RSS feedsWhat is a podcast? Technically, it is just another RSS newsfeed but one that contains an MP3 or audio file within the enclosure tag. Simply put, it brings all the advantages of RSS distribution, including syndication and ease of access, to audio content. The creation process is surprisingly simple, and because podcasts give the listener control over what they hear and when, take-up within the mainstream media has been excellent.
But while podcasts let you listen to, say, BBC Radio when you want, where you want, they also let you bring the concept into the enterprise. Think training and instructional materials, think archiving of presentations, lectures and demonstrations, think any audio media you may want to make widely available internally and externally.
The only trouble with podcasting is there are so few barriers to entry. Because pretty much anyone can record a podcast, the quality varies considerably. And that’s not just the quality of the content, but also the quality of the audio recording itself. Even the most compelling of content become pointless if nobody can hear what is being said.
Quality and ease of compilation are set to become major differentiators within the podcast sector, especially as video podcasts emerge as the next big thing. Already, tools like ProfCast can take a presentation and convert it to a high-quality enhanced podcast – live, as you are giving the presentation.
This convenience of multimedia information archiving is set to be the future of podcasting wherever lectures, presentations and demonstrations form an integral part of the workflow, whether in business or in education.
That’s podcasting, but what is in-browser news aggregation? For the purpose of this feature the term refers not to the heavyweight and highly expensive commercial news reporting and archiving services out there, but to the web-based, free-to-access, in-browser services that have been taken increasingly seriously since the likes of Google got involved. These provide not only access to current news and searchable archives, but also tap into a wider range of sources; some even incorporate a citizen journalism element where the reader can contribute to a story by way of commenting.
PODCASTING TOOLS
MT-Podcast
Text document to podcast conversion
www.magnetictime.com
Cost Starting at £114 a month
MT-Podcast is a pretty unique online service that uses MagneticTime's MT1
technology to convert existing text documents into professional-quality
podcasts. Although you could do this by recording a podcast yourself, or hiring
in an actor or voice-over specialist to record it for you,
MT-Podcast does away with the human element altogether.
Although cost savings are entirely dependent on the volume of conversions you require on a monthly basis (the more podcasts you make, the bigger the savings over the traditional do-it-yourself approach), there is no denying that MT-Podcast is a real resource liberator in terms of both time and training requirements.
MagneticTime emphasises the consistent high quality of the podcast audio, courtesy of the natural voice technology used. And while things have progressed a long way from the stereotypical “Stephen Hawking” machine voice of old, there is no getting away from the fact that it is still a computer talking rather than a real human being.
Don’t get us wrong: it is among the best of the digital voices we have heard, but you would still be advised to download a demo from the website before signing up to ensure it meets your needs. It is perfectly suitable for in-house information distribution, but whether you would want it to be the voice of your business for your customers or users is a different matter.
Conversions are extremely versatile in that MT-Podcast will happily convert MS Word, Adobe PDF or plain text documents, which covers the major office and institution bases. Simply upload the documents – email currently, but with a web interface promised soon – and the conversion process takes less time than the actual resulting podcast duration.
However, despite the automation’s ability to convert the average document in only a couple of minutes, there is a time overhead introduced by the human QA team, which checks all podcasts prior to their release.
Missing at the moment is the ability to upload completed podcasts directly to your web server, although this level of automation is also promised in the near future.
We like the fact that MT-Podcast completely removes the requirement for any technical knowledge on the part of the user by ensuring that the content of the index file associated with a podcast is managed by MagneticTime. We also like the size of the resulting MP3 files, which are as much as four times smaller than the equivalent music MP3s; a 25-minute podcast can be held in a file just 4MB in size.
Costs are the big grey area, though. The £114 a month starting rate is for
just 4,000 words, rising to £229 for 10,000 and £344 for the 20,000-word
Platinum package. If your requirements exceed these limits, custom packages are
available on a quotation basis.
Pros Automation, convenience, quality
Cons Voice still sounds robotic rather than human, expensive
for low-volume users
FeedForAll Mac
Podcast creation and publishing
www.feedforall.com
Cost $39.95 (£21.75)
FeedForAll has long been a playing field leveller when it comes to Really Simple
Syndication (RSS) feed creation, editing and publishing software. Indeed, it has
brought a refreshing simplicity to the whole process from start to finish, and
at a price nobody can complain about.
The program lets you create and maintain an unlimited number of RSS feeds, and makes the professional maintenance and distribution of multiple content streams a fuss-free exercise through the prudent use of wizards.
