Martin B
Success Coach, speaker, trainer and author. Known for his focused, rapid-results coaching.
What do you recommend for business "pod-casting" hosting sites? What software do you recommend for making the pod-casting? Any other advice about pod-castings? I am new to this so I may not be using the correct terms.
What do you recommend for business "pod-casting" hosting sites? What software do you recommend for making the pod-casting? Any other advice about pod-castings? I am new to this so I may not be using the correct terms. Any good sites for learning more about pod-casting?
Clarification added May 1, 2007:
Do all "pod-casts" need Quicktime to play on your computer?
Clarification added May 1, 2007:
Also, what is an "RSS feed"? I know what an MP3 but not how that relates to an RSS feed and if I can have that feed on my web site as a sub folder?
Clarification added May 6, 2007:
Three "Podcast" hosting sites were recommended, what do you think of them or do your recommend others, if I want to go that way?
http://www.audioblog.com/
http://podcastpeople.com/
http://reinventedsoftware.com/feeder/ which only works with mac so that is out for me.
What recording / editing software do you recommend?
Also, how can you do a podcast interview over the phone?
Thanks for all the wonderful responses! I am on my way to start pod-casting!
I use to be the radio engineer in college so I enjoy the technical stuff.
Clarification added May 10, 2007:
Baba Guhan, I am not promoting any sites above. They are recommended to me. It seems like almost all podcast are attached to blogs (or their links are). Are their any exceptions? Also any advice on least expensive hosting for just the MP3 files? Thanks for all the wonderful answers!!!
Clarification added May 11, 2007:
Should the audio be mono or stereo? I started building a test site and will post that next as a lost "Clarify Question", comments are welcome.
Answers (14)
R H
Litigation Project
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For the fundamentals, check out the following link.
Links:
John M. O
President, Career Pro of NC, Inc. or Career Pro Inc.
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One of the other answers for podcasting I have is script it. I do this now for my clients and it helps them stay focused. Depending upon the audience podcasts can be short or long but I recommend some kind of plot or script. I study sites that podcast and do it with a level of professionalism vs. podcast sites alone Martin. There are some impressive speakers and podcasts out there. I would be interested in them too.
Michael M
President of media man
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Martin-
We are creating pod casts for clients now. I would be happy to put you in touch with our interactive marketing director to get some basics.
Michael
Glenn A C
CPS (Chief Paper Shuffler) Efficient Technologies
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It is a shame to see buzz words and company specific hype take things over. There has been the ability to stream audio (and video), or download files of same, for a long time. Along comes the ipod which forces usage of one particular interface and now the market has to bow down to it.
And your clarification shows why it is a problem. If web site developers used more open standards, you would not be forced to ask this question.
No a well written site does not require some proprietary client software when well establised formats will do the job better and offer more user compatibility. Sloppy and lazy programmers do not code to established standards. It requires more than a point and click programming ability.
Clarification added May 3, 2007:
John: To be honest, when I saw "About.com Guide To Podcasting", I was prepped for superhype. However after reading your post I applaud your effort.
I find "podcasting" to be one of thowe things that are causing lack of compatibility on the net. Many sites I go to that have a "podcast" link give me either a built in player or I get an html code disply. In either and many other cases I just manually "save link as" or find some way to hack the actual file location from the source code and paste it into winamp or such.
I set up one of the first Real Audio streams for a client lon ago. And hate watching DRM and Corp branding formats killing things.
HI Martin,
The links mentioned are a great place to start understanding what PODCASTING is all about, in a simplistic way, the way technology has advanced in the past few years has been something to be understood, we had the web 1 (so to say environment) where in you as a user, would have to go to the concerned site for getting the information you needed could be audio content, video content or text based content, then came in RSS - (Really Simple Syndication) where in you are aware of the places where you get your content and after subscribing to it that content was pushed to you on to your client (browser or a media player).
So you do not have to go to multiple place for getting your daily dose of information.
Thats what RSS is all about, rather then you going to the source for content, the content comes (pushed) to you.
Podcasting is basically the push of audio content to the users (who has subscribed). If you were to use itunes then it would be podcasting but if you were to use your client application for subscribing then it might not be fair to call it podcasting.
The push of audio file (which could be a mp3 format) directly to a subscribed user is the process of podcasting.
If this makes any sense to you and if you want to know more please do drop me a mail
regards
Milind
John H
VP, Partnership Marketing & Integration for BlogTalkRadio
Best Answers in: Professional Organizations (1)
Hi Martin,
You can check out my site (all information is free); I'm the About.com Guide to Podcasting (http://podcasting.about.com) as well as founder of Podcast Vision and Voice. There's a lot to learn if you want to do it yourself, but the good news is you can start very cheaply. Whether you have a PC or MAC, you can get Audacity (PC) or Garageband (comes in iLife with MAC) and a microphone ($20 and up) and give it a go.
