I know it’s early days and all but I just set up an Irish podcast area on meetup.com.
At least it will be there when people want to join up and meet other podcast enthusiasts once a month.
If you’re anyway interested about podcasting head over to the Podcasting Meetup Website. If you’re looking for information on podcasting or want to start your own podcast this is the place for you.
Another Podcast site to put on your watch list. It’s an exciting time for podcasters, we already have podsafe and podkissed expecting a launch someday soon. I will keep you up to date as usual on these three websites.
Do you want to make money podcasting? Now you can!
Do you want to get your product message out on podcasts? Now you can!
Do you want to podcast to all of your friends? Now you can!
Do you want to be the Greatest, Most Popular Podcaster in the world? We can help!
I tried out the service and found it very easy to use. Once you are logged in you appear on the blog entry page. Here you can decide whether you are posting a podcast or just a text blog, all the usual items are there. You can upload your image to coincide with your post along wit your MP3 file. The handy feature is that you can automatically ping audio.weblogs once you post, meaning more people will come across your podcast.
We have started a new podcast at http://sandbox.libsyn.com . It’s open for everyone to post podcasts, blogs and pictures on. You can change whatever you like. Just keep in mind, someone else can change whatever they like too. It’s also a good way to check out how our service works.
In the media files section you can view/delete your uploaded podcasts. Two very handy shortcuts also appear here:
You can click the MP3 file and get the enclosure tag code if you want to use your own RSS feed. There is functionality to click the id3 tags and enter your title, album and so forth along with an image.
Blog Settings allows you to change your page title, description etc. It also gives the handy tool of editing your CSS file to personalise it to your standards. You can also change what order the side panel content appears. (more…)
Want to stay up to date with your favourite blog but don’t have Internet access while you’re on the move? RSS2WAP allows you to enter in the website RSS feed and it will convert it to WML for access on mobile devices. This means you can get the latest content wherever you may be. Not too many sites are wap friendly so if you want to find the latest info it will either come in many separate pages or it may be too large to even view.
This is a useful tool for podcasting, once someone posts a podcast they could enter the shownotes in the blog post or even place it on a separate feed. People could play a podcast and enter the rss2wap address on their mobile to view what’s coming up on today’s show. This would come in handy if it was a 40 minute show and you need to know what appears and when.
The next podcasting show will soon begin production and will have a more appealing magazine feel to it. We will feature soundscapes, spoken approved essays, a trip around Ireland to see what other bloggers are talking about using the useful irishblogs tag. Another interesting section is Hidden Ireland, which will feature issues dealing with items that don’t appear for tourists on their guidebooks, such as places to go that offer the best meals, the best pubs to drink an authentic pint of Guinness. We already have some useful one-minute tips, which need to get out to people. MyJob will be a section for students to become involved with especially our current 3rd year students, they can record a CV like segment dealing which could be heard by potential employers who are listening and may have an opening for them once they leave college. Also an Inside View column to be spoken out be Bernie Goldbach featuring the quotes from the people featured in the article.
Once we get a couple of shows out featuring the above items, we may offer each one as a seperate feed for people to subscribe to.
I spent tonight working on a layout for podcasting.blogsome.com, a place holder for my PURK idea, I hope to have it fully populated in 3/4 weeks time ready for any person to visit and learn from the beginning all about podcasting.
MTV refugee Adam Curry is leading a grassroots revolt called podcasting. Why amateurs may soon rule the airwaves (begin download now).
Welcome to podcasting, the medium that promises a future where anyone can make radio, instead of just listen to it. The biggest podcast audiences now number in the mere tens of thousands. Yet real radio, the kind with bona fide mass audiences, is starting to use the technology to make its shows available for download.
Thanks to spam trackback that I opened in my inbox, I remembered that I had signed up and blogged an item relating to podcasting way back on the 20th of October which related to: The Podcast Revolution Begins.
