iPod on Amazon's 'Best of 2006' list

Via Macsimum News : the iPod once again appears on a 'Best of 2006' list - this time on Amazon.com.

Queen's Christmas speech available as a podcast

That staple of holiday listening, the Queen's Christmas speech, is now available as a podcast. Subscribe here.

DIGG podcasting

DIGG has just rolled out another update, this time replete with some great podcasting features. Looks good.

Podcamp in Second Life

Via Podonomics : A Podcamp is being organised to begin at the end of January 2007. The difference this time - it'll be held in Second Life. Sounds great.

Turn your iPod into a Karaoke machine

From the site :

Turn your iPod into your own band. Play backing tracks or songs and sing along. We add an echo effect to your voice to make it sound like you are on stage! Includes a high-quality microphone, cables, AC adapter, and microphone stand clamp. We even include an electric guitar input--the MusicJam has a guitar preamp with Tone and Distortion controls. The MusicJam has a sophisticated circuit design with very low noise and superior sound quality that may be used for public performances and recording via standard RCA jacks on the side.

Recording your interviews

So I’ve been a bit busy, but I’ve made a new promise to myself and to you the readers to get something up here every week about podcasting.

Awhile back I downloaded Skype…and it sat there collecting dust. Well not really but you get the idea. I did nothing with it. Finally I shot off an e-mail to someone that said they wouldn’t mind being interviewed. Sure they’d love to be interviewed. Luckily they were busy, so I was allowed a bit of time to prepare for the interview. The first order of business was to figure out how to record from Skype.

I found very little options for recording. Especially free options. The one option that I did find was from 2004 and it gave me hope that Skype had been upgraded and would now seamlessly record podcasts. That was not the case.

So interview night arrived and I was fumbling around like a total amateur. Oh wait…I am an amateur. Luckily the person I interviewed was also a computer person and helped me out a bit. After a bit of searching he was able to come up with SoliCall. SoliCall not only records conversations it is also supposed to reduce the noise on the call, which is an added bonus!

SoliCall is a very small program that you download and install. Once you have installed SoliCall you need to set up your Skype (or whatever program you use) so that it uses SoliCall for audio rather than the defaults that are setup. In the process of setting up SoliCall they will give you instructions on how to setup various programs. Despite setting up Skype the way they described I was not able to chat with my interviewee. After a bit of time I figured out that once I started the call I would no longer be able to talk. A work around that I found was to un-plug the microphone and plug it back in. Then I was in business.

So once we got SoliCall setup we were onto the interview which I was not prepared for. Next time I will talk about what needs to happen for an interview:

Searching for Video Podcasts

Via Podcasting News: Searching for more video podcast content? Try SearchforMedia's www.searchforvideo.com. Time for another external hard drive I think.

The iPod Pillow

I like to relax whilst listening to podcasts, and the iPod Pillow looks ideal. It's more than just a fun-looking pillow - pop your favourite mp3 player into the hidden pocket and hook it up to the pillow's internal speaker. What's more, the enormous controls actually work. Beautiful.