The podcast jam officially starts tomorrow, but I’ve launched the chat today in case you are “in town” early and want to come hang out at the equivalent of the conference hotel bar.
If you’re the sort that subscribes to podcasts, you can just use the main news feed in your podcatcher. FeedBurner offers a service that will look for files that might be suitable as podcast feed enclosures (e.g., mp3s) and makes them into enclosures, thereby turning a plain old WordPress blog feed into a podcast feed. Very nice.
In case you’re interested in the technology behind the podcast jam, here’s a rundown:
- The website is a WordPress blog with a theme by Andreas Viklund.
- Podcast files are hosted on libsyn, which offers unlimited downloads.
- The feed is burned through FeedBurner so we can track stats and because of the SmartCast service.
- phpFreeChat provides the chat interface.
- Marc Reichelt’s flash mp3 player plays podcasts on the website.
- We used Wikispaces for our project planning wiki.
- We’ll be displaying an OPML reading list of contributors using the Optimal browser.
For podcasting, everyone uses their own tools, of course, but here’s what I’ve found useful:
- GarageBand on the Mac, part of Apple’s iLife suite, is a great way to record podcasts then edit them and some music.
- iTunes will convert various audio file formats into mp3.
- Odeo Studio provides a web-based audio recorder, if you don’t need editing.
- Gizmo offers one button recording of VoIP calls.
- If you would rather use Skype than Gizmo and you have a Mac, Audio Hijack Pro makes it easy to record a Skype call.
One Comment
One more credit to mention. We’re hosting our OPML file at opmlworkstation.com.
The original reading list was built in the OPML Editor, but it’s a desktop app (actually sort of desktop/online hybrid) and we just happened to think today that we might want to share editing of the file. Since I have a day job complete with firewall, an online editor seemed like a better idea.