Rob and Cynthia Learn to Podcast

We held an impromptu “Podcasting 101” tutorial at the [[Queen Street Commons]] this afternoon. Brother [[Johnny]], [[Rob Paterson]], and [[Cynthia Dunsford]] were there, along with Peter West and Mark Sandiford.

We covered the same same ground I covered in this blog post, but in person: how to record audio into an iBook, the basics of editing in Sound Studio, converting to an MP3 file using iTunes.

The missing link, left uncovered, was how to take your MP3 and “turn it into a podcast.” In other words, get the MP3 on the web with a URL, and set up an RSS 2.0 feed to point at it. Unfortunately, the “free weblogging platform” marketplace — Blogger, TypePad, et al — haven’t quite caught up to podcasting yet, and so this final step isn’t easy as, say, maintaining a text-only blog.

Help is on the way, however. A good place to start is this Feedburner page that describes how you can use Feedburner to “podcastify” your TypePad or Blogger blog. This is probably exactly what Rob (TypePad user) and Cynthia (Blogger user) need.

We’re going to get together again sometime soon to cover “how to record Skype calls and turn them into a podcast.” I’ll try and give some advance notice about this so others can attend.