PURK - At the end of this project I would like to have a downloadable pdf file that explains podcasting to the masses, what it is, benefits, how to listen, how to download and use podcatchers. Also what to do with the orange RSS button, they just need to know how easy it is set up a podcast of their own. Should begin this process by Friday.
Even if the usage is high we could have a gmail account set up especially for these people to send it to so listeners can log-in and download it. This means they needn’t worry about the storage space issue.
WinPodcast is available for download at podcast.scon.de.
This is a great free application for people who have just heard about podcasting from various sources and want to start a show of their own. All you need to do is download the program, insert your microphone and talk about whatever topic you feel passionate about.
Once downloaded open it up and click on File > New Podcast and now you just have to enter the show name, author, keywords and pick a folder for where your saved podcasts go to. Once completed click the microphone icon and start talking. When you start you can type your show notes in the left hand column which will be saved as your showname.txt. This is a great add-on and will allow others to view what’s on your show before they decide to listen. (more…)
Get ready for a make-your-own-podcast program called Podcast Wizard which will be available in five days time. We’ll just have to wait and see if it can be any competition to MixCast Live. Hopefully some screenshots wll be up soon.
Interested in podcasting? Ever try to do it? Podcasting is not trivial - it’s actually quite hard. Or at least it was. Podcast Wizard, new from Paramagnus, takes the pain out of podcasting. Simply create, publish, and promote.
Podcasts help people to and from work, the only problem is timing. I have a 15 minute commute to college each morning and The Dawn and Drew show lasts around 30 minutes, so once I reach college I have to remember the time stamp and wait until my trip home to finish it off. It takes a while to turn the wheel to where I stopped it from.
To solve this maybe podcasters could have an alternative feed with AAC as the file enclosure. AAC audio files support bookmarks, so if you stop listening you will be able to continue where you left off upon re-access.
Many popular podcatchers support MP3 to AAC file conversion. Having this alternate feed allows the subscriber to choose which file format they prefer if they have an iPod.
I know when I was younger I didn’t read too many books, although I was joined the local library but I mainly took out ‘make and do’ books which gave me a vivid imagination to create wonderful items that appeared in the books. I do regret not reading that many books when I look back on my childhood. I remember back to when I used to go to speech therapy because I couldn’t pronounce simple words like coat properly.
During one session she asked me if I read many books, I was on the spot and couldn’t think of any recent ones that I had read. The Famous Five flew out of my mouth, she then asked me to name out the leading characters. They could have been Tom, Dick and Harry for all I knew. I remember naming out common names like John, Mary and Seamus, thankfully she said them out soon afterwards and I left with my head down ashamed of lying to her.
Nowadays many more children are missing out on a good read because of the time they spend in front of the Television. Thankfully books like Harry Potter and A Series of Unfortunate Events are grabbing children away from the TV and into their own world of imagination.
Over the past year there has been a massive increase with children having MP3 players particularly an iPod, many of which who own them are between 10 and 12 years old.
What would be great to see happen is for a parents council of a particular school getting together with parents of pupils and try to get children listening to spoken content instead of music all the time. The parents could get together and decide upon a children’s book and read it aloud while recording. Each adult is given a character to read out and one person acts as the narrator. Once completed the children can download it to their MP3 player and listen to the finished piece either with their friends or alone. Allowing them to use their imagination while they listen to the content.
Looking through my referral logs for the past week I have made an observation that 25 people have arrived from google looking for RTE Podcast information. I wonder if they want to find podcasts of their favourite radio shows or do they think RTE is about to do a feature on Podcasting for one of their TV programmes?
After 7 hours of production time (editing down the large files, learning how to use Pro Tools on Mac, pulling intros and outros down from xdrive, deciding in what order to place them and finally converting them to MP3 for your portable pleasure). Here is Irish Podcast 0506 in all its glory 7.11MB. View shownotes in : opml or html and subscribe to your favourite Irish Podcaster.
