Well, this is a bummer: according to the folks at Boing Boing, the audioblogger feature on blogger– which allows you to literally call in an audio file over the phone and post it to your blogger blog– is going to be closed down on November 1.
It figures. Computers and Composition Online recently published a special issue on sound that includes my article/website/podcast “Broadcast Composition,” and one of the things I talk about in that piece is the advantages of using audioblogger as a teaching tool.
I thought audioblogger was a pretty cool service– at least when it worked (it was always a little buggy). Make a phone call, talk for up to five minutes, and it automatically posts. That’s it. Super easy, and free is a really good price.
Well, the good news is there are other services, notably Odeo, which I think has more or less cornered the market on free podcasting. You can’t use the phone to record podcasts, but you can use their software– as long as you’ve got a microphone on your computer. And, as the Boing Boing piece points out, there are other services for recording audio for the web over the phone out there.
Still, I’ll miss the audioblogger stuff….
I am using http://FreeConferencing.LiveOffice.com with great success, it’s free, to start a conference, but press (5*) and the whole thing is recorded to MP3. This makes podcasting very easy!