PoducateMe, PoducateU

A new website and well-written guide can be found at PoducateMe dot com.

The guide is 186 pages long, but has a nice table of contents that allows you to jump around easily, and the pages are also rather short so it is not an overwhelmingly long document. This guide is pretty thorough and contains lots of good information.

Much of what they include in the guide is platform independent, as I had hoped. However, when you get into their software recommendations I see two problems: 1) It is very much Apple-based with a majority of the recommended titles being Mac-only, and 2) they don't really cover the free podcast hosting solutions that are out there in great numbers and instead compare them to the free Internet Service Provders of days gone by and predict their doom.

The Apple thing is something that has bothered me greatly since the podcast movement started. Sure there's some good software that runs on a Mac that makes podcasting easy. However, the last thing I want is for several hundred faculty to think that they now need the school to buy them an Apple computer because they want to start producing podcasts. That's one reason that I created a new conference and workshop presentation titled "Podcasting without Fruit." It's important for Windows users to know that there are solutions (inlcuding many free ones) out there that don't require a Mac. Almost every podcasting workshop I've attended in the past two years has had an Apple focus, and most of them have been conducted by Apple employees.

Check out PoducateMe, you'll learn something.