Podcasting? Yea its another buzzbuzz artifact word of the iPlod degeneration-ecccch, but the

idea is something that has been a long time in tweaking. Put simply podcasting is a way to automagicaly snag regularly posted audio reports from folks who have something worth hearing or from musicians who put out a steady stream of goodies and put those sound files someplace you can listen to them.

Yes, some of you are already wondering if you have heard this one before, and in fact you have but now of course it has the letters POD in it so somehow its new, amazingly new, really really new and by gum the world is going to change because of it. Imagine a flood of audio files form all the folks who blog talking about all the stuff they blog about because you know each and every word spoken is going to be precious and unique not to be missed by any intelligent thinking person. In short , and lets repeat this till it sinks in, 95% fecal matter 5% good.

So what do you need to be apart of the revolutionary brandnewjimmy? No, you don’t need an iPlod, lets get that out of the way right off. If done right all you should need to do is make a list of sites with RSS feeds that you want to monitor every day for new goodies and then have those feeds gone thru looking for new goodies and finally have those goodies put somewhere you can get to them easily for listening.

I can hear some of you regulars mouthing the words “Wget” and by gosh by gum you are right on the money. Enter BashPodder

BashPodder is about 44 lines of shell scripting with this gem at its heart…..

wget -q -P $datadir “$url”

All you do is add the rss feeds you want to monitor in a file called bp.conf and run the script bashpodder.shell every day or so (you can even automate this with a single line in a crontab). Let it rip and come back latter to find the audio files in neat dated directories with playlist files to tie them all up if you want.

I love tech like this. It strips the BS off the marketing buzz and gets down to the heart of the matter. I also love this logo…

OK so if you must have some sort of graphical easy to use front end for your podcasting needs, try BPConf. This is a nice kde based gui that uses BashPodder as an engine to do the magic. Enjoy.

“No, I’d say that of the world’s economies, there’s more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don’t think that those incentives should exist.” Bill Gates

Playlists and Archives for Thomas Edison’s Attic: “WFMU 91.1 fm 90.1 fm wfmu.org

The audio curator at Edison National Historic Site rummages through the archives of the legendary Edison Laboratory of West Orange, New Jersey. Tune in for Edison cylinder and disc record rarities, many not heard since ‘the old man’ himself stashed them away, featuring: Tin Pan Alley pop songs, ragtime, vaudeville comedy sketches, flapper dance bands, old-time country tunes, historic classical music, laboratory experiments and other artifacts – all dating from 1888 through 1929.”

The 12/07/04 show in MP3 format