Podcaster Eric Rice has managed to wangle some sponsorship from Warner Brothers for his podcast The Eric Rice Show. The deal includes exclusive interviews, banter and impromptu jams from The Used, a band on Warner Brothers’ Reprise label. Question is, is he just a jammy git or is this the way forward?

Thanks to Jascha, I can now give you the LSE debate as a stream, rather than just a download. It’s amazingly easy to achieve this:

1. Copy the full URI to the mp3 file, e.g. http://uri.com/an_audio_file.mp3 (ensure there are no spaces in the URI as that seems to stuff things up)
2. Paste the URI into a text document
3. Save the text document as an_audio_file.mp3.m3u
4. Upload the .m3u file
5. Link to the .m3u file in your post
6. Users clicking the link will then be able to listen to the file as a stream, instead of having to download it

Of course, all this kerfuffle with podcasting/streaming this LSE debate recording might lead you to believe that there’s something really wonderful about it that makes it terribly important to have disseminated across the web. That’s not really true. It’s more proof of concept for me, because soon I hope to do some more audio stuff and this happens to have been the first time I’ve ever tried to podcast/stream on Strange Attractor. So sorry if you end up listening to it and think “I went through all that for this?”

Podcastcon 2005 - the UK’s first podcasting conference. Date and venue to be confirmed.

Audioblog.com have recently added a few new small, but useful, features to their service including the ability to download the source MP3s.

Audioblog allows subscribers to record audio files via either a browser-based Flash recorder or their phone (in the US). You can also create your own MP3 or WAV files and upload those directly. These files are then hosted on Audioblog and published to the user’s blog via a customisable player.

Until now, the source audio files were locked up in Audioblog’s system, but they have not only made them available to users, but have also given users the option to make them available for download by their listeners.

This means that users can make the most of Movable Type’s enclosures to send the audio file URIs by RSS, thus creating their own podcasts.

Eric Rice, founder of Audioblog, audioblogs more on the new features and podcasting techniques.

I’ve started a little audioblogging experiment over on Chocolate and Vodka wherein I forsake the written word in favour of recording audio posts. I’m using Audioblog.com as my tool of choice and I am hoping to do nothing but blog verbally for the next week or so, although posting may be interrupted by a trip up to London.

My main reason for cutting out written blogging completely, except for excerpts, on Choclate and Vodka for this period is to force me to use the audioblog tool and to see whether I can get used to talking instead of typing. On the one hand, I currently feel terribly self-conscious recording myself whittering on, but on the other I fear that if I do get used to it the posts may end up as epic soliloquies that the blogging world may actually be better off without. Knowing how much I usually talk, this risk cannot be ignored.

Anyway, take a look at… I mean, listen to the experiment and feel free to leave comments. I’d love to know what you think of the audioblog experience - not necessarily the content, but the actual listening instead of reading part of it.