Blogcast

A blogcast is simply the combination of a blog and podcast into a single Web site. A blog is a weblog, or journal, that is available on the Internet. A podcast is an audio file that is shared with visitors or subscribers to your site. A Blogcast enables you to easily create both. You don’t have to choose one or the other. In addition, with a Blogcast, you can freely add text, photos, and music to your blogcast entries.

A blogcast is a portmanteau of words for two better known media types, the blog and the podcast.

Simply put, a blogcast is an individual blog post or article with an attached audio and/or video file associated with it immediately available for download to any mp3 player, Web browser, or RSS reader .

History
In 2005, CNET used the term blogcast for Supernova 2005 . However, references to the term blogcast are seen as far back as 2001. [http://groups.google.com/group/uk.games.video.xbox/browse_thread/thread/2354bb24f3fb7daa/82e94f6496f98bf8?lnkst&qblogcast&rnum=1#82e94f6496f98bf8]. The term "blogcast" first originated in September, 2001, when the BlogTV.com blog service, originally founded by blogger Austin Chase , began offering "blogcast" accounts to end-users desiring to integrate audio and video into their blog posts.

Evan Williams, the co-founder of Blogger.com (a Google.com service) , started an Internet meme using the phrase, "this is a test of the emergency blogcast system," on October 10, 2001 ; unbeknownst to Evan, other bloggers would soon begin utilizing the term blogcast in their blog posts making the phrase a soon to be household word.

Brian S. Tucker designed a website called The Blogcast Repository (www.blogcastrepository.com). The website is targeted to IT professionals and Microsoft related videos were uploaded and displayed for free. A person could post a topic on their blog and then link to the video to demonstrate the technology.

In early 2006, web designer Aaron Murray realized that podcasting could venture outside of the Apple iTunes realm by making podcasts searchable with search engines. This was accomplished by video blogging with text summaries called "shownotes". This realization came in spite of the fact that podcasting had been very popular before it was supported by Apple iTunes, and had always featured shownotes posted on blogs.

After working on the project for a few weeks, Mr. Murray started using the term “blogcast” to describe the searchable podcast-blog combination, and the term saw some uptake among his fellow web designers.

The first audio-video blogcasting tests confirmed that search engines do indeed index shownotes.

In July 2006, a Montreal, Canada based company named Podbean began business allowing anyone to create podcasts on the famous blog publish platform, wordpress, which integrates blogging and podcasting into one platform and website, making it both user friendly and search engine friendly.

Future
An interesting direction of development is an automatic generation of blogcasts. In that, a user creates a text-only version and converts it to audio with a help of RSS-narrator.

Blogcasting (video plus blogging, e.g. MySpace meets YouTube) is flourishing due to affordable, available high speed internet connections where end-users can readily publish & download online video/audio associated with his or her relevant blogs on personal sites and social networking sites such as MySpace.com & Facebook.com.

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