Daily Podcast News

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.

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.

Wouldn’t it be great to connect to wap, download your favourite show and listen to it whenever you want to?

All you pay for is the download cost, no need for a computer. This would be ideal for students who love listening to the Dawn and Drew Show. This would mean you bypass using ipodder, ipodderX or dopplerradio, and get the content without subscribing. But how do you know when a show has updated you ask? Well you don’t want to be wasting credit ever hour looking through their site. To solve this all we need is a company to realise the potential of all of this and set up a text alert scheme. You could send the RSS file location to whatever number (costing 30cent max) and receive texts for every new show for the price of a normal text.

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.

It was then my task to save as mp3, burn to CD and upload to my web server, Dircaster automatically inserted it into an RSS file so subscribers could listen to the first ever ‘College Podcast’ relating to Multimedia Projects.

There’s more to come and things will sound better as we evolve. We are ensuring that one element of our creative development is the documentation of wireless podcasting. It’s important to have this skillset in your pocket if you’re caught out behind normal lines of support. That skillset also works well for deployed or embedded journalists.

podkissed.com will provide a queuing system allowing easy management of podcasts on your mobile device. Development has just begun, and we hope to have a beta up and running by early 2005. Stay tuned.

Want to be told when your favourite podcast has been updated? Just send the xml address to 086 0639158. Firstly open a sms message on your phone and type your favourite podcast xml location. You can specify if you want to be updated everytime your show has a new podcast type EVERYTIME. Of maybe if you want to just receive a weekly text containing the number of show you can listen to text WEEKLY.

E.g. www.sitename.com/podcast.xml, everytime

This service is free of charge, just just pay for the price of the first text. Only available in Ireland.