Coming right at you: Podcasts and RSS feeds

Thus far, most of the technologies we have talked about have been primarily social media platforms, which tend to be multi-way communication (lots of people or institutions sharing with one another).  Services like Twitter, Historypin, and Google+ consist entirely of what the users, whether institutions or individuals, generate and share.  Now we will turn to some things that are a bit more one-way, from museum to visitors: podcasts and RSS feeds. 

RSS Feeds

RSS stands for RDF Site Summary (RDF stands for Resource Description Framework).  It is sometimes referred to as "really simple syndication."  Essentially, RSS is a delivery system; it is a service that gathers content from blogs, Facebook pages, even video or audio broadcasts (such as podcasts), and brings it all to one place through a "feed."  The feed comes to your computer or mobile device using an RSS software program, or you can receive the content by e-mail.

You've probably seen the orange RSS icon on many websites and blogs (such as this one); sometimes the icon is labeled "xml" instead of RSS, but it serves the same function.  The icon indicates where you can "subscribe" to something, which means it will appear in your RSS feed whenever new content is added by that blog, website, or other service.

Your RSS feed will come to your computer or mobile device once you install an RSS reader and then subscribe to websites, blogs, or other sources.  The RSS reader scans all the sites you've subscribed to, and whenever something new appears it downloads the content to your device.  This way you don't have to visit all the individual sites you're interested in; everything just comes to you.

A typical RSS feed reader, photo courtesy of Lifehacker.

RSS feeds can apply to many of the social media we have discussed in previous posts.  For a museum, the employee who serves as the blogger, Facebook page author, or webmaster can make the institution's content available through RSS by providing a subscription link.

• In Blogger, as we've done here, it's as simple as adding the RSS subscription "gadget." 
• Other blog templates, like Tumblr and Wordpress, have a similar feature that can be added.
• In Facebook, the RSS capability is an app that you can add to your page.
• To enable your museum's website such that people can subscribe to its updates via RSS, there are free services like RSSpect that can help you set it up.

The MOMA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Royal Ontario Museum, and numerous others have set up full pages within their websites dedicated to RSS subscriptions.  More museums are adding this feature nowadays.  For more reading, this review has a good description with more details than I've gone into here.

Podcasts

The word podcast is a combination of broadcast and iPod; it is a pre-recorded audio or video program that goes right to your computer or mp3 player.  Tee device doesn't have to be an Apple iPod or iPhone, unless you want to use the iTunes podcast store.  You can sign up to automatically receive the podcasts of a regularly-produced program, or you can go to the source's website and download podcasts individually.

Sample view of the iTunes Store podcast listings

Creating a podcast involves some work, but it's not that difficult to do.  You need a good video/audio recording device with a microphone to pick up sound clearly and minimize background noise.  You need an interesting topic and a clear, succinct script with which to explain it.  And you need just enough sound- or video-editing software and knowledge to splice the recordings into something cohesive that visitors will understand and enjoy.

Liz recently created a podcast about museum technologies, which she will talk about in her next post.

Museums can use the podcast format to serve their visitors in a variety of ways:

• Audio or video tours, such as the National Museum of the Air Force has made; this format makes the content more independently accessible to people who have difficulty seeing or hearing, and it allows visitors to pause or rewind the tour and move at their own pace.  
• The San Diego Zoo has a cool iZoofari program, which allows visitors to create a customized audio tour of the park.
• Behind-the-scenes peeks at the internal functions of the museum, the creation of its exhibits, and the development of programs; these kinds of "insider" specials can help the audience feel more like a part of the museum.
• Informational lectures about recent discoveries, research, and news in the world; there are many good examples among the podcast offerings from the Smithsonian museums
• Going forward, museums could use podcasts to present ideas for new exhibits and then get feedback from the public (by e-mail, Twitter, etc.) about the topics, themes, objects, and stories that are portrayed, as well as how they are presented.

The Boston Museum of Science, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and the Design Museum in London, among others, have great podcast pages that list their current offerings.  This page has a fairly good list of museums that offer podcasts; not all the links are up to date, but the listed museums do have podcast pages elsewhere on their websites.

For more resources on podcasting, there's the archives of Podcasting Underground, tips from eHow, and a detailed tutorial from FeedForAll.