If you Google "podcasting tools", podcasting-tools.com is the first link you will find (at least as of 1:15 pm on Feb 25th, 2008).  Rather than being a one-stop-shop where you can peruse software to find the perfect recorder and web editor to use in setting up your podcasting blog with excellent audio and an easy to use interface, this site looks and works more like a directory.  While this may not satisfy the more technically advanced crowd, if you’ve never done a podcast before, this is an excellent place to start.

The navigation pane in the upper left corner includes topics like “How to Podcast,” “What is Podcasting?” and even links to find forums, feeds, blogs, wikis and more.  For instance, the “What is Podcasting?” page will provide the curious with a quick and relatively easy to understand explanation that podcasting is using an RSS feed to allow your website visitors to automatically download audio files and listen to them at their leisure.  However, it doesn’t stop there, going on to provide a list of possible uses of podcasting.  Have you ever taken a book on tape for a long road trip?  Don’t bother going to the library anymore, find a podcast!  (Many car stereos can have mp3 players plugged in, or you can get a short range FM broadcaster for your mp3 player and tune your car stereo to its frequency.)  Maybe you’re a history buff and enjoy touring old battleships.  If you work for the historical society and help with keeping a ship in shape for tours, you don’t need to provide as many (if any) special equipment for people to listen to a guided tour.  Simply use a podcast on a website, and they can use their own mp3 player.  You can even use a podcast to promote your band.  For the price of websites and bandwidth these days, this is a very low cost way to get your music to your audience or make sure they are up to date on new songs by podcasting clips of your newest album.

And rather than just whetting your appetite and leaving you hungry, you can use podcasting-tools to find the software you need to set up your own feed.  “Podcasting Software” will help you find a few tools to get started, but perhaps its greatest strength is the list of podcasting clients for Windows and Mac.  These programs will help turn your computer into a downloading machine, automating everything from checking your podcast RSS feeds to pulling the file to your computer to copying it to your choice of MP3 player.  From what I’ve seen, Doppler looks like a decent choice, but I haven’t had a chance to look closely at all of the software.  Also, this site is focused more on podcasting tools itself, rather than audio recording or editing software, so if you’re looking for something that will give you more than the bare minimum list of recorders, do another Google search.

Finally, while the blogs provide a needed link for podcasters to share experiences and find solutions that work, there is precious little information that explains what the directories and wikis have on them.  In trying to go to some of the wiki links, I found that one didn’t work, and the rest all pointed to Wikipedia.  The directories link gave a list of directories and ranked them with some helpful info (including page rank, if site content was categorized, and if you could use a keyword search).  I would also recommend checking out the forums page as well, since that had the greatest wealth of links, and is more related to specific tools used for podcasting.  Again, remember these forums are focused more on setting up podcasting feeds and getting clients to work with your content than creating content.

Overall, this is a good site to start with; it provides a solid explanation of what podcasting is, how it is done, and provides some tools to get started.  And since podcasting is still relatively new, there are limited tools and clients for the distribution portion; however, podcasting-tools.com could also provide a more complete list of audio recorders.  The general public and the amateur who is getting started will benefit from this site, but ultimately, you will need to follow the links they do provide or go back to Google if you want to become a pro and produce high quality content.