As many of you know, we broadcast our weekly radio show—called Windy City Radio—on 105.9 FM in Chicago on Sunday nights at 10 p.m. We have recently started our very own podcast at WindyCityQueercast.com and will be posting all of our radio shows there. Please visit the site or search for us in iTunes to subscribe.
If you subscribe and miss our radio show, you'll still receive it each week. Very soon, we will be producing even more shows that you can only get if you're a subscriber. Moreover, you can find some fun videos on WindyCityQueercast.com that you can't see anywhere else.
Now let me discuss videocasts, vlogs or video blogs. Just as podcasts can be mp3 ( sound ) files, they can also be video ones. Some advanced podcasters have started to produce video-only podcasts. They work the same way. If you subscribe to their podcasts, iTunes will automatically download new videos when they are available.
Over the last two years, the GLBT community has been quite productive in the podcasting world, regarding both video and audio podcasts. The affectionate label of 'queercast' or 'queercaster' has begun to stick, and many members of our community proudly use it to describe their podcasts.
At the top of the queercaster list would be Richard Bluestein. He famously created his online persona Madge Weinstein, who hosts a daily podcast at Yeast Radio. Bluestein has been a professional queercaster for quite some time now, and has developed many tools that we, as members of the queer community, can use. You can hear his unique perspective on the state of the world each day at YeastRadio.com .
Bluestein has also created qpodder.com, a forum where queercasters can promote their podcasts as well as discover new ones. In addition, he maintains several other sites, such as InsaneFilms.com, a showcase for independent films, and EatThisHotShow.com, a weekly audio roundtable with several well-known queercasters.
Each day, more and more people are sitting down with a microphone at their computers to produce their own unique podcasts. Some shows are simply audio diaries, while others are highly produced works of art. There are news shows, comedy programs, dramas, music reviews, support groups—you name it. If there is a subject area, it's likely that there is a podcast for it. Truly, all the colors of the rainbow are offered in the podcasting world, and the best part is that it's almost entirely free.
Podcasts are free in nearly every sense of the word. There are no censors, FCC regulations, profanity filters, taboo subjects and, usually, there is no charge to subscribe to a podcast. They represent freedom of speech at its finest.
Visit us at WindyCityQueercast.com and check out the 'Podcasts We Like' section to find some good jumping-off points in the podcasting world.
You can find some podcasts we like on windycityqueercast.com .
