I just found out about the United Soybean Board’s podcast called, BeanCast. I had heard they were planning to produce one but I guess I missed it somehow since it looks like it started last December. It came up in conversation today. I’m glad to see another ag group taking advantage of this new media option.

A couple of things hit me though when I looked at it. It’s not clear that I can subscribe to the podcast. It says I can subscribe to the blog though. I wonder if people will understand that the blog rss feed is okay to use in iTunes for example. The BeanCast is being produced by well known farm broadcaster David Russell but the site doesn’t say who David is. David works for Brownfield of course but I’m not sure everyone knows that. Might be good to disclose that information since he doesn’t work for the United Soybean Board.

I like the fact that they are posting each episode onto a blog. There are a lot of good reasons to do this starting with search engine optimization and online archiving. They’re also posting it as both a click to download option or play in a flash player. This provides choices to the visitor and I’ve found that to be much appreciated, especially if you hope someone else will “pass it along.”

I tried to find the BeanCast in the iTunes podcast library and instead found a trademarked “The Beancast: A Marketing Podcast” by Cool Bean Productions. There’s also a Beancaster.com podcast which is about financial information. No BeanCast for USB though. The iTunes directory is a good place to be found for people who are key word searching for podcasts since it’s probably the biggest online directory of podcasts that I know of anyway.