Learning Conversations

There are three stages to creating and delivering a podcast: planning, production and delivery.

Planning

Consider what style you're going to adopt.

Options include:

• Monologue
• Dialogue / conversation
• News bulletin
• Interview
• Set of feature articles
• Story-telling
• Radio play

The dialogue and interview options tend to work well. Examples include Manager Tools, Top Briefings, Towards Maturity.

Monologues, unless you have a very charismatic presenter, or a very motivated audience, are hard to listen to.

Feature articles, story-telling and radio plays tend to require much higher production values and scripts. You're competing with Radio 4 for listeners after all!

Even if you go for the interview/dialogue option, you'll still need to plan out the basic structure of what you're going to talk about. Make sure your interviewee has time to plan out their responses too.

Further resources
Planning your podcast - majors on script writing
Choosing your podcast format

Production

You will need:

• A quiet, acoustically "dead" place to record. Somewhere with lots of curtains or clothes around you is ideal.
• A decent microphone. This could be one that plugs into your laptop via USB (eg. Samson's C01U (there are many others). Or you could use an all-in-one recorder (like the excellent Zoom H2)
• A means of storing the audio in a digital format. You could use the aforementioned Zoom H2, or plug a microphone into your laptop/desktop (be careful of fan noise).
• Software to do the recording and editing. The Zoom H2 will handle all the recording, but not editing. If you're using a computer-based solution then you could use Audacity (an extremely powerful but simple to use open source tool), or GarageBand (free with every Mac - and also highly recommended).
• Time. Dialogues take less editing than most other types of podcast. But still allow time to plan, record and then edit the podcast - in roughly equal quantities.

The production process goes as follows:

1. Record raw materials
2. Edit together the raw materials with any additional sound effects, intro and outro sections etc
3. Save with a suitable bit-rate to ensure minimum size and maximum quality. There's a balance to be made here. I wouldn't expect any 30 minute podcast to be more than about 10Mb. You can make them smaller by reducing quality and publishing in mono. But lower quality means they're harder to listen to.
4. Add the appropriate mp3 ID3 tags to your recording. Audacity does this as part of the export process, but there are other tools available. The ID3 tags help listeners to find the file within their mp3 players.
5. Publish to a suitable website (see next section).

Delivery

There are three ways to listen to a podcast. The ideal delivery platform should handle all three:

1. By going to the website and using a player like the one below.
   
2. By going to the website and downloading the mp3 file.
3. By setting your media software (eg. iTunes) to catch and download the podcast automatically, via your site's RSS 2.0 feed.

So, your website needs to be able to:

1. handle uploading an mp3 file
2. put an mp3 player on the page when given an mp3 file to deal with
3. create a link to the mp3 file
4. build an RSS 2.0 feed

This should all be handled automatically by the website application. Wordpress, b2evolution and Loudblog are all good, solid applications that will provide a basis for podcasting. If all you're doing is podcasting, then Loudblog is your best bet. [UPDATE: Just discovered that Loudblog looks like it's being superceded by PodHawk]

If you want to publish your podcast via the iTunes store, then follow Apple's instructions.

Further resources

BBC Academy > Interviewing for radio
Educause: Seven things you should know about podcasting