At the start of this project I knew zero about recording/editing or even what a podcast was. 4 months have pasted and I must admit I have podcasting sussed completely which is great and can always retell how at the start there were only 452 entries in google for podcasting. Podcast sites were rare to none. iPodder.org, Podfly and Podstar were the only chance apart from the yahoo podcast group to find information on Podcasting, four months on we have podcast stars (Dawn and Drew). It has appeared on BBC2, CNN and many major newspapers; unfortunately Ireland is slow to do a feature but it early days and Ireland is slow to catch on.
Back to the recording/editing status. I am currently working on Podcast 0506 with technical director Mike Kiely. Most of Friday was spent in college, more specifically between the AV lab and the Sound Studio. From 10am until just after 3pm we worked on getting all the sound files together so we could make adjustments and get them to sound in tandem.
Firstly we tested each track in SoundForge to see what they actually sounded like. On Tuesday I had all the tracks editing down (in SoundForge) as best I could, unfortunately as I found out the default for Soundforge is to save file as .MP3 so once I had them on disc I opened them on screen, Mike needed to convert the sample rate of each track so they sounded on the same level, we located this thanks to google. We entered the sound studio and opened Pro Tools on the Mac, now he needed to grab the tracks from my CD and convert them back to .wav; I had three CDs with me, the originals, the edited versions and the intro/outro segments. I hadn’t labelled the CDs properly so this held us up as I gave him the wrong CD to convert (Note to self: Use a black marker). During this time Mike found that the Ellen MacArthur piece was in Mono and all other clips were Stereo. So to overcome this difference he copied the file and pasted it into a left and right output.
Now once we had all .wav files on a USB storage card we could save them onto the Mac and get ready to get our show together. Mike gave me a demonstration on how to use the ProTools which in the end looked simple to use. I have never had any experience with Macs before so that was an experience in itself. ProTools has a nice layout to understand and follow, we laid out the segments on two different parts, one for the interviews and the one below was for the introductions and outros. We made a quick outline of where the content would appear along with the intros and iteming following to the next section.
Problems with the recordings:
Ellen MacAther: Sound quality was good except it was in mono which set us back a bit on productivity. Maeve Connolly: Segment was just 20 seconds long but involved an awful hissing noise due to the surroundings or a connection lose, this was completely blocked out by using the dehisser option under audiostudio. Feargal McKay: Two separate recordings sounded okay, one of them was louder than the other so we used the limiter to quieten it down. Eamon Kearns: This was a phone interview which actually was of great quality but we wanted to give a more realistic sound, so people actually knew it was recorded over mobile phone so we used the limiter.
I spent just over an hour by myself getting to know ProTools and figuring out where each action was which was a very valuable experience, I could easily move the files around and put them in the order which I preferred.
I got the chance to test out the Nokia 9500 in the sound studio with 7 other Multimedia Students. We had an open discussion lead by Bernie Goldbach relating to Smart Mobs written by Howard Reingold. The opening sentences of each chapter were read out and we inserted our own opinions/views on what they actually meant and how they related to us.
I opened the Nokia Communicator on the desk which was the central feature of the room. I just had to hit the ‘my own’ button while I was on the main menu followed by record. Once the 30 minute session had ended I just had to click stop > menu and scroll down to save as and enter the file name. To take out the 512MB memory card I had to open the mobile from the back and pop it out. I later used the Memorex card reader to upload to my college PC, the computer recognised it but it had no data. After thinking everything was deleted it was pointed out to me that the card was upside down, not very clear from the device as to what way to insert it.
The sound clips were in amr format meaning I needed to use a simple converter program and change the four files to wav so I could listen to the sound quality. I tried uploading them to the xdrive but the college computers had problems uploaded such large files. When I got home Tuesday I tried from home, I selected the file to upload, it was uploading but gave no feedback as to if it was successful, unfortunately it never got there, so today at 7pm tonight I uploaded each one again. I know one of them appears on xdrive so at the moment I have just logged in to xdrive and I’m still waiting over 5 minutes to view my uploads to see if the rest made it.
