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January 17, 2005

How to Create Your Own Mobcast with Blogger

This weekend, I wrote an essay about the concept of mobcasting -- using mobile phones and blogging tools as a way for large groups of people to create audio podcasts on the same website. Ethan Zuckerman and I exchanged some ideas about it on the Global Voices blog, and I spent part of the afternoon tinkering with a variety of tools to see if I could come up with a relatively easy way to do this.

The result: a new experimental blog called mobcasting.blogspot.com. It's a free Blogger website that I've set up with an RSS feed that supports enclosure tags -- the key to publishing podcasts on the Internet. Now, I have the ability to give anyone posting privileges on the site, which in turn would allow them to use Blogger's free Audioblogger.com tool. Audioblogger lets Blogger users call a phone number and post an audio blog to their blog. But since I've set up the blog with a podcast-friendly RSS feed, I've turned Audioblogger into a simple telephone-based podcasting tool. Now I just need some volunteers to contribute to the site. If anyone would like to experiment with it, contact me and I'll give you access to the site so you can post your own telephone podcasts to it.

I could see this method being used by groups of people attending an event, whether it's a conference, a protest or any other public gathering. Any situation in which you'd want to give a number of people the ability to podcast on the same website would apply.

How would you do it? It's easy.

Step One: Go to Blogger.com and set up a free blog. Just follow the instructions; it basically involves creating a username and password for yourself, giving your blog a name and description, then choosing a template. The easiest method is to have Blogger host it for you; this would end up giving you a blog with a URL like XYZblog.blogspot.com, with the first part of the address depending on whatever your blog is called. For example, my mobcasting blog is located at http://mobcasting.blogspot.com.

Step Two: Post an intro message to your blog. Just say whatever you'd like to say; the point here is to get your blog's URL working, and it won't work if you haven't posted anything to the blog.

Step Three: Create a podcast-friendly RSS feed for your blog. Blogger will automatically generate an RSS feed for your new blog, located at an address that looks something like http://XYZblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml. Again, the first part of the URL will be determined by whatever you named your blog, Unfortunately, this feed won't work with podcast -subscription software, so you need to create a new feed for it. The good news is that it's easy to fix. Simply go to feedburner.com and type in the RSS feed generated by Blogger (that's the one that looks like http://XYZblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml). Once you've submitted it to Feedburner, you'll see a long list of options for your feed. The one that's important is the one called SmartCast, This will enable your RSS feed to support podcasts. Be sure to check it and submit it to the website. At this point, Feedburner will make you set up a free account before they'll activate your new feed.

Step Four: Add your new feed to your website. Log into your Blogger account and click the settings button for your blog, then click the template button. You can add a link to your new RSS feed in the sidebar section of the template, near the bottom.

Step Five: Set up an Audioblogger account. Go to Audioblogger.com and sign up for audio blogging access on your blog. Just log in with your Blogger user name and password, then tell it your primary phone number and a four-digit PIN code you'd want to use when making your podcasts.

Step Six: Post your first audio blog! Call 1-415-856-0205 and follow the instructions. You'll have to enter your primary phone number and PIN code.

Now you have your own phone-generated podcast: check your blog and you'll find the message you just posted with your phone. Every time you call the phone number, your blog will display your message on the homepage.

Now for the final step to turn your blog into a mobcast:

Step Seven: Invite friends and colleagues to participate in your mobcast. If they're interested in participating, you'll need their email address to give them posting privileges. Then, log into Blogger, click the Settings tab, then the Members tab. You'll then find a big orange button labeled "Add Team Members." This will bring you to a form that will let you invite three people at a time; just type in their email addresses in the appropriate fields. You can repeat this process if you want to invite more than three people. When they receive the invitation email, they'll find a link to the Blogger website that will let them create a username and password; if they're already a Blogger member they can simply log in. Either way, they will then be able to set up an Audioblogger account and post their first podcast, following the instructions as listed above in Steps Five and Six.

And that's it. If you just follow steps one through six, you'll be able to create your own podcast blog, posting podcasts through your phone. And if you want to get a group of people contributing to the same podcast -- a mobcast -- Step Seven will take care of that for you.

If you decide to create your own mobcast, please let me know. I'd love to hear stories about how you were able to use it... -andy

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Posted by acarvin at January 17, 2005 09:39 PM

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