Hack48.Connect with the Community

Hack 48. Connect with the Community

Keep in touch with the podcast community through newsgroups and message boards.

The best way to keep up on what's happening in the podcasting world is to be an active part of it. You should subscribe to these two message boards and mailing lists:

iPodder (http://iPodder.org/)

The iPodder site discussion board consists primarily of postings from Adam Curry about additions to the iPodder directory. The real discussions happen on ipodder-dev.

Podcast Alley (http://podcastalley.com/)

This is an excellent site for both its podcast directory and its bulletin board. Topics on the board include new podcast listings, technical talk, news, and article listings.

7.6.1. Yahoo! Groups

A number of Yahoo! Groups (http://groups.yahoo.com) mailing lists discuss podcasting. A sampling of the bigger ones are listed here:

ipodder-dev

The iPodder development Yahoo! Group. Ostensibly this group is about the development of iPodder, but in reality, it's a high-traffic list that talks about everything podcasting.

Podcasters

The second biggest podcasting list. It's almost indistinguishable in content from ipodder-dev.

Podcastrevolution

A smaller and newer podcast mailing list.

Videobloggers

This is an older mailing list that focuses on video blogging. But recent postings cover podcasting topics.

podcast-review

A small but growing mailing list that reviews the new podcasts on the block.

Registration on all of these is required, but it's free. That helps keep down the spam. Some of these require a free Yahoo! account to register. With others, you can register by email.

7.6.2. What You Can Offer

Podcasters are regular people who have day jobs just like you and me and everyone else. Most are not radio or audio professionals. So, by engaging in and contributing to these groups, you can work with all of us to raise our common skill level. Topics include everything from which microphones to choose and how to debug RSS, to how to tell great stories. Then there is the inevitable periodic war over where podcasting is going, or how, and even if, it can be commercialized [Hack #47].

I suggest that you hang back on the boards for a while; lurk, if you will. Get a sense of the proper form and how you can add value to the conversation. Then get in there and get involved.

7.6.3. Keeping Up-to-Date

Adam Curry's Daily Source Code (http://curry.com/) is the primary way to stay up-to-date on the world of podcasting. He plugs new podcasts regularly and is generally in the center of the storm. Dave Winer (http://www.scripting.com/) is another great resource for tracking new developments in podcasting.

Using Google's News service (http://news.google.com), you can subscribe to email alerts on words such as podcast and ipodder and receive email updates when stories appear on the newswires about these topics.

Blog aggregators such as Feedster (http://www.feedster.com/) and PubSub (http://www.pubsub.com/) are useful in tracking blog mentions of podcasting. These create custom RSS feeds that you can use in your aggregator or in newer versions of the Safari and Firefox browsers that support RSS. When new blog entries come up that match your search criteria, they are listed in the composite RSS feed that comes from the service.