Rosie's Ramblings

By Sandra Rosenzweig
     
      [Pod]Casting Your Lot
      I must admit that in the early days of podcasting (last Tuesday, was it?), I wasn't terribly impressed with the new medium. I didn't see the point of listening to someone else's playlist of favorite songs or some poor schlepp's adenoidal pontifications on the future of Apple's Macintosh operating system.
     
      It was easier for me to figure out why people make podcasts than why people listen to them. Some podcasters are in it to master a new technology. Some are in it for the money that may come down the line. And some are in it for fame, if not fortune. That's because podcasting involves a distribution network; you're not just talking to your mother. Think of podcasting as downloadable radio. There are podcast syndicators such as iTunes (www.apple.com/itunes), liberated syndication (www.libsyn.com/directory), and Odeo (www. odeo.com). But still, listeners need to be able to download and listen to the words. If we're talking radio, we're talking radio receivers, long ago shortened to radio. For podcasts, we need podcast receivers. The difference between radio and podcast programs is that for radio, you have to listen when they are broadcast (unless you figure out a way to record them). With podcasts, you can listen immediately, but you don't have to. (Your receiver downloads them to, say, a flash media card, and you stick that into a portable media player such as Digital Networks' Rio Forge or Rio Carbon; Creative Labs' Creative Zen Vision:M; or, I didn't forget, an Apple iPod. Anything that takes flash media cards and plays mp3 files will do-even a Palm LifeDrive or a Dell Axim x51v or other Windows Mobile device, known in these precincts as a Pocket PC.) Unfortunately, because the downloading process is so automated and easy, podcasts are a filthy habit-it doesn't take long to fill your entire flash memory card or even hard disk with 20MB files.
     
      Still, there was nothing compelling about podcasts to me until I discovered Chinesepod, which is the best Chinese conversationlearning resource I've ever found, excluding my teacher. I know you're probably not that interested in studying conversational Chinese, but I feel entitled to discuss Chinesepod.com because there's also a Frenchpodclass.com, Instaspanish.com, Englishpod.com, Japanesepod101.com, RadioArkivo. org (for Esperanto), Babelpod.com (a matchmaking site, of sorts, that helps speakers in more than 20 languages find a teacher or fellow student to practice with and also language podcasts). The point is, podcasting is the best way to learn a language outside of private lessons, one-on-one. You listen to native speakers conversing, but at your speed. Commentators give you punctuation tips or new vocabulary, especially colloquialisms.
     
      So, if podcasts work so well for languages, to what other educational purposes might they be put (besides letters home to Mom)? Why not plawdcasts-law podcasts? (Plawd plays off Reed Smith appellate and intellectual property lawyer Denise Howell's blawgs, or law blogs.) And, indeed, there are a few plawdcasts. The problem is, the several lawyers who started plawdcasts abandoned them after a few months. No time.
     
      Podcasters have learned from their forebears. Or at least from those who have blogged before. Blogging didn't really go mainstream until Google added blogs to its searches (blogsearch.google.com). Podcasting, which in fact has been kicking around for two or three years, has had its own search directories from the beginning. Check out blawg.org, which includes blawgs and plawdcasts; www.podnova.com, a search engine; http://www.podcast. net; www.podcastalley.com, another podcast directory; blawgreview.com, which also includes plawdcasts; and iPodder, formerly Indiepodder, at //ipodder.org, where you also will find the iPodder receiver program (download iPodder from the right-hand sidebar).
     
      Which brings us to podcast receivers, the programs that download your shows daily. Many people choose Apple's iTunes because they already use it. I prefer Juice, an open-source, easy-to-use program (http://juicereceiver.sourceforge. net). How do you find podcasts? Juice links you to the top directories and search engines to help you find old favorites and new adventures. Or just download directly from your favorite podcasting sites-and then don't forget to listen.
     
      Raise your hands out there: How many of you want to hear some law professor drone on about the finer points of trusts? On the other hand, how many of you would enjoy hearing an audio lesson on closing arguments? Or listening to some famous lawyer's magnificent summation in a famous criminal case? And then there's CLE. It's a gold mine, I tell you, a gold mine.
     

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