Podcasting is easily enough described. If you can make an MP3 file, and have access to the Internet, you can record your own radio programmes and make them available to the world. The twist is that whereas before, your listeners would have to keep checking your site on a regular basis in search of new episodes, podcasting ensures that everything is served straight to their desktop as and when you release it. If they have some form of portable media player, such as the iPod (from which the name originated), podcasting software will even load it up, ready for listening on the go.

Basics of pod people
The actual technology is based on RSS feeds, as used by almost every news site to provide its headlines. Instead of carrying news, the feed carries a link to the file – saved as an MP3, wherever you happen to host it – wrapped in an ‘enclosure’ that tells the podcast software what to do. This opens up the one problem that you need to be aware of: MP3s are big files, and while one person downloading a couple of MB should barely graze your monthly bandwidth allocation, a wider listener base will quickly cut through your allowance. In most cases, your host will pull the plug if you exceed this, but some will opt to charge you for the excess bandwidth used. In both cases, it’s bad news.

We recommend that you host your MP3s on a separate server to your websites, ensuring that service remains uninterrupted. Alternatively, you can go with a straight service, such as Audioblog ($4.95 [about £2.85] a month for 1GB of downloads, www.audioblog.com) or Streamload ($9.95 [about £5.70] for 10GB, www.streamload.com), which should be plenty, at least when starting out.

Odeo (www.odeo.com) is a dedicated podcasting portal, with creation tools currently available to beta users, which should be going live any time now. Another possibility is the Internet Archive (www.ourmedia.org), which will hold your recordings for free, but make sure that you get the link to the actual file rather than one of its built-in redirects. One caveat, though: when it’s up there, it’s up for good.

Recording the show
Speak into a microphone. Save this as an MP3. For all the futuristic terminology, it’s really that simple. The most important part is to decide what your podcast is going to be about. Audioblogs are a growing market, but tend not to be particularly interesting, while full-on radio shows like Poweruser.tv will clearly take a lot more time and effort. Consult last issue’s tutorial on audio optimisation for hints on making your show sound as good as possible.

A word of caution, however: unless you’re prepared to pay expensive ASCAP/BMI type fees to the appropriate bodies, you can’t play commercial music as part of your podcast. You can, however, make use of other sources, such as Creative Commons music – www.magnatune.com is a great place to start, regardless of the kind of music you’re after.

A more important technical consideration for podcasting is ID3 tagging. You can edit these tags in most sound editors, and even from playback tools such as iTunes and Winamp. They categorise your file by genre, album, artist, and other standard grouping tools, and unless the albums match, your listeners will end up with your podcasts scattered all over their music library, instead of sitting nicely in their own directory.

Making it available
Here comes the tricky part. Once you have the file, you need to set up an RSS feed that will serve it up to all-comers. If you don’t have one already, and most sites based on a content management tool do, you can create a free account with almost any blogging service, such as Blogger (www.blogger.com) and use that. Once you have the feed, by far the easiest way to jazz it up, and add support for podcasting, is to run it through FeedBurner (www.feedburner.com), a free service that will do everything from serving up the correct version of a feed to anyone who asks, to slipping in adverts and affiliate links that you can use to make money from your podcast. Using these examples, your feed source would be http://yourname.blogspot.com/atom.xml, and the link for people to subscribe to, http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourname.

Log in to your Feedburner account, register your feed, and visit the Optimize settings. There’s plenty you can do here, but for now, we want the SmartCast option. This parses your feed and assumes that any link to a media file is for podcasting purposes – you can specify audio, video or both.

To easily keep track, you can also enter description information for your podcast as a whole, including the show’s name, its genre, copyright, and other information that will be used on a continuous basis (the individual shows are still based on the MP3 files’ ID3 tags however, so make sure to keep those in check). Of course, you don’t have to use Feedburner. Most established CMS tools now feature either built-in support for podcasts, or plug-ins to enable them. In WordPress, for example, it’s as easy as typing this into a post:

<a href=”http://example.com/my-podcast.mp3”>My podcast</a>

Be careful, however. Even if this is an internal link, you’ll have to put in the complete domain name and directory information (as opposed to cutting it off to ‘/my-podcast.mp3’) or WordPress simply won’t pick it up.

Spreading the word
There are a lot of podcasts out there, with more created every day. At the least, you’ll want to make sure that you exist on the main podcast sources, including the iTunes Music Store (don’t worry, Apple doesn’t charge for this – just select ‘Publish a Podcast’ from the Podcasts section in iTunes), Yahoo! Podcasts (http://podcasts.yahoo.com), Odeo and any others that seem interesting. For a new visitor to actually find your podcast cold on one of these sites puts any haystack-based needle-hunting activities into sharp relief, but it’s important to show up in any topic or direct searches.

As with all web content, the rest is a matter of telling people that your content exists, with links on your website or on message forums, and shout-outs to other podcasts in the hope of getting one back. Having a good hook is particularly important, be it Dawn and Drew discussing their sex lives, or the Radio Adventures of Doctor Floyd – the self-proclaimed First Family Friendly Podcast on the web (and funny too – go to www.doctorfloyd.com to subscribe). Needless to say, existing shows have an edge here. No matter how good your rundown of news might be, it’s still unlikely to take much traffic away from the BBC’s official podcasts – thus far only covering snippets, such as the Today Programme morning interview, but with more due in the future.

One particularly useful feature of the FeedBurner application – even if you don’t need to use its services – is its ability to track how many people have accessed your feed and thus chart your process. As with so much on the Internet, people are always quick to complain, but glacially slow to praise – as pleasant as good feedback is, you’ll want something to remind you that you’re not just blasting episodes out into space.