Creating a Podcast - Mohammed & the mountain

Web industry trends Podcast audience small but still growing

"The total audience for podcasts has shown meteoric growth, particularly in the US," says Mike Chapman, eMarketer Editorial Director and author of the new Podcasting: Who's Tuning In? report. "The active listening audience is much smaller, but it is still set to grow rapidly."

"A year ago, many people had not even heard of podcasting. Yet the number of podcast listeners who have ever listened to or watched a podcast is projected to top 10 million this year and reach 50 million by 2010."

My interest in podcasting grew when I read a magazine article describing educators at our Ivy league universities creating podcasts of their lectures which thier learners can access at their own convenience. I thought, "technology at work again" I was happy to see fellow faculty members taking the initiative to keep up with the generation and their "toys". This can only be good for creating interest after all "if the mountain won't come to Mohammed then Mohammed must go to the mountain" :))

So I began investigating and found a good web site, How to create your own podcast which gives good instructions. Yesterday I downloaded the software audicity and its encoder Lame 3.96 1-1. Downloading was the easy part, linking the encoder to Audacity was a little tricky. For some reason I kept looking for an .exe file instead of the required .dll file but after a couple of attempts I got it and voila I was on my way to mp3 creation. My first mp3 file materialized in a matter of minutes. It was an intuitive process, I gave the "victory pull" sign at my mid-afternoon joy.

The first part of my lesson was successful, I also created the txt file in notepad an now need to take other steps i.e. upload these files and run my podcast, stay tuned.