Podcasting and iPodder

You may or may not have heard about podcasting and the program iPodder. For those who have not, podcasting is the concept of using RSS feeds to subscribe to articles that link to audio files instead of the normal textual information. This creates a list of audio files that users can subscribe to easily by saving the URL of the RSS feed. Then using a program like iPodder you can link these podcasts with your iTunes so that the audio are automatically uploaded to your iPod. That is podcasting in a nutshell, so why is this so interesting? Podcasting is starting a new way of potentially reading/listening to news, articles or sharing music. It has not caught on yet and therefore there are only a few podcasts available. Content developers are also realising just how hard it is to create audio-based news articles when compared to traditional text. I am surprised the no-one has create it yet but why is there not a text to speech converter included in this equation so that any RSS feed can be converted to a podcast feed. It will be interesting to see where this goes in the future.

Links
iPodder.org
Podcast.net