Why not start up a podcast magazine? We have unlimited content to make it a success and build on it from there. We could have. I’m sure every podcaster would love to buy it to see what other people are up to and podcasting is starting to hit the average Joe on he streets so maybe a magazine may be the best medium to get them into podcasting.
News Section:
New podast websites. Segments on new podcasters. Latest information on podcasting.
Main Section:
Interviews with podcasters. Tried and tested podcast equipment (which is best for which situations). Review of certain podcasts. Podcasters: Who to watch out for. The latest gadgets available to help people out. Tutorials on how to podcast, how to listen etc. Podcatchers evaluated.
Interactive Section:
CD with magazine which features the best podcasts on it for newcomers to try out in their car. Readers write in with their problems; answered by podcasters themselves. People can send in an MMS of their set up.
Running out of storage space for your podcasts? Why not set up a gmail account such as mypodcastshow@gmail.com. Upload your MP3 file and give Podcast #1 as the subject line so people can come and open it. To let people know about it you could post from your blog everytime you record a podcast or e-mail them, although it wouldn’t be a good idea for people who like to subscribe using the RSS feed. But if people really want to listen to your show give them the login and password for this specially set up google account. Now they can either right click and save or open it with real player.
After articles in USA Today I’m sure a lot more people are googling for information about how to set up a podcast for the least amount of funds.
The can start with a free blog either at blogger.com or on live journal. Or if they have some web experience go to dhost and set up a free account with ftp access. After this they can decide to install movable type, mambo or my favourite wordpress, because it has ftp access you can upload images and mp3 files as it has 100MB of space. You could set up multiple accounts it you’re going to have a lot of shows.
Or another solution although slower would be to email your mp3 files to submit@openpodcast.org and wait to see your feed pop up in the archives section and link to it from your blog. Although this will be slow if someone wants to download it, but if you get subscribers they won’t notice as much.
A square unresizable podcast receiver, which proberly is the most popular podcast receiver available at the moment. It’s got 5 taps along the top:
Status: Is the main menu which shows your podcast RSS feeds, an area to add your feed and buttons to select or remove and check for new podcasts.
Sceduler: Where you can select when to check for new podcasts at whatever time you want to.
Preferences: General options appear here, such as do you want to hide iPodder at start up and select which folder to download podcasts to.
Info: Gives details on the programmers and an area to donate money.
Log: gives details when you’re downloading podcasts.
This software will make keeping up-to-date on the latest and greatest podcast feeds absolutely effortless.
At the start of this project I knew zero about recording/editing or even what a podcast was. 4 months have pasted and I must admit I have podcasting sussed completely which is great and can always retell how at the start there were only 452 entries in google for podcasting. Podcast sites were rare to none. iPodder.org, Podfly and Podstar were the only chance apart from the yahoo podcast group to find information on Podcasting, four months on we have podcast stars (Dawn and Drew). It has appeared on BBC2, CNN and many major newspapers; unfortunately Ireland is slow to do a feature but it early days and Ireland is slow to catch on.
Back to the recording/editing status. I am currently working on Podcast 0506 with technical director Mike Kiely. Most of Friday was spent in college, more specifically between the AV lab and the Sound Studio. From 10am until just after 3pm we worked on getting all the sound files together so we could make adjustments and get them to sound in tandem.
Firstly we tested each track in SoundForge to see what they actually sounded like. On Tuesday I had all the tracks editing down (in SoundForge) as best I could, unfortunately as I found out the default for Soundforge is to save file as .MP3 so once I had them on disc I opened them on screen, Mike needed to convert the sample rate of each track so they sounded on the same level, we located this thanks to google. We entered the sound studio and opened Pro Tools on the Mac, now he needed to grab the tracks from my CD and convert them back to .wav; I had three CDs with me, the originals, the edited versions and the intro/outro segments. I hadn’t labelled the CDs properly so this held us up as I gave him the wrong CD to convert (Note to self: Use a black marker). During this time Mike found that the Ellen MacArthur piece was in Mono and all other clips were Stereo. So to overcome this difference he copied the file and pasted it into a left and right output.