Because a podcast feed is essentially an RSS feed with an audio file in the enclosure field (although an RSS feed is not always a podcast), it should come as no surprise that the beautifully WYSIWYG FeedForAll editor has been extended to include support for podcasting. And this includes built-in support for creating podcasts to be used directly within Apple iTunes. This is more valuable than you might imagine if you want your podcast to be distributed via this valuable medium, as the iTunes store requires podcast RSS feeds to follow a particular format in order to be listed. FeedForAll takes care of this for you without any undue fuss.
The support proposition is vital if you are just getting into podcast publishing, and this is one area where FeedForAll doesn’t disappoint. Indeed, the FeedForAll podcasting knowledgebase was recently voted the best podcasting FAQ by readers of the influential resource PodcastingTricks.com.
Not that you are likely to run into much trouble, to be honest, as podcast creation really couldn’t be much simpler than with FeedForAll. The 12-step process begins with entering a title and then a collective description of all the audio files to be included within the podcast, followed by a URL to be associated with it. The steps are then repeated for each audio file that is to become a standalone podcast in its own right. A few minutes later, having entered details of file sizes and formats, you simply save the file as a podcast and FTP the feed to your server.
The process is made just as simple publishing to either the Apple iTunes Store or your own website, and the online help is always there to guide you should you hit a stumbling block.
The value proposition is also a good one, especially as the volume discounts on offer (50 copies bring the price down to £16 a seat, and full site licence costs around £1,000) encourage the whole enterprise to get involved in feed creation. Even if the content syndication team is limited to a few individuals, the £21.75 per head cost constitutes remarkable value.
Although the Mac product is the one with the full podcasting functionality in
the release version, Windows users can also exploit the advanced podcasting
capabilities by using the latest beta version.
Pros Simple, powerful, cheap.
Cons Windows version only in beta
ProfCast 2.0
Presentation to podcast conversion
www.profcast.com
Cost £16.64
ProfCast is a Mac-only tool, but one so good that it makes a strong case for
investing in Apple hardware. What ProfCast does really well is to apply the
create-a-podcast concept to the live presentation field. It can create and
publish podcasts of lectures, speeches, conferences and presentations as they
are being given.
What’s more, it will happily include PowerPoint or Keynote slides to create advanced and enhanced podcasts (ones where the audio files contain chapter markers that can be used to include images and web links as well as titles, for example). Image links in the podcast can be viewed on a video iPod or any MP3 player that can display photographs, as well as in iTunes, QuickTime or embedded within your own web pages.
Simply launch ProfCast and drag the presentation you want to give to the Presentation Well area, and ProfCast will launch the conversion software in the background. Select which audio input device you will be using during the presentation and when you are ready to start hit the Start Recording button. That’s pretty much all there is to it. When you are done, you hit the Stop Recording button and everything you have said will have been recorded and be ready to publish in podcast format. The finished podcast is complete with slides, chapters and audio – all perfectly synchronised.
ProfCast uses slide titles to create podcast chapter titles, and takes URLs from your presentation to create links within the podcast.
Clearly, when you get into the realm of image-enhanced podcasting, file size constraints really start to bite. ProfCast offers preconfigured file size selections that let you opt for smaller, lower-quality files or bigger, higher-quality ones, as well as an option to customise the process.
Beyond this superbly simple ability to move your presentation audio and video into a QuickTime file, ProfCast takes care of the publishing side of things as well with built-in FTP functionality to publish to your web server, as well as full integration with Apple iLife’s iWeb service.
What you don’t get is a fancy editing suite. ProfCast isn’t designed to go head to head with production studios, just to allow anyone to record live presentations as podcasts. That said, you can export your recorded presentation to GarageBand for further audio editing which could come in handy.
What ProfCast does extremely well is offer a very low-cost solution for
recording and distributing lectures and presentations as podcasts, complete with
superb integrated workflow. If you use a Mac for creating presentation
materials, then ProfCast is a no-brainer addition.
Pros Creates podcasts from presentations live, easy to use
Cons Mac only
NEWS AGGREGATORS
NewsVine
News aggregation community
www.newsvine.com
Cost Free
Very new indeed on the news scene, having launched in March 2006, Seattle-based
Newsvine aims to bring together media both big and small. It lets you search for
and read the latest news stories from the likes of Associated Press, New
Scientist and ESPN, while supporting the citizen journalism take on that
news from individual blogs. Indeed, you can write your own news stories and
recommend those you come across online from others.
How prominently news reports are placed depends on numerous factors, including the freshness of the story, its popularity and the reputation of the source. As with Wikipedia, editorial judgement is left entirely in the hands of the community: the balanced judgement of the many should outweigh the fanatical judgement of the few and prevent any obvious attempts to inflate undeserving and inaccurate articles.
Newsvine really does provide the best of both worlds when reading the news. An easy-on-the-eye interface gives quick access to the major news sources you would expect, plus the ability to tag, comment on and link to similar stories that you might not.
