Podcasts

Today I was thinking about all the new ways we get our news... the New York Times online, news applications on our iphones and blackberries, the Kindle, etc. What I haven't thought about are podcasts that we can download straight to our ipods. Podcasts have been around for several years and are very easy to download and listen to or watch. According to apple.com (http://www.apple.com/itunes/whatson/podcasts/) a podcast "is a free free video or audio series — like a TV or radio show — that you download from iTunes and play on your computer, iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV." You subscribe to podcasts and they are automatically downloaded to your iTunes library. Podcasts can be updated daily, weekly or monthly. There are podcasts available for pretty much any topic or interest. On the iTunes Top 100 Podcasts list are almost a dozen different NPR podcasts, The New York Times: Front Page, The Economist, 60 Minutes, Global News by BBC, NBC Nightly News, ABC Nightly News, and President Obama's Weekly Address and Key Speeches. All of these are available to watch at your leisure and can be saved or deleted whenever you want. The best thing about Podcasts is that they are FREE and can provide you with extra info about endless topics and interests.

Customizable news has been talked about as a thing of the future and the direction that news will eventually take. But, podcasts are pretty much that. They can be used for entertainment or your source for news. NPR, The New York Times, The Onion, Reuters, and CNN all have podcasts. In between listening to Anderson Cooper you can watch a "The Best of YouTube" video or learn Spanish. You can quickly find out what's on the front page of the NYT on your way to work, without picking up the paper. 

Podcasts are another source for information readily and easily available to us. We should all utilize this feature of iTunes and our iPods.