I spoke with my good friend Jordan Polk on the phone the other day for a few minutes about podcasting. It is a pretty difficult process…and it got me thinking, YouTube rocks, for tons of reasons. But what about just being able to stream audio?
You could use YouTube to create videos with simple static images and the audio. But that’s a lot of extra work just to get some audio up. Of course, it would really be ideal if you could just upload an audio file alone to YouTube and have it converted into a Flash file with player controls just like a YouTube video. It would really rock if those uploaded sound clips could be organized into a playlists and podcasts (don’t know what a podcast is? Click here!). Such a web app would really make podcasting much more accessible to a ton of people who don’t know the first thing about RSS feeds (don’t know what RSS is? Click here!) and all the other stuff you need to create a podcast.
If I knew how to take on such a task, I would. Here would be my features:
- Users upload audio files to the server.
- Files are converted to Flash format with a control interface.
- Audio can then be embedded in a any page with standard embed tags.
- Users can create playlists that generate their own RSS feeds.
- RSS feeds can be submitted to iTunes and other podcasting services.
Is there already a service like this that you know about? I couldn’t find one…
What would be a cool name for it? You Cast? You Wave? You Noise?