However, remember that for a business audio branding comes into play, meaning the same way you might not build your own website I'd highly recommend using a podcast consultant/production firm for doing your podcast for B2B or B2C applications where your brand is at stake. But again, trying it out within a safe internal community is a great way to see if the technology will work for you.
Also, remember that podcasting is not a magic bullet - it's a delivery mechanism. Most people still listen to podcast content via streaming on a website (65% or so). So focus more on the message you're creating and how to connect with your audience in a value-added way than the methodology people use to retrieve it. Also keep in mind that once you create an audio file, it can be attached to an RSS feed to make it a podcast (if you have more than three or four episodes; a podcast is typically considered a series versus a one or two off), streamed on your site (listened to while someone is at your site versus downloading), downloaded to any MP3 player (not just an iPod), converted so it can be listened to on a phone, (something I recommend to clients as people prefer easy ways to listen right away) or burned to a CD (for the car).
Hope that helps.
Links:
I'm not sure there's a need for a specific type of host for podcasting. The technical requirements for podcast hosting are met with most basic web hosting companies already. Here are a few pointers I'd point out for starting off with podcasting:
Use good blog software which will manage the 'rss feed' for you. Wordpress, blogger.com, loudblog.com and others offer either hosted services for blogs or software you can download and install on your current webhost. My own podcast, http://www.webdevradio.com, uses loudblog's software, which might give you an idea of it in action.
Feed your blog's RSS feed through feedburner.com's free service if the blog software doesn't explicitly deal with podcasts. The feedburner service will add some extra tags and info to your feed which will make it more podcast-client friendly (especially for people using itunes as their podcasting client).
My own experience in podcasting was that I started off doing 3-4 shows per month - about 1 per week. Over time, that's become harder to do, and at one point I let 2 months go by without updating. That was very harmful to the listenership - some people just 'gave up' on me. Winning people back is hard to do, especially when there's new content coming up all the time. I'd suggest that you devise a reasonable schedule for publishing your content, make it known that the content is weekly/daily/monthly/whatever, and *stick to it*. Putting out stuff more frequently is OK, now and then, but missing scheduled content when people are expecting it is a no-no.
An RSS feed is an XML file which contains information about the MP3 files on your server. Clients (itunes, etc) pull the RSS file from your server, then display the files available to the user, who decides to download the files to their player. The 'podcast' concept originally was that the client software would simply automatically pull down the most recent episodes listed in each RSS file the user subscribed to, then automatically place the file on the user's ipod player. It's grown to be a more encompassing term for publishing audio/video/media files, but that was the original (and likely still majority) usage.
Links:
Clarification added May 13, 2007:
Martin asked me to post a link to his first podcasting effort here - http://inquireonline.wordpress.com/
Because he posted the question, he can't also post here, but he's looking for some feedback, and thanks everyone for their input and support so far. (He's aware this is a very rough first draft, but considers it a 'work in progress').
I set up a law firm client of mine with a weekly half hour radio show (yes, on an old-fashioned AM radio station in LA) a few years ago, and we just started podcasting episodes on their website to make it more widely available. One benefit of the podcast RSS syndications is that it also creates more links into your website, which helps with SEO too.
Q. What do you recommend for business "pod-casting" hosting sites?
A. You don't need a specialized hosting site. All you need to do is upload MP3 files to your own web host... and be prepared to pay bandwidth for the downloads.
(This do-it-yourself approach may not be optimal, so I am also considering to move these over to a dedicated podcast hosting service.)
Q. What software do you recommend for making the pod-casting?
A. Audacity - it's open source (free) and you can buy the MP3 codec for $15. Highly recommended. With your audio engineering background, you should be able to learn it easily.
Basically:
step 1: record some audio somehow (to an uncompressed format such as wma). Use whatever sound capture equipment / software you like. I usually just get a CD from the radio engineer.
step 2: edit your file as you wish. I remove commercials, boring parts, and break up the radio shows into episodes (1 question and answer per episode). Audacity is great for this without complicating things too much.
step 3: convert your wma episodes to mp3. Use dbpoweramp Music Converter for this. It's very fast and produces nicely compressed mp3s that can be played on most podcasting clients. Be careful about using a sampling rate that is not universally supported.
step 4: upload your mp3s to your website. Make a "list" that describes the files and where they are. With a little formatting, this will become your RSS feed. There are services that will apply the formatting (XML) to your list, or you can do it by hand, or you can customize an asp.net, php, or coldfusion page (whatever your web development language) to format it for you.
