Hi, my name is Chris Enns, I run Lemon Productions, a podcast editing and production business, and this is my story. Today is Friday, September 20th, 2019. For the next six episodes, I'm going to answer the basic what, why, who, when, where of podcasting, in that order.
So today I'm going to cover what is a podcast, which to be honest, you already know likely if you've looked at this title in the podcast player you're listening in, and chances are if you're listening and subscribed to this, you probably already know what a podcast is. But this podcast isn't just for you, it's also for the machines, the Googles, Bing's, and Overcasts and podcasts that will slurp up my content and spit it back out to people searching for what a podcast is. It's all about the SEO.
By the way, if you've got questions about podcasting that I don't answer directly in this series, I'd love to answer it in the future. You can send in your questions via Twitter, where you can find me @Lemonproduction, or on Instagram where I'm lemon production CA. Lemon then productions, then a C and an A, like the letter A, not the Canadian A. So when I asked on Twitter, how do you define a podcast?
What do you think of when someone asks you listen to podcasts, a couple of responses were from at action J said podcast is a recurring audio show where you can listen to people you like talk about stuff for the purpose of drowning out hearing people you don't like and at jail underscore Braden said a podcast is radio that I can rewind, which are both true and probably even more. So podcast is audio that you can listen to whenever you want, generally wherever you want.
Usually you can subscribe to it with software, an app on your phone, tablet or computer. Back in the day, we had to dig for RSS feeds and copy and paste that into a special RSS reader app in order to be notified when new episodes of a podcast came out. These days in 2019 podcasts are much easier to find, try out, subscribe to and be notified when new episodes are released. But before we get ahead of ourselves, let's define some basic terms.
A podcast as defined by dictionary.com is a digital audio file made available on the internet for downloading to a computer or mobile device, typically available as a series new installments of which can be received by subscribers automatically. Now it used to be confusing because Apple sold an iPod around the time podcasts became a thing and some folks thought you could only listen to a podcast on an iPod. That was never the case.
A podcast is the whole show, like radio but on demand so you can listen, and listen again if you want, whenever you want. And you don't have to have a radio to listen, it's generally a collection of episodes, possibly broken up into multiple seasons, just like a TV show. Episodes are the recordings that make up a podcast. Episodes might be published daily, weekly, monthly or at random, depending on the podcast.
As an aside, there are some out there who want to call episodes pods, but that's just wrong. I wouldn't mock them too much for being wrong, but it's wrong all the same. There are so many apps that play podcasts now that it would be impossible to list all of them. Android phones and iPhones come with podcast apps pre-installed these days, so those are great places to start. Pocketcast is a popular app that's available for both Android and iOS, it's actually my app of choice.
Overcast is also a popular iPhone-only app that you can get on the App Store. You can also listen to most podcasts in your web browser on your computer. It won't necessarily track which episodes you've listened to or notify you of new episodes, but it's still an easy way to try out a podcast before you subscribe, just like this episode of this very podcast is available at www.podcast.lemonproductions.ca, just the number 6 because it's episode 6.
Regardless of which app you choose, podcasts will all sound the same. Not literally sound the same, but the app itself won't determine how well or how easy it is to listen to a podcast. You can switch podcast apps in the future without any penalty or issues, other than possibly losing which episodes of a show you've already listened to. There are podcasts published by individuals, friends, celebrities, businesses, all the way up to big corporations and everything in between.
Most podcasts are public and available for anyone to listen to, but some are private, maybe for a business's CEO who sends out weekly audio messages to the staff, or locked behind a paywall of some sort for members only. You can get the daily news, the weekly news, the highlights of last month, TV and movie caps, rewatches and analysis, health and wellness, sports, literally any topic you can think of.
And plenty of podcasts are about things that you didn't even think anyone would want to talk about, never mind listen to. That's what's so great about podcasts, in my opinion. Much like blogs before them, there's no gatekeeper or media department head you have to go to for approval before you can publish a podcast. You could record something into your phone right now and within minutes have it available on the internet for anyone in the world to subscribe to, your very own podcast.
These days, almost anyone can, and it seems like almost everyone does, make a podcast. There are so many different apps and services to create podcasts that can be a bit overwhelming to know where to start. But again, I'm getting ahead of myself. In the next episode I'll be talking about why you might want to start a podcast, we'll get to the how of podcasting in an episode after that, that'll be episode 8.
So for now you can find all the details for this podcast on the web at podcast.lemonproductions.ca, including the various ways to subscribe. You can reach me on Twitter at Lemon Production, or on Instagram where I'm LemonProductionsCA. This episode is written, edited, produced, and mixed by me, Chris Enns, and my theme song is from Sounds Like an Earful Music Supply. This episode's lemon recipe is Lemon Poppy Seed Muffins, which you can find in the show notes. Have a great day, bye.