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Learning to Build a Podcast-Defining Terms
By Larry Hendrick | May 14, 2005
In this series of learning to build a podcast, it is important to understand some of the terms used. Acronyms seem to be the biggest hurdle to understanding technical information. Most of the technical terms have names that are long and obscure to the layman. Eventually the technically astute can put together full sentences without using any complete words. This is an art and should not be tried at home. Experts have spent decades and millions studing this phenomenon, but still have no answers for the meek.
This list will not be complete because of the very nature of this endeavor, but I will begin the list and add to it as I learn new terms and definitions. It will be a live list with updates as needed. A good resource for this information can be found at Wikipedia.
Here is the beginning:
Podcast
An audio recording made available on the Internet. What sets this apart from a radio station recording is the ability to use an RSS program to automatically download these to your computer.
RSS
Really Simple Syndication. A way to make content on the Internet available for distribution. RSS agregators can monitor these “feeds” and let you know when new content is posted.
WAV files
An audio format that can record and store audio files in a “lossless” format. These usually are large files with a high quality associated with them.
MP3 files
An audio format like above, but with a possible compression of 10:1. This allows audio files to be small enough to move around on the internet.
Blog
Weblog is shortened to blog frequently. It refers to a website like this one that have “posts” made regularly. There are many kinds of blogs with many different topics. Volumes have been written on this and a Google search for the term “weblogs” returns 32,200,000 hits. That’s a lot.
Hits
This is a term that refers to the number of page views a website has. With you looking at this page, it has recorded a “hit.”
–more to come–
Topics: Podcasting |