Now once we had all .wav files on a USB storage card we could save them onto the Mac and get ready to get our show together. Mike gave me a demonstration on how to use the ProTools which in the end looked simple to use. I have never had any experience with Macs before so that was an experience in itself. ProTools has a nice layout to understand and follow, we laid out the segments on two different parts, one for the interviews and the one below was for the introductions and outros. We made a quick outline of where the content would appear along with the intros and iteming following to the next section.
Problems with the recordings:
Ellen MacAther: Sound quality was good except it was in mono which set us back a bit on productivity. Maeve Connolly: Segment was just 20 seconds long but involved an awful hissing noise due to the surroundings or a connection lose, this was completely blocked out by using the dehisser option under audiostudio. Feargal McKay: Two separate recordings sounded okay, one of them was louder than the other so we used the limiter to quieten it down. Eamon Kearns: This was a phone interview which actually was of great quality but we wanted to give a more realistic sound, so people actually knew it was recorded over mobile phone so we used the limiter.
I spent just over an hour by myself getting to know ProTools and figuring out where each action was which was a very valuable experience, I could easily move the files around and put them in the order which I preferred.
Using my girlfriends Nokia 3220 I decided to try some tests. I wanted to see if my Wordpress would allow for my Video to be placed in my RSS; unfortunately I had to do it manually in the end. Here is how:
Go to the advanced editing mode. Scroll down to custom fields and place enclosure in the key section followed by the link to your video in the value text box. Now write your post and hit post.
So I opened Nimiq, selected my RSS feed and hit ‘download now’. To my surprise it downloaded the video in five seconds It was placed in my Nimiq folder ready to view. The default opening is for Quick Time. The phone can record for 50 seconds but doing so means you are unable to send it, so the recording time for this is just 13 seconds.
Using different technologies with Podcasting can we fun and can also save you time in many different manys. Today I was introduced to the Sony S700i by Bernie Goldbach. 10 Multimedia Developers gathered in the Sound Studio of the Tipperary Institute to discuss their project is a quick 20 second soundbyte.
Which focused on “What are you doing for your project”, we all had 2/3 minutes to jot down the main points of our project, inturn each Mutlimedia student sat down directly in front of me to speak about their projects. Each voice level was different from the last one so I needed to be on hand with the mobile moving it closer/futher from their mouth.
Once each item had be recorded as individual soundclips we exported them to a labtop. Unfortunately we discovered that the recording turn out to be .amr and not mp3 as we thought. This handed us a large problem which not even google could solve. We looked everywhere even purchased the latest Real Player to see if it could at least play it, this wasn’t the case, but luckily Michael Kiely (Video and Sound Expert) was on hand and solved the problem by sending a zip file of a program which allowed us to convert it to .wav. We placed each seperate clip in Soundforge and copied and pasted each one together. I edited down blank noise, gaps in sentances and other noises.
The Sony MZ-N10 was one of the first recorders I worked with. Before this I had never come into contact with a Mini Disc player. It’s a very easy device to pop out of the box and start Podcasting from.
Recording items is very quick and simple. Just gather a group around a table and shift the record bar to the right and begin your podcast. Once completed just hit the square stop button. If your holding the recording in your hand at this stage you should begin to hear it viabrate while it saves. To upload this .wav file connect your cable to your laptop and use any sound program e.g Soundforge.
Streaming would be for listeners who either:
Music Podcast is quoted as saying:
We are a bunch of music lovers who have access to great, mostly independent music that you probably haven’t heard of (yet). We provide a fresh alternative to the radio you may be used to. It is all 100% legal and safe to download. Each AMP member has his or her own unique podcast show, but we all share a passion for getting great new music heard, and we believe AMP helps everyone: music listeners, bands and labels, podcasters, and podcast service providers (PSPs).
