Podcast.com News

Looking for a conference that features indie culture, podcasting, digital music and the arts? Yeah, well, maybe you weren’t, but the Podcast Hotel is just that type of conference, and after making a fuss in Portland and Seattle it has ventured south into the Golden State. The San Francisco version features P.H.-relevant speakers representing videobloggers/podcasters (Rocketboom, Podtech), record/music labels (Sub Pop, IODA), Web radio (Pandora, Soma.fm), big Internet media (Real Networks), academia (Stanford University), and more. For people who are far away from the left coast (like us), check the Podcast Hotel website for potential archives from the conference, or maybe a stream, or maybe that’s too much to ask although I will be snarky and say it should not be in this day and age, especially at a podcast-centric conference.

If you aren’t “in the know”, learning to become a podcaster can be a frustrating experience. You need a working knowledge of technology, audio and/or video editing, interviewing skills, and more. While we’ll always say the easiest way to become a good podcaster is to jump in with both feet and just do it, to quote that unnamed shoe company, there are resources out there to make your trip a bit smoother (just as Podcast.com is and will continue to be). Take the quick trip on April 20th and 21st to the International Podcasting Expo 2007, and it’s as easy as jumping on the Internet on your home computer. According to the Expo, you’ll learn, among other things:

• What music can I use in my podcast?
• How do I learn about videocasting?
• Is there really money to be made by podcasting?
• Where do I find an audience for my podcast?

… and other valuable skills.  Visit the Expo site for more information.

The adoption of Apple TV might push video podcasters to up the ante on the resolution of their video podcasts, but not too high as to not display on the iPod, because many Web-optimized podcasts (using 320 x 240 resolution) won’t look good through Apple TV on a television. If you’re already encoding your podcast at 640 x 480 (or in HD if you’ve been doing it right for a while), move along — there’s nothing to see here.

Gary Bissell, a computer science teacher at a high school in California, wants to teach a class on making podcasts. “Public speaking is involved, audio editing, script writing, organization and presentation,” Bissell said.

Bissell isn’t the first person to teach young people how to produce audio and video pieces (Generation PRX is a good example of a recent initiative), or the first to introduce podcasting in a scholastic setting (typically on the college level), but he does accentuate how podcasters can gain professional skills while taking part in an exciting new trend in media and technology.

A new podcast creation tool called Ubercaster is now available for the Mac, and it has plenty of features to make it appealing to podcasters who want to use one program to do it all, from recording interviews to multi-track editing to adding descriptive text and uploading your podcast files.  It’s a small investment at around 80 USD, and we can’t fully back it since we don’t have a copy here and haven’t found any online reviews for it yet, but it may be software worth checking out if you need a better solution for producing your podcasts.