If the number of blog entries is anything to go by, podcasting is the hot new internet trend. Churches are natural users of podcasting. If fact, the use of podcasts by churches has been given the name Godcast (tacky ah…).
Every Sunday, sermons are preached, so distributing via podcasts makes sense. Certainly on the next version of the Toongabbie Anglican Church site, we will pay careful attention to the sermons page, and how best to incorporate audio. As yet, however, I’m still not convinced that the hype about podcasting is warranted – it is simply another means of distributing audio. Its advantage lies in the method of distribution – once a user is signed up to your podcast feed you push updates to them, rather than relying on them to pull an update down.
As the webmaster of a Church site, one advantage will be the ability to keep the sermons page of the site up-to-date without relying on the preacher to send me the text file.
True regarding MP3 players, but users may still be interested in the automatic receipt of audio files to their desktop for later listening. Although, lack of broadband means we will still be supplying text versions for a while.