March 30, 2006

Getting Started with Podcasting

On Tuesday I wrote about picture blogging for dancers. Today I want to talk about audio podcasting.

One of the benefits of photo blogging is that you can focus on sharing pictures of dance rehearsals and performances as opposed to spending a lot of time writing posts a few times a week for your blog.

The same time-saving benefits also hold true for adding audio messages to your blog. I think it would be great to be able to listen to dancers and choreographers talk about their work and other activities on a regular basis. Say, for example, I could go to Bill T. Jones' new blog and listen to him talk about what he's up to in the world of dance. Maybe he could record a five-minute audio message three times a week. I think that would be incredibly compelling. Of course, if hundreds of choreographers and dancers started to do this, we'd all have to pick the ones that we listened to.

The beauty of podcasting is that it's fast, cheap and usually easy. You can either record your audio messages through a microphone connected to your computer or you can pick-up a telephone and leave a voice mail that is converted into an audio message that can be listened to over the Internet.

Once you start your podcast, you can then make it accessible through your blog and services such as iTunes so that these audio programs can be transferred to iPods. I create my podcast in a much different manner than I'm describing in this post because I conduct interviews by telephone. But however you go about it, you can create a channel like I have on iTunes - you need iTunes software to view it or click this image for larger view:

Click for Larger Image

Here are some applications that you can use to create an audio podcast:

- Audioblog was one of the first (maybe the first) audio podcast services. Prices start at $9.95 a month. You can record audio messages by telephone or through a web browser. I've used this application. It works well and you can post your audio recordings automatically to your blog.

- Odeo also lets you record and share your audio programs. You can record messages by telephone or through a Flash application. You can even add an Odeo link on your blog/website so that visitors can leave voice mail messages for you. Odeo won the podcasting category of the Web 2.0 Awards. Odeo is free. I've used this service very briefly just for the purpose of sending a voice message from the home page of a blogger - a fun feature.

- Evoca is a very new audio recording and sharing service. I experimented with it for a few minutes yesterday. It's easy to record an audio message, but as of yesterday, you could only post your audio messages if you used Blogger. I'll experiment more once they support MovableType - my blogging software. Evoca is free for a basic account and $4.99 for a professional account.

- In addition to recording your own audio blogs, you can have the text from your blog converted into audio messages. Services such as Talkr and Feed2Podcast create synthesized voice versions of your posts. The voice on both of these services really annoys me. But for some of your blog readers it may be more convenient to have access to these audio transcripts.

- Here's a listing of more audio and podcasting services.

- And here's another listing of podcasting, audio and music services - they are at the top of this huge list under the "Audio" category.

Posted by Doug Fox on March 30, 2006 11:35 AM

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