Assignment 3: How I managed to make a Podcast and embed it in Blogger

The podcast of my interview with Ms. Andrea Peterson, Head of Library IT at Western Washington University, should be playing right now because it is embedded in this post. Ms. Peterson's discussion of Content Management Systems centered around Drupal because that is the CMS that she uses at WWU. Her explanations helped further my understanding of how Drupal works and why it is so popular. I would also like to add that she freely admitted that the learning curve for Drupal was quite steep, even for someone like herself with a strong background in html, web design and technology.

As Head of Library IT at WWU, Ms. Peterson is responsible for both the Viking Village and Western Washington University Library's websites. I was really impressed with the successful integration of several Web 2.0 concepts on both sites and totally blown away by the interaction that the students are able to experience when they visit these sites. There are online study sessions, embedded links to facebook and twitter, student profiles/blogs, embedded videos, online discussion boards that deal with both library and non-library issues, online polls, and the list goes on.

Many thanks to Ms. Peterson for donating her time and expertise to a complete stranger on the East Coast.

Here's a brief overview of the adventure that I experienced as I attempted to embed my first podcast.

After finally securing a candidate to interview, I decided to perform a little experiment with my cell phone and Garageband. I conducted the interview with Ms. Peterson via speakerphone, recording the conversation onto my Macbook with Garageband. From an audio perspective, it's not the best thing ever, but then again, most podcasts are not. I cleaned up the audio as best as I could using Garageband and then I converted the file itself to mp3 format.

That was the easy part. As you may or may not already know, Blogger does not have a feature that allows you to embed audio. At the recommendation of Ms. Peterson, I attempted to use odeo to "publish" my podcast, only to discover that the site was down for construction. I then setup an account with podcast alley but quickly ran into problems. I did some more digging and discovered that I could upload my file to box.net and post a link to the site. While this worked just fine, I wanted to see if I could embed the mp3 in the blog post itself. I discoverededublogs.tv, which functions much like youtube but also allows you to upload audio. Once the audio was uploaded, I simply copy and pasted the "embedded code" into my blog posting.