It has already got seven members who are dedicated to playing podsafe music for people to listen to. Talking about podsafe, there has been a lot of talk about placing music in your podcast and if it’s legal. On Adam Currys show recently he talked about the ASCAP Internet license which features information on how you can:
Play song “samples” or excerpts that are not more than 60 seconds in duration.
Podsafe.com has been registered and will probably be location for Artists to place their music so people had place them in their show and not worry about the legalities of it all.
Check out my simple guide which will teach you have to record on a mini, this should be a good resource for people new to podcasting that don’t know an awful lot about recording.
Now you need to test your voice (a) to see what you sound like and (b) to set the volume to the right level. If the rectangles are at around 80% it’s going to be good quality. If the speaker has a quiet voice pump up the volume by pushing the play button upwards to nearer 30 (the maximum).
The Minidisc is a fairly simplistic device but can cause hair loss if you are not fully sure how to use it properly.
Firstly to start recording you need to purchase some recordable minidiscs (you can get 10 for €20 which come in nice coloured coded discs, each one has a max of 80 minutes recording time).
Getting to know your Minidisc
To turn on the device flip it over to its back and slide the switch to the on position. You will also notice a hold switch which is useful when you have it resting in your pocket. The right hand side of the device has the vital slots which will be mostly used when podcasting (recording). The black slot is the line in option commonly used when listening to your recordings, but this slot is also used for when you want to upload tracks to your computer. The red slot is used to connect your microphone or external microphone depending on the circumstances of your usage. (more…)
Having tuned in from Podcast number five, little did I know that Dawn and Drew would become major celebrities, as Johan van Rooyen said in their comment stream: “Some folks mumble in their beer that Dawn is going to become the next Oprah with Drew as the next Jerry Springer.”
Whatever they decide to do they deserve it, they have kept us all entertained with their wacky and outlandish content. Most people decide too tune in at night time to suit its content. But me? I prefer to connect my iPod in the morning, get the latest show and listen to it on my way to college which is just about the length of their podcast. I find myself laughing for the most part out loud, something which I can’t control and I often get people looking back over my shoulder wondering am I right in the head. This content of their show is just perfect for podcasting, it’s just speech so no problems with copyrighted material, it contains the content that just cannot ever be heard on the radio, showing people why it really is an alternative to the radio. They can listen to content that suits them, there are no restrictions, you can say what you want when you want and if you offend someone so what? No one is in charge you have total freedom of the medium which is what Dawn and Drew do so well in their podcast.
Just after dinner three or four times each week, Dawn and Drew plop down in their Salvation Army-decorated living room and record 30 minutes of funny, inane and often racy husband-and-wife yakking — a show about nothing. But how they’re delivering the program worldwide is quite something.
I just found a problem with my RSS feed. It seems that every entry I post with an image is including automatically in an enclosure tag, meaning anyone who has also subscribed will have all my images if they use a podcatcher. I have fixed the problem so it’s business as usual.
While looking through Dawn and Drews comment stream I saw a link to Slapcast. Sounds intriguing doesn’t it. Well it’s in its beta stage at the moment so I’m sure it will be updated with lots of MP3’s especially when people start signing up. It offers:
Unlimited bandwidth for your podcast 60 minutes of phone messages included each month Easy set up
At the moment Slapcast has a free trial which allows you to try it out and submit 3 free messages. Once you have tried it out and are happy with the service you can sign-up for just $5 (each month – unlimited bandwidth). It says you can go from sign-up to login in less than one minute.
Update: After logging in the my account I was pleasantly surprised at the set-up. It gave all the information about how to podcast either through email or phone, if you use phone they ask for the number you have dialled from which allows for identification. You can edit the title, artist and comment fields for your particular podcast. If you have an existing blog you can post the MP3 file to your blog also.
It also shows your RSS file to add to directories and for others to add to their podcatcher. You can check out my slapcast website and see whats it looks like for yourself: http://slapcast.com/users/podcaster.
Another new website recently setup is Podcast World.
