Phonecasting in WordPress

While chatting with Jeff Waugh, we worked out a great way of blogging from remote Tanzania: podcasting by telephone! Here’s how.

Even if we’re not in one of the 70% of Tanzanian villages with mobile phone coverage, we’ll still have a satellite phone. We call into a voicemail service like mBox and just start talking. It then emails us the MP3 file of the recording.

WordPress already lets you blog by email, checking a standard POP3 mailbox and turning whatever it finds there into a blog post. Email subject becomes post title, email body becomes content. But it doesn’t support attachments. Yet.

Jeff reckons it’d be easy enough to see if the email contains an MP3 file and extract it. It could then be handed to, say, the PodPress plug-in, which in turn makes sure the MP3 file is properly connected to the blog post to work as a podcast. PodPress then automatically updates your podcast listing in iTunes and other directories.

As an added bonus, WordPress can automatically send a message to Twitter when a new episode goes online.

How do we avoid spam? Well, mBox uses Caller ID to make sure the email has a subject like:

mBox Voice message from NNNNNNNNNNN to MMMMMMMMMM

We can check the email headers to ensure they’re legitimately from mBox or whoever we use. And we can use the sender’s phone number to correctly assign the author, and the receiving phone number to, well, post into different categories or whatever.

So, to run through it again… I’m standing on the ferry to Zanzibar. I make a satellite phone call to describe the magnificent view. Five minutes later, that’s a podcast. And everybody gets notified via Twitter.

Of course there’s bound to be some potential for screwing this up, but whaddyareckon?

Stilgherrian Live Alpha: a program brief

Photograph of Sennheiser S825 microphone

Decided! The first episode of Stilgherrian Live Alpha will be “recorded live” on the Internet this Thursday 8 May at 9.30pm Sydney time. Oh shit! That’s tomorrow!

I won’t repeat what I’ve already written about my plans [1, 2]. This post presents a Program Brief — so I can clarify my thinking as much as anything else — and gathers a few recent thoughts. I’m intending to make the entire process transparent in the immodest hope that someone might find it useful.

Aims

  1. Continue my process of moving from doing hands-on technical work to media production, executive production and consulting.
  2. Build upon the “Stilgherrian as a blogger” brand to establish the core personal media global microbrand of “Stilgherrian as a presenter”, around which I can gather other projects.
  3. Establish a regular audience who can become the core of my 1000 True Fans.
  4. Develop and document production workflows so that we can produce similar programs quickly and cheaply.
  5. Experiment with and settle upon a suite of hardware, software and services which works for me in this context.

See, there is method to my madness!

Continue reading “Stilgherrian Live Alpha: a program brief”

Creating podcasts on a Mac, Part 1

Podcasting is now far, far easier and cheaper even than I’d imagined — even for complex productions. I’ve been experimenting. Here’s a very quick summary of what I’ve learned so far about doing this on a Mac, my platform of choice.

Now if your podcast is just you talking then you can take a much simpler approach. Read no further.

However this investigation was inspired by the “live recording” of the 2 Web Crew. Having an audience contributing comments and questions via text chat created an interesting dynamic — similar to talkback radio but less formal. I wanted to explore further.

The technical challenge is combining all of the audio elements before the audio or video stream is piped up to Ustream or wherever. There’s probably quite a few ways to do this, but my starting-point was The UStream Tool Kit — which also covers Windows.

Continue reading “Creating podcasts on a Mac, Part 1”