Okay, so I said I was going to start a How To Blog 101 series. I apologize for the delay. Among the many hats I wear, Geek happens to be one of them for better or for worse and depending on who you are talking to.

I got caught up in learning more about Podcasting and that took some time away from my original intent to write up some Blogging 101 articles. What is Podcasting? Podcasting is a spin on the word Broadcasting and iPod. When you broadcast you are distributing information across a wide area of recievers. The obvious example would be radio and television. Well Podcasting is distributing media rich content like audio and video as attachment in your RSS feed.

You can essential syndicating your media files along with your content in your RSS feeds. This is accomplished via RSS enclosures. An RSS enclosure is simply a file attachment in your RSS feed. The RSS element or tag within RSS defines your attachment by identify the content type, date of publishing and media file size.

What's really cool is that podcasting software called media aggregators is available that can scan your RSS feeds for enclosures, download them automatically and synch them with your media player device. Podcasting is reportedly about 6 months old although support for RSS has been available since the early days or RSS development. However, Podcasting started out as the delivery of internat audio files to Mac iPods for later replay and so the term Pod and Podcasting was coined.

This term is misleading a bit and a new term I'm sure will be added to our tech lexicon but Podcasting applies to portable media player that can play mp3. What is better still is the fact that you don't have to download your enclosures automatically, you can schedule your enclosure downloads with the right media aggregator software and you also don't have to load them to your portable media or mp3 player. You can download them and add to the playlist of your software media player like Windows Media Player, WinAmp or Real Audio RealPlayer.

Hmmm...I like the term Blogcasting myself :-) Anyway...

Support for RSS enclosures isn't widely support yet in most RSS aggregators (or RSS newsfeed readers) but support is being added real soon to RSS readers like Nick Bradbury's FeedDemon and NewzCrawler.

This post includes a test Podcast and is not polished at all. I may include a few clips for the blogging 101 series. Stay tuned as I will start the blogging 101 series soon. I don't want to stop my momentum with learning more about Podcasting. :-)

Here's what is great about BlogHarbor who hosts this blog here. They provide support for RSS enclosures automatically. When you attach a media file your blog your blog enty items, the RSS enclosure information is automatically to your item when it is syndicated. BlogHarbor also uses dynamic RSS feed creation. This is powerful because they BlogHarbor does is not only provide you with a main feed, but BlogHarbor also creates category feeds for you. This means to each category you create also gets a syndication link associated with it.

Your readers can simply subscribe to specific channels of content with your site. Depending on how your arrange your site content, readers can filter out topics that aren't as relevant for them with the context of your overall site content. This is can be great for your Podcasts. You can create a category for your Podcasts and allow your readers to subscribe to channel dedicated to your media content. Very cool stuff indeed.

Here are a few resources to learn more about the Podcasting phenomenon:

Podcasting - Are You Ready for Media Rich RSS? I've placed additional coverage of Podcasting here. I've also listed a bevy of Podcasting resources here as well to further your learning.

What is Podcasting and Why Should You Care? Well, Contentious Blog will tell what Podcasting is and why you really should care. She has excellent coverage of Podcasting along with a series of excellent links to further your learning and understanding of this very exciting aspect of RSS and Media content distribution.