Q. Do all "pod-casts" need Quicktime to play on your computer?
A. Definitely not. Most listeners will just use Window Media Player to "listen" to the MP3 files from your site directly. However, if you do wish to publish them to itunes, you may need proprietary Apple software. I don't bother.
Q. Also, what is an "RSS feed"? I know what an MP3 but not how that relates to an RSS feed and if I can have that feed on my web site as a sub folder?
A. RSS feed is just a file that is a "list". The list describes to people what you have available at your website. The list is in a special format, based on XML (sorry). This list gets posted by you to a service that people interested in subscribing to such lists can put it in their feed readers. This is syndication. Then every time you change your mp3s and update your RSS feed (list), you can "ping" the syndication services to tell them new content is available, and people can see that you have something new to offer.
Q. Also, how can you do a podcast interview over the phone?
A. Interesting concept. In fact, the radio show we do is a "personality" attorney doing Q&A on the air with callers to the radio station. We have also done closed telephone conference calls with medium-sized groups (not on the air). Most of the conference call profiders give you the option to record your phone call. As long as you have a recording somehow, you can convert it to wma, edit in audacity, and convert to mp3 and voilla.
Clarification added May 7, 2007:
Voila.
Interesting answers to a question that seems to have a simple set of answers. Glenn Curry makes one of the best points of the entire set of answers.
Podcasting is just a marketing term and that is all it is.
For your question regarding hosting for your audio files and how to record these audio files. There are free simple open standards based software that you can use to record and upload to your host and then share it to be downloaded and played on any audio player/computer that can play the mp3 format.
Audacity is a full featured free open source software for you to record/edit and convert to mp3 format the audio streams you may generate.
You can buy simple device at Radio Shack that allows to pass through the audio stream from a phone to your computer and then use a programs like Audacity to edit and convert to an Mp3 file and upload.
Having said all this I don't know whether you are asking a sincere question or are trying to push the websites you mention in your Question.
If you have gotten recommendations already then I wonder why you haven't asked questions with regards to what was missing from what you saw in these sites.
To blog you don't need any special software as it is made out to be. You are just writing a journal and sharing that with the rest of the world, whats the big deal about writing a journal that you need specialized software for, unless you you have become numb and dumb and need software services to help you write your diary/journal.
My husband and I have our own personal podcast, but he's the expert on hosting sites. What I can recommend though for doing a podcast interview over the phone is to get involved with Talkshoe. It's a great site that allows you to talk live with an audience. You can even be paid a small sum for each listener who logs into the podcast. We do our podcasts from Talkshoe most of the time, rather than on our own. We use Skype to have folks dial in, since the Talkshoe phone number is out of state for us. It's not perfect, but it is an easy way to get everyone on the call live. You don't have to dial into the phone number on Talkshoe - your guests can simply log into the show on the website and just listen. It allows them to post messages to the show board while you are talking. If you have folks that you would like to interview, then they would need to dial in.
As for editing/recording software, you can look into Audacity, which is a free software - or my husband likes Sony's SoundForge.
If you want more information, you can check out my husband's website www.jrdonline.com, and if you have more questions he would welcome the emails. He really wants to help people get started on using podcasts, so he would love to talk to you. He's also put up some tutorials, links and other information on the site on podcasting.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
Links:
Mark H
2Bridge2, Global Biz Dev Pro; markhuber_wi[at]yahoo. com
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Same here, like the concept, not yet up to speed on the tech side.
To get a quick overview see: "What is podcasting" below. Here you have a short overview, why use RSS, recommended equipment and software (mostly free - MS, Mac or Linux)
I added a nice article (lengthy) about Web 2.0
Sourceforge is where you will can get some of the free software needed.
Above all, have fun...
Links:
I use podomatic.com for my Canadian Small Business Show at http://www.canadiansmallbusinessshow.com
Links:
Hello, podcasting is actually pretty simple. I reckon the hardest part is creating content that people will want to subscribe to.
Apple provide plenty of tech specs at http://www.apple.com/itunes/store/podcasts.html, but basically you'll need to a) create movie or audio content, b) put this on a webserver somewhere c) create an XML file (as per the Apple specs on the page above) that references your file(s) and d) provide a link to the XML file on your website.
Users then simply "add a podcast" in iTunes or equivalent and you're off.
If you can integrate the creation of the XML file into your CMS somehow so when content is added the XML file is automatically updated, then it's pretty much a set-and-forget system.
Hope that helps.
Stefan Drury
Links:
Brian L
Sales Training & Sales Performance Guy
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HI Martin
I like byoaudio.com the best
I use Audacity to edit the files (free)
brian
