The use of podcasts in enterprise 2.0
Another way to keep informed on what happens in the Net is the use of podcasts. Let us see in detail what they are and how companies can use them to their advantage.
The word podcasting is born from the joint of iPod with broadcasting, and defines the action of automatically downloading audio or video files from clients, which are often free, through a feed aggregator, a system that was used for the first time by Adam Curry, an MTV America veejay. The downloaded files are thus called podcasts.
Basically, it works in the same way as the aggregation of news through RSS feeds, that we have already seen, with the only difference that this material is listened to rather than read.
In order to listen to a podcast, you have to subscribe to a broadcast inserting it into your feed reader. Once you have downloaded it, you can listen to it with an audio player or synchronizing your iPod.
A very rich and interesting source is iTunes Store where, in a dedicated section, you can find a long list of podcasts, both audio and video. A lot of companies and their representatives have made a clever use of it. If you want to have an idea of how many contents are already available on iTunes, just make a search on a keyword and you will get a shower of results.
But this is not the only source to draw from. The presence of podcasts is more and more important also in several web sites, in information sites and particularly in journalism, in the US above all.
You can find a good example in this ZDNet post, where the passage from web 2.0 to enterprise 2.0 is discussed but, instead of being reported with words, it is with a 25 minute long podcast.
Tags: podcast