Newsvine is the complete opposite of those advertising-cluttered interfaces that many major news providers think the public wants, but which make finding and reading relevant news difficult. It presents a clear overview of news headlines in two distinct channels: the Wire for major accredited sources and the Vine for the user-submitted content such as original stories or “seeds” that link to external articles.
You can navigate the site by searching for a story or browsing by category.
Once you’ve found a story, Newsvine presents the news quite differently to other
sites. On the same page there are links to related articles on Newsvine but also
comments from registered members of the site. In essence, it is a news mashup
that combines major news feeds with small blogs, Digg-style voting and
Technorati-style folksonomy tagging. Newsvine is citizen journalism meets the
established media, and all the better for being a mix of the two.
Pros Integration of news sources, ability to comment on
stories, friendly interface
Cons None
NewsNow
News aggregation portal
www.newsnow.co.uk
Cost From free
UK-based NewsNow was one of the pioneers in web-based news aggregation services.
Established in 1997, it is now the UK’s leading online press monitoring service
with more than a million users worldwide.
Indeed, what was once a distinctly UK-oriented news site now monitors the breaking news from 26,500 sources, including international, national and regional titles, newspapers, magazines, press releases and online news services. What’s more, it updates these stories every five minutes, every day and provides access in 22 languages.
However, because NewsNow is a news aggregation portal, you don’t get to read the full stories on the site. Instead, selecting a headline opens a new window, which redirects to the original publication. It adds a delay, which some may find unacceptable compared with the instant news hit and slick interface of Newsvine.
The headlines cover numerous categories, totalling more than 500, although of that number some 300 are dedicated to sports alone, which is disappointing. But there are 38 business and finance categories, 38 for IT, 42 industry sectors and 75 current affairs topics. The headlines are sorted by freshness, making it easy to see the age of a story, ranging from five minutes, through various stages ending in four-to-six hours old.
Beyond the free-to-access news portal, NewsNow offers numerous corporate services including online press cuttings, market intelligence and competitor tracking. There is also a facility for providing customised newsfeeds for web or intranet use, starting at £50 a month.
Unfortunately, the search functionality for the public portal is limited to a
30-day headline archive only, and further limited by the fact that you can only
search for a single keyword, which seems somewhat mean-spirited and highly
restrictive. To access the full, unlimited text search functionality, you have
to subscribe to the commercial press cutting and news monitoring service.
Pros Five-minute updates, 26,500 news sources, wide range of
commercial services
Cons Poor search facility in the free version, over-emphasis on
sport
Google News
News aggregation archive
news.google.com
Cost Free
Google News has done more to popularise the concept of free-to-access news
aggregation sites than any other service.
Using a pool of 4,500 English-language news sources worldwide, Google removes the human element altogether and takes the expected computer-generated headlines approach. Google News ranks its articles according to such factors as how often and on what sites a story appears, and then groups similar stories together. So for every breaking story, you get access to several articles, with the number growing over time.
Unfortunately, Google News’ source material can be very varied. And, unlike Newsvine, the major news publishers and blogs are all mixed together, which makes sorting the wheat from the chaff rather difficult at times. Indeed, the only way to do it is to click on a headline that interests you and then scroll through the links looking for publishers that you trust.
If you sign up for a Google account, and if you use any of the numerous Google features such as Gmail, Calendar or Analytics, then you’ll already have Google News.
You can personalise the news page by choosing the categories that interest you and removing the ones that don’t. An alerts function can be configured to email you news headlines on a weekly, daily or even real-time basis, and there’s a beta service for accessing the headlines via your mobile phone. And don’t forget that you can also have the news pushed to you by way of an RSS newsfeed subscription.
But perhaps the biggest asset that Google News has to offer is at once both the least and most surprising of all – the search functionality. As well as a basic news archive search, Google has recently introduced an advanced news archive search that stretches across a historical archive of news dating back more than 200 years. Yes, you read that right, that’s two centuries’ worth of news.
Some of this content is free, such as material from the BBC, CNN, the Guardian and Time magazine, but other sources carry a fee (varies depending on publication and story) such as content from the Washington Post and New York Times archives.
Nonetheless, the fact that you have access to a free search facility that includes major newspapers, news archives and legal archives is exceptional. As are the timelines, which are computer-generated and let you display all the news for a given subject in chronological order.
But, as good as the historical archive is, it is really only suited to the
occasional user rather than the information professional. The likes of Factiva
and LexisNexis provide better depth of search and better value for money with
their pay-as-you-go plans. Of course, it doesn’t hurt to check for free stories
on Google News.
Pros Historical archive search, timeline displays,
personalisation features
Cons Difficult to identify trusted and untrusted sources, cost
of some searches
All Tags: Features
del.icio.us
Digg this
reddit!
