podcasting section). creating the first podcast, the Daily Source Code in August, 2004 (Newitz, 2005).

Research: Convincing Findings  From a user-creator perspective, Podcasting offers a degree of self-empowerment, control and autonomy. Huann and Thong (2006) note the “bottom up” approach to podcasting where internet users have the potential to develop and publish podcasts to the net quickly and easily without having to know complicated HTML code. From an academic perspective, podcasting offers the lecturer the potential to evolve into an educational broadcaster, instantly disseminating knowledge as and when it occurs. With a basic knowledge of the right technology, podcasts are relatively easy to produce.

Developmental Problems: If podcasting is to be supported successfully then sufficient IT resources are required (Alexander,2005). This includes both the necessary equipment and the software to be able to produce and publish the podcasts. The size of the podcast files, in particular, can be large and if uploading onto a VLE, this often has to be done using File Transfer Protocol (FTP). Due to compatibility issues, images embedded within the podcasts may not be full able to be the size on the VLE screen. There needs to be sufficient training to support staff in the development of podcasts (Brown, 2006). Staff need to be competent in each of the different and technical skills to be able to use efficiently.

Intended Market Owners of digital music players- It said that by 2010, three-quarters of all people who own portable digital music players will listen to podcasts, a growth from less than 15% last year. Higher education – Georgia College & State University (GC&SU) was among the very first campuses to put together an academic program using the iPods, when it launched a couple of pilot programs in 2002.

Marketing/Distributio n:  Apple said that by providing a directory of 3,000 podcast shows, it put podcasting into the mainstream. - Major international content providers, such as the BBC, ABC News, NBC News, Disney and even Nasa have started to make their programmers'- usually ones with no music - available as podcasts to download.

Distribution/Growth:  The audience growth is being fuelled by the rise in popularity of digital music players, and people's desire to take more control of their digital content, listening and watching what they want, when they want it.

References: Alexander, B. (2005) Podcasting and the Liberal Arts, The Newsletter of the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education [online], 4(3). Retrieved, Bausch, S., and Han, L. (2006) Podcasting gains an important foothold among U.S. adult online population [online]. Nielsen/NetRatings. Retrieved, netratings.com/pr/pr_ pdfhttp:// netratings.com/pr/pr_ pdf Brown, S. (2006) Student Affairs and Podcasting [online]. Student Affairs Online 7 (2). Retrieved, Copestake, S. (2006). How to create your own podcast. Personal Computer World. Retrieved July 27, 2006 from world/features/ /podcast-partyhttp:// world/features/ /podcast-party Huann, T. Y. and Thong, M.K. (2006) Audioblogging and Podcasting in Education [online}. Edublog.net. Retrieved, and%20podcasting.pdf and%20podcasting.pdf