Sunday, June 19, 2005

Why Not Here?

Last weekend, Surf and I met up with "Murph" at Longbranch to conduct a podcasting test. Podcasting combines the immediacy of the weblog with the intimacy of radio. The three of us conversed for about one hour, discussing how downtown Carbondale can be improved and how to get a podcast radio show "on the air."

Our conversation rambled and coalesced around the idea of using a podcast to make Carbondale (especially downtown/town square area) more attractive. Murph (a recent transplant from California) offered observations on downtown redevelopment. The tinkling in the background was caused by interaction of wind and chimes on the porch of Tropicana (behind the Branch).

2 comments:

Rob said...

We used an Olympus VN-240PC digital voice recorder for the audio -- since it was on the road. The Olympus has a PCLink cable for transferring files directly to PC. Once there, we used Audacity to edit and convert the audio file to MP3. From there it was just a matter of serving it up and linking to it. Of course, we already had to create an external feed and use that feed to create an RSS-friendly Feedburner feed. Once that was done, per feedburner instructions, if you link to the audio file using blogger's "link" button, your MP3 should be podcast ready.

Of course, there are a lot of technical and audio possibilities we are still investigating. Still, its amazing that -- knowing so little about this medium -- we were able to do even the little we did.

Incidentally, I am currently using a program called RSSRadio to detect and automatically download new podcasts. But there are many others available at Ipodder.org. So I know we are podcasting...sort of. (It worked at first, but now it doesn't. RSSRadio is no longer recognizing that our feed has audio enclosures.)

Rob said...

From the I-don't-know-what-I'm-doing department: Our podcast feed really does now work. And -- so far -- I recommend RSS_Radio as a podcast aggregator.