Just after purchasing version 0.9 last night. I tried testing it out but it was around 2am when I got to play around with it. By this time a Podcast was beyond my reach. I recorded a few clips with music effects and sound but when they played back I was either getting just the music or just my voice. I need to change the settings tonight and get a 20 minute show of my own up for your consumption. In other news Podcast 0506 will be available tomorrow, featuring loads of interesting interviews.
It’s not the Oscars but it is a start, a new website will be giving awards out to podcasters on the 15th of June. The site is part of podcast connect which is a place holder for sites such as podcast-one which is a commercial marketing venture. They want to get money from podcasting by getting small businesses involved and do all the start-up work for them. Tech podcasts are looking for people who produce a technology based Podcast to contribute and participate to the site; the last link is left for podcastalley which to my knowledge has no link to the podcast connect website.
After hearing about MixCast Live over two months ago I knew it would be massive. I was hooked from the start after watching a quick demo. This application is fantastic and will get more people into podcasting once they hear of this application.
“MixCast Live’s going to allow a lot of people to get into this, produce high quality recordings, without having a whole lot of knowledge of how to do it.”
MixCast Live is now available on Pre-Release with a discount of $20 to make it just $39 (€30.34). MixCast Live really is podcasting for the People. All going to plan I will be getting my copy tomorrow and evaluating and testing it with a podcast.
Mobile Podcasting - MMS is now standard on all mobiles along with voice recorders, most of these recordings are in .amr but as I have noticed when you send a sound clip to your email it converts it automatically to .wav which is a handy shortcut, but what if there was the be a mobile podcast community? A place where you could get Podcasts delivered directly to your mobile, allowing you to stay away from your computer and never have the need to purchase an MP3 player.
For this to work for the whole community (e.g. subscribers through RSS) we will have to wait until Mobiles come with MP3 recorders that are affordable for everyone so they can be included in your feeds. When this happens it could be the first money making attempt to succeed from Podcasting. People can subscribe to your show which you record on the move on your mobile. They subscribe by topping up your mobile and you send them your latest podcasts for a month to their mobile. Another barrier which whas gone which helps the spread of mobile podcasting is that you can now send MMS messages from O2 to Meteor and visa versa, I’m not sure if Vodafone allows this at the moment.
Having just tried it out from my o2 Sony Ericsson (which allows for ten minutes of recording time) to my Meteor Motorola V300 the sound quality was clear to hear and of a good standard. If a podcast was to be a maximum of ten minutes people would get tried of holding their mobile to their ear and just listening to content. People don’t realise it as much when they are interacting with people over mobiles. So couldn’t there be and Bluetooth option that allows you to listen to podcasts. Just insert your headset, leave you mobile in your pocket and keep your hands free for the shopping bags.
Text to Speech is a great item which can help people with disabilities get to hear the content just like everyone else. Having used text to speech before it is very simple, you can just write in your content and choose which voice should speak it. The voice is clear and concise and something could hopefully be implemented on most blogs in a few years time. Bloggers can enter their content as usual but while their blog is updating it is also converting it to speech (at the moment it is converted to .wav). Once it appears on the site it also features a button for people to click and listen. Maybe in the future the speech synthesis will be able to convert to MP3, which could be added to your RSS file so they can connect their MP3 Player and listen to blog posts on the go. So they not only get to listen to podcasts but also blog entries.
Having just visited Podfeeder, I noticed a site revamp had taken place recently with the added addiction of a new logo by Bryan Bell. For a novice user looking at the site they may find it to be another podcast directory site, but really under neat it all it’s another podcatcher. I have downloaded it and am currently trying it out. Expect after this 30 day trial I’m sure I will make my way back to iPodder if I have not already done so by tomorrow.
After a 30-day trial period, your current subscription list will be locked. If you find that you like Podfeeder, you can purchase a subscription for only US$11.95 per year.
