Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth

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October 6, 2006

Blogger, Odeo Get Out of the Mobcasting Business

Yesterday I received an email from Audioblogger.com, the mobile phone podcasting service for Blogger/Blogspot blogs. Looks like they're getting rid of the free service at the end of the month:

As of November 1, 2006, Audioblogger will no longer accept phone calls. MP3s made with the service will continue to be hosted and served but you will no longer be able to use Audioblogger to post new audio.

Audioblogger is an independent product, run by Odeo, Inc., a small
startup company in San Francisco, CA. We are not affiliated with
Google or Blogger except that we operate and provide the
Audioblogger service.

Given our limited resources, we have to make tough decisions
about what projects to focus on. And we've come to the difficult
decision that Audioblogger demands too many resources, time, and
money for us to continue its operation.

However, there are several other services that offer similar
functionality. Odeo is not affiliated with any of these services,
we only suggest them only in hopes that one or the other will be
a good alternative for you.

Gabcast.com is a free service for recording by phone
Hipcast.com has a seven day free trial and lots of features
Gcast.com is another free service for phone recording

All of the phone posting services listed above are compatible
with Odeo in that they produce podcast feeds, which can be
imported to Odeo. Any audio file at Odeo can be posted on a blog
by copying and pasting some embed code.

With Audioblogger giving up the ghost, this will be the second free mobcasting tool shuttering its doors within the last year. Some of you may remember my previous posts about Audlink.com, which also provided a free mobcasting service. They shut down without any warning earlier this year. While there's no reason to suspect that tools like Gabcast or Hipcast will vanish any time soon, the trend doesn't bode well, and reinforces my long-held argument that we need to have an open source mobcasting tool that can be installed easily on a local phone number, without concerns that the company hosting it will disappear unexpectedly. Meanwhile, services like Melodeo.com are making it possible for people to hear podcasts over their mobile phone, you need to subscribe to an Internet data plan for it to work. The beauty of tools like Audlink and Audioblogger is that they worked with regular phones - no Internet access required. And for communities with limited Internet access and poor mobile Internet infrastructure, mobcasting could prove to be an excellent way to allow the public to participate in podcasting - both listening and recording - without worrying about their lack of Internet access. -andy

Posted by acarvin at October 6, 2006 4:23 PM

Listen to a computer-generated podcast of this article