Third Essay: Researching Podcasts

For this essay, I chose the Web 2.0 communication Medium of Pod-casts as my research topic. Pod-casts are a dynamic form of Web 2.0 technology and capability, and very much reflect the growing world of digital convergence. How did I find information on them? Like all college students doing research on the web, I started at the questionable information haven, Wikipedia, to find out what a Podcast is by definition. Learning that a pod-cast is simply the audio or video media that are put up on the web and made available for download onto personal computers, if I can then go out onto the world wild web and confirm the very info given by Wikipedia, I could then accept it as credible. But that alone won’t help me write my final essay, and ill have to get some firsthand experience with Podcasts themselves.
This is a newer technology, so when I went to the search engines, like Com-Abstracts made available through the University at Albany’s libraries, I didn’t find many scholarly journals or works that were helpful. So to find out the benefits and usefulness of pod-casts, and why they are so popular, I found it best to go directly to places which offer them through subscription or free download by the thousands. I went to Google and typed the word ‘Podcast’ into the search engine, which brought me to helpful sites. Podcast.com, Podcastalley.com, NPR's (National Public Radio) database, and of coarse Apple.com all gave good clarification for what Pod-casts are, how they work, the software you need in order to download them, the information you give in order to subscribe to the websites, and of course, the content that make up most Pod-casts. Some of these websites even pulled there definitions on the about page from Wikipedia, so I felt even better about that being my starting point.
After Google, I went to browse over the content on the Yahoo search engine. Kaye and Medoff refer to Yahoo in their 2001 reading on ‘how search engines work’ as “The mother of all portals” (pg. 2). So I found it necessary to compare the Google and Yahoo searches and see which links came up first in both. If certain links show up twice within the first or second page unsponsored, I know I could consider them credible and resourceful. Sure enough, the links to Podcast Alley, Podcast dot, and Apple were all on the top search results for both sites, along with podcast links for Slate Magazine and the New York Times which I just haven’t used. In the final essay, I plan to discuss how the amount of podcasted content continues to grow by the thousands every day. To explain or confirm the growth, I visited the sites of major news stations which are now offering new Pod-casts daily, like CNN, MSNBC, ESPN, and CBS. I’m citing the web-page, Chinesepod.com as a useful recourse in showing how pod-casting can be educational, offering over 1500 language lessons on how to speak Chinese. The last website I visited for pod-casting news was ironically, PodcastingNews.
The only problem I ran into during my research was when I wanted to find sights or articles that gave information on the history of Pod-casts. When I went to search engines like Google, and typed in the words ‘Podcast’ and ‘History’, the first link to come up was the History Channels web page, and their available pod-casts. All the links below it for the first two pages were similar history sites, which were simply offering them, rather then sights offering the history of them. In the later point in my searching, I began using Ebsco, my last hope for finding some scholarly analysis on Podcasting. Instead of finding a journal of some kind, here I found something I think is better. This article published by author Scott Sigler, who after 100 rejections by publishers was able to podcast his novel to popularity, receiving a 3 book contract from Crown Publishers. This article not only gave insight to what podcasting can do for exposure in the online community, but the positive and negative affects it could possibly have on other forms of media and entertainment.
At this point, I feel that I have enough knowledge on the technology that I can successfully give an accurate and thorough description of the medium with clarity and quality for the final essay. I’ll be able to state the positive and negative implications of the Medium, and ill form my own opinions and thesis on podcasts based on credible sources. I’m actually looking forward to shedding light some light on them.