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Tech Tips Podcast Information

By Miguel Guhlin

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Driving to and from work, I often wished for ways I could listen to experts on topics I was personally, as well as professionally, interested in.

That is now possible through the use of audio blog entries, also known as "podcasts." Podcasts are an easy way of publishing audio files to the Internet. More importantly, you are able to subscribe to podcasts and listen to them as they become available. This activity is known as "podcatching." Of course, you do not have to subscribe to podcasts such as TechTips. You can always play them via your Web Browser. Special software to "catch" podcasts — a.k.a. "podcatching" — for listening is available below.

Take a moment to subscribe to the TechTips weekly podcast by getting and installing a copy of the free "podcatching" software for your computer's operating system (e.g. Windows, Mac, or Linux), and the enter the URL or web address for the XML or RSS feed. This will immediately give you a list of available podcasts you can listen to. Note that if you have iTunes installed on your computer, you can also use that. However, in some school districts, iTunes has been banned because of music sharing. Instead, try one of these free, open source software programs.

Software available for podcatching includes the following:

Windows and Macintosh - Juice

Linux - iPodder

To subscribe to TechTips, copy-n-paste the following address into a new subscription in Juice or iPodder:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/techlearning_techtips

While you may not need any extra software to listen to these podcasts, you should consider installing a copy of the free VLC Media Player (http://www.videolan.org/vlc). It is available for Macintosh, Windows, and Linux and will allow you to listen to many of the audio--and video--formats podcasts appear in, such as MP3 and OGG.