Hello hello,
So, as this ball begins to build momentum, I thought it would be a good idea to briefly go through a few of the tech challenges/obstacles/hurdles/smash your head against the wall moments that amateurs may encounter during the course of producing a podcast.
TECH STUFF
Firstly, there are the obvious technacy (or is that technocy? Yay for neologisms...) issues regarding the recording and publication of the podcast. Like Nirupam suggested, the most important of these will probably be learning how to set up and maintain an RSS feed. I think (hope) this will be a lot easier than it first seemed; surely there are simple hosting sites that we can take advantage of, such as FeedForAll.
There are also a lot of readily available tutorials on podcasting and RSS feeds, that range from the complicated and tech language heavy to the podcasting for dummies style. Apple even have their own detailed guide on podcasting - though maybe their newly acquired pocket money could go towards making it a simpler read.
To elaborate a little more on what an RSS actually is, it's basically a feed that is used for pages/blogs etc that are constantly updating. Think Twitter/Facebook's ability to update magically before your eyes without refreshing the page. So for a podcast, it essentially allows our many listeners to listen to/download our latest episode as soon as we're done with it, and without them having to navigate from a single location.
IN SHORT, they are a very handy tool for the lazy.
Some additional information Sam had:
ReplyDeleteThe other major challenges that a new podcast would obviously encounter are those of publicity and distribution. As a start up without any money (unless someone has enough faith in the delightful frivolity of handshake discussions and is willing to invest), the most viable and immediate way to raise interest and awareness in the podcast would be social media and the wonderfully loud mouth of the internet. After all, the common denominator of all podcast listeners, you'd assume, would be that they all use the internet.
A short list of potential avenues for gaining exposure for free:
Making a Facebook page and using our combined social network powers to draw in an initial fan base
Making a Twitter page
Taking advantage of University media, ie SURG FM, Honi Soit etc.
These would be particularly relevant if our target market is predominantly people from our own demographic
I'm sure we can come up with some more creative options as well.
There will no doubt be a lot more hurdles to cross when it comes to actually producing the podcast, though I think part of the fun will be finding these unseen obstacles and overcoming them.