Group Podcasting

Lately, I was presented a technical question by friends that were looking to create a group podcast. The friends were very excited about the Podcasting technology through sites like Odeo, and wanted to enable their forum as a place where people can share their podcasting as a group and maybe create discussions based on voice rather than on text. The technology available today should enable such an interaction, right?

At first, I tried playing around Odeo and trying to figure out if there’s anything that might be done about that. Odeo has a feature of embedding code or sending an mp3-link, so you could either allow embedding code in your forum - which is something my friends didn’t want to do, or the users can just post links. That would work, but my friends thought that wouldn’t be as neat as it was always possible to record your own mp3 and upload them to a server, but Odeo - they felt - it more than that, in that it creates a community.

So, I looked around for anything that might sound like Group podcasting and have come across a Wiki post on Groupcasting with not too much in it but a simple idea somebody suggested on how to create something like that. Del.icio.us - the very popular tagging site and its RSS capabilities, coupled together with Odeo could bring Groupcasting in that people would tag their podcasting with del.icio.us and using the RSS feed for the grouptag people would be able to receive updates on the group’s podcasting. Anybody registering for the tag’s RSS could take part in the “Groupcasting”. Once you have an RSS feed, you could - as the group administrator - do plenty with it using tools like FeedBurner and BuzzBoost to publish the links in your forum, or use those in anyway you want.

That’s a neat idea, but it still required that you train people to use another tool - del.icio.us and depend on them tagging the links the right way. Moreover, there really isn’t much control over who tags what.

There are two more tools I thought of that would simplify Groupcasting for the users and maybe add needed features.
The first thing I thought about was using an online tool like MailBucket, that takes incoming email and converts them into an RSS feed. Some bloggers use it to create a comments-feed, some to create an RSS feed for their mailing-lists, but it could also allow Groupcasting users to simply email their podcasting link to the Mailbucket email and read of the Mailbucket RSS feed created. That would save the need for del.icio.us tagging. Mailbucket doesn’t need any setup or registration, your just send it to an email address you want on “@mailbucket.org” and get your feed at “mailbucket.org/.xml”.

Another way is through using Google Groups, which is the way I do my comments feed today. You register for a group on Google groups, get a group-email with it people can post through, you can modify everything and setup permission in the group as an Admin and you can also create an RSS feed of it. Neat thing is that you can separate between posts and topics, and create actual pod-casting discussions.
So, create your group, set it up the way you like it, tell your users to create a Podcasting account in an Odeo-like site, have them send links to their online podcasting to the Google group’s email address, and post the group’s Feedburner’s BuzzBoost up on your forum. Groupcasting accomplished.

Good luck with your Groupcasting, let me know how it worked out for you.