What is a Podcast?

The term Podcast is heard all of the time these days, Most people realise that Podcasts are something to do with listening to audio files that they have downloaded from a website, and basically that's true but many people still don't really know how podcasts work. Property Prophets are going to be bringing you a series of podcasts from now on. These will be interesting property related podcasts, not just about Property Prophets, but also about overseas market trends, or anything else we think may be of some interest to you.

Podcasting is a term that describes the technology used to push audio content from websites down to consumers, who typically listen to it on their iPod (hence the "pod") or other audio player that supports mp3 at their convenience.

We have written a short guide to podcasts below and hope that you will sign up (for free of course) to our new service...

Subscribing to Property Prophets Podcast

To subscribe to our podcast you will need a piece of software or an online service known as a Podcast aggregator (a.k.a RSS Aggregator, Feed Reader). once our podcast feed has been loaded into your aggregator it will then regularly check our podcast for any new additions and (depending on how its configured) download them to your computer.

Podcast Aggregators
By far the most popular software for subscribing to podcasts is Apples iTunes. The iTunes software comes with many other features which are great for organising your music collection but which you do not necessarily need for subscribing to our podcasts, for this reason some users prefer to have a dedicated podcast aggregator such as Juice or even an online service such as Google Reader.

Subscribe using iTunes
1. Copy the web address for the site's podcast feed.
2. Open iTunes. Go to the "Advanced' pulldown menu and choose "Subscribe to Podcast"
3. A "Subscribe to Podcast" window appears; paste the RSS feed's address into the window and hit the "ok" button.

Subscribe using Juice
Juice is an open source (completely free) podcast aggregator which lets you subscribe to and download podcasts. Once the files are downloaded, you can then choose to what to do next, including importing files into iTunes, Windows Media Player or some other audio program. Instructions and links to download Juice can be found on the project's Web site: http://juicereceiver.sourceforge.net
The web address for the site's podcast feed.

Subscribe using Google Reader
1. You will first need to register for a Google Reader account
2. Copy the web address for the site's podcast feed.
3. Click the 'Add Subscription' button
4. Paste the feed address into the field and click 'Add'

Download the audio files directly from the site.

You can download any of the podcast audio files directly to your computer by right clicking on the links to the audio files and selecting "Save Target As" in Internet Explorer, "Save Link As" in Firefox or "Download Linked File" in Safari. You can then play them back using any software that supports .mp3 playback, such as iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp, or VLC Media Player.

Finally, whilst it is our intention to bring you interesting and regular content via our podcasts we will only do so when we feel that the information will be genuinly useful to a large number of people. We would very much like to hear any suggestions that you may have for future podcasts and we will endeavour to provide the relevant content. Please email any programming requests to podcasts@property-prophets.com