Podcasts

Today I am looking at podcasts.

Podcasts are, basically, videos online. But what makes them different is that poscasts are often kept on the organisation's or individual's website and tend to be informative in nature. They are "streamed" from the server, instead of pre-loaded, so people with poor internet service may have trouble veiwing them. Some podcasts require specific software to view them (though this is usually provided to download for free).

I am looking at podcasts by the Library of Congress.

Library of Congress (last updated 2010), The Library of Congress - Webcasts. Viewed 2nd September 2010. < http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/index.php >

The initial page of webcasts in quite compact and small. The individual pages are all set out neatly, with the player in the rough centre of the screen. It is seperated into broad subjects for ease of browsing. The on-site search engine also contains the ability to uise the webcasts section as a limiter, allowing the user to search just webcasts. I looked at a few webcasts, and they all played smoothly, despite being streams.

As well as being able to browse webcasts, there is also provided on the webcasts home page a list of popular and featured webcasts. I browsed through a few of the categories and after doing so I concluded that, while containing a great wealth of webcasts, browsing, even by subject was impractical becuase of the quantity of casts available. The on-site search is most likely the best way to search for specific webcasts.

- piff