Podcasting & Internet Radio (&TV) - How It's Done

We're talking about delivering up audio and or video files on a regular basis that people can listen to online, download or subscribe to: an audio/video diary that contains whatever the individual or group are interested in producing and hopefully what their audience are equally interested in.

The process of "podcasting" involves a number of steps.

1. Create your media file, audio or video
   
2. upload and host your media file
3. publish your media file
4. users subscribe to your media

Create your media file, audio or video

The simplest way to create digital audio is with the free and open source Audacity. Click here to learn how to use it. Click here for a guide to simple video creation.


Upload Your Media File

You could upload your media files to your own web space (click here for web hosting) but media files are large and unless you can afford huge server space you will soon run out of space. So perhaps your media files could be stored elsewhere. You could use YouTube,Google Videos or BlipTV for video files. You could also use them for audio because if you record a video with something covering the camera lens what you then have is an audio file.

[edit] Drive-123, Ourmedia

Publish Your Media File

There may be other ways to do this and when I discover them I'll report on it. For now my view is that the best way to publish a podcast or a media file is in a blog which is a chronological mechanism and usually has a means for people to subscribe. Click here for blogs. Ideally a subscriber should receive the audio file inro their PC but I haven't quite cracked that yet. For now the subscriber gets a note about the new blog post which contains the media file.

I can offer up two current examples of podcast activity that use slightly different mechanisms.

1) Two podcast channels at http://www.saltburn.org.uk/
2) www.boromela.co.uk/woodentops

Both of these examples use (free) open source blogging software as the vehicle to deliver up chronological audio postings. There are probably lots of other ways to podcast but these two require the software to be installed on a web host. The first uses software called B2 Evolution which is excellent and really comprehensive blogging software. The second uses "Loud Blog" which is simpler and concentrates more on the audio blogging and subscribing. As you may have seen both can incorporate multimedia.

There are other blogs you can use to deliver your audio. the blog you are reading right now uses the excellent and free "blogger" which has loads of features and another is edublogs

Your subscribers