Firstly I’ll explain how to use the site, you will need to hit the create an account button, enter your name, email etc. Now download the application and login with your details. You will be issued with an email to welcome you into the fold. Once login is successful you will be able to change your settings which are: the location where they should downloaded to, your bandwidth limit (very useful if you’re using dial-up), once podcasts are downloaded you can choose between iTunes or Windows Media Player (Apple v Windows). You will now notice Bryan Bells new logo appear in your toolbar. To add podcasts you can either visit here or right click > podcasts > update collection. Now you can carry on with your daily work and wait for your podcasts to download or you can update them at any time.
My first use of the Sound Recorder which comes with Windows XP, with a little help from my Sony Microphone. It’s just below a minute. Should it be a daily/weekly podcast or a non-starter?
A lot of Podcast sites have drifted away. I remember back to the beginning of Podcasting and looking around google to find new podcast sites. There wasn’t an awful lot of choice out there. Podstar.com was a site which was updated daily with some interesting content that enhanced my experience of Podcasting. It was even a sponsored link in google so it must of getting a lot of visitors although the comment rate didn’t reflect this.
Another site which I regularly visited was podfly.com, I remember back to when I emailed the owner to discuss what his site would be based on and which CMS he should use. In the end he installed Mambo which was something I had never heard about and wouldn’t be a choice for me even after seeing it. Podfly featured in many sites as a great place to find out “How to Podcast” in three easy steps. It was easy to understand but the problem was the way in which the content was displayed with messy links to navigate through it.
Podfly then decided to open up its site to allow for other podcast enthusiasts to contribute and add an article. It started off well with some great content from Gary Bibb and Kristopher Smith. Alas within a few months the content had dried up and it hasn’t been updated since the 3th of January.
While these two were the main sites (along with ipodder.org) at the beginning of the evolution of Podcasting, the main site now is Podcast Alley who has over taken and features the main place for podcasters to interact with each other on the forum. People flock to it everyday either to check for new podcasters or to see if they had any feedback from their listeners.
But is Podcast Alley such a big deal? The majority of podcasters feature either a link or have it included in their podcast asking people to visit Podcast Alley and vote for them. I know feedback is a major part of podcasting and if you don’t get feedback what makes you carry on knowing you might not have listeners. But don’t most podcasters have blogs which allow for comments, if not they can always drop you an email (with optional MP3 attachment). Or maybe you have a j2 account or Skype where you could record and place these recordings in your podcasts.
Why do people feel they need to be rated on some website? Although this site is the main place to find podcasts at the moment and as pointed out in mobilepodcasts latest podcast it is the best for people new to podcasting to locate the top 10 most popular podcasts that they should subscribe to. But at the start of the show he was very upset to find a comment left on podcast alley which was as follows:
Not so great, I started listening to this podcast thinking it was about Treos, but was disappointed to find ramblings about everything but. I’d pass on this one and pick up the Wizards of Tech as they seem to talk about Treos more than this podcast.
He goes on to agree with my point of view saying:
Time to change? But then I saw it was signed by ’superdork’ and realized just how meaningless podcastalley.com is…
Podcast Alley is a site for people to view their mind whether they like or dislike your podcast. Not everyone is nicey nicey as Gary Bibb pointed out saying:
“Why in the hell is everyone in podcasting so damn nice to one another?”
To be a true podcaster we need to take on the advice and either do something about it or just forget about it and “podcast on”.
On a Saturday my girlfriend (Suzanna) always looks forward to buying The Sun so she can preview all the major soaps to see what’s happening for the week ahead. Once she has a quick glance she quickly grapes the newspaper and flicks through until she finds the Dear Deirdre section. When she finds it she’s in her element, there’s no stopping her, it’s like she just switches off completely. She looks towards the main heading: “I slept with my boyfriend and his dad and now I’m pregnant” and gets sucked in. Most of it is sensationalised rubbish in my opinion but you can’t let her know that. What she needs is a podcast which includes people’s problems and helps them through it. Step forward The Hotline hosted by Suzy. Anyone is able to email her their problems and she will advise you in the best possible way. So if you want to know which colour to paint your kitchen or know how to get a date, just email your questions to her. I know Suzanna will definitely be a subscriber.
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