Some initial experiences with podcasting

Earlier this week I thought I'd play around with Garageband, and produce a podcast. For starters it'd be easy enough to take an existing post, and record myself reading it out. Then a bit of music and a few images combined with it–instant podcast.

Only, it's rubbish.

That particular blogpost doesn't improve by being read aloud. Apart from the weird sound of my voice recorded it's also boring to listen to. Podcasts, I have decided, have to be free and spontaneous speech. Reading out stuff, especially words that have not explicitly been written to be spoken, just doesn't work.

OL's first rule of podcasting:

Podcasts are essentially spoken, rather than written language.

In the Web 2.0 course session there was an opportunity to gather some spontaneous speech: an impromptu interview with some participants. As I did the question asking, I think I'll take those snippets and put a frame around them, and I'll try to turn them into a more interesting podcast than the one I finally deleted this afternoon due to running out of disk space...