Podcasting on a Shoestring Budget

Fifteen years ago, anyone who wanted to be anything, had to have his own website. It was just the cool thing to do. All you needed was a PC and dial-up internet access, and a WYSIWIG HTML editor, you know that fancy addition that came with Netscape, that let you build your own website? Now it seems that, in order to be counted among the cool, you need to have a podcast, as well. Hey, somewhere someone can't wait to hear what you have to say about war and taxes. You'll get an audience of 5 or 5,000,000, but you'll have fans, whether you're a ham or a half wit

As long as you have a broadband connection, a PC (or Mac), and a microphone, there isn't a darn thing anyone can do to keep you from podcasting. When the word podcast was coined, some three years ago, no one had any idea to explain the concept in any terms the average Joe could understand. It was the next generation of internet radio, but, nooooo, it wasn't anything like webcasting. Podcasting requires RSS. Well, what the heck is RSS, the average Joe would ask. And the explanation would leave him wonder just how many swirlies Mr. RSS had received in high school.

It's really much less complicated than it sounds. Most people already know what a blog is. A podcast is, simply put, an audio blog. Those profound insights and drunken rants you post on myspace and livejournal, those are blogs. If you apply the same principle to audio files, you have a podcast.

If you subscribe to a blog, a file called an RSS feed, will tell you when the blog has been updated. And RSS feed is a separate file, usually written in a scripting language called XML. If you understand how HTML tags work, learning XML is not very hard. But if you don't want to go through the trouble of writing your XML files from scratch, the Firefox web browser comes with a built in RSS editor. There are also free RSS services and RSS editors available for download.

This messy podcast studio accommodates up to four people. It is also set up for professional quality phone interviews.

Credit: Jeva Singh-Anand

Copyright: Jeva Singh-Anand