Christopher Penn from the Financial Aid Podcast has just released a tool to easily generate an iPhone-compatible page for your podcast. It is called the Financial Aid Podcast Podcaster iPhone Kit, and it is a free download.

from Chris’s site:

This simple little web page parses your podcast’s XML feed and slaps it into a nice page designed to render well in Safari, which is the browser on which the iPhone operates. It also grabs your feed’s image and displays it as the icons.

I installed it in only a couple of minutes, giving me this iPhone-compatible version of Boston Behind the Scenes.

You can get the file here: [http://www.financialaidpodcast.com/iphone.zip], make a few simple modifications, then upload it to your webserver.

Read on for more specific instructions.

1. Download the Financial Aid Podcast iPhone Kit.
2. Unzip the folder (which should be called iphone) to your hard drive.
3. You”ll find a file called config.php in the iphone folder. Open this with a text editor like Notepad, BB Edit, etc. and replace Chris’s podcast info with your own. Here’s the contents of the file with what you need to change highlighted in red:
   
   <?php

   //iPhone configuration page
   // Created by Christopher S. Penn
   // Licensed under Creative Commons By Attribution Non Commercial Use Only Sharealike 3.0 US License
   // Do not use any form of punctuation except periods, commas, or dashes

   // Enter the name of your podcast.
   $podcastname=”Financial Aid Podcast“;// Enter your blog/podcast homepage URL – NOT the RSS feed
   $podcastweb=”http://www.FinancialAidPodcast.com“;

   // Enter your podcast RSS feed URL
   $rssfeed=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/studentfinancialaidnews“;

   // Enter your name or your company’s name – keep it short
   $author=”Christopher S. Penn“;

   // If your show has a call in number – and it should – put it here
   // This is a US format number – if you need a free call in line,
   // Try www.K7.net
   $callin=”206-350-1208“; // US format xxx-xxx-xxxx

   ?>

4. Upload the iphone folder and its now-modified contents to your web hosting provider. It doesn’t have to be on the same domain as you podcast, but I would think the best place to put it is http://www.yourpodcast.com/iphone/
5. Set the folder’s permissions to writeable (you may not need this step with some hosts).
6. Create a link to your iPhone-ready site from your podcast’s home page.
7. Be one of the first podcasters to have an iPhone ready show!

Chris has released the Financial Aid Podcast iPhone Kit under a Creative Commons License allowing you to adapt it and improve upon it — just make sure you give Chris credit if you do make it your own! I’d also like to know about any improvements so I can post them here.

Enjoy!

Many businesses, conference organizers, and educational institutions see podcasting as a way to distribute recordings of their lectures and classes online. This has its uses and its problems, and I’d like to take a look at a few of them.

Before I lay out my views on the subject, I want you to take a minute and think about what it is like to sit in an auditorium listening to a lecture. Do you imagine an exciting experience? For many people, the answer is no.

Now, think about listening to the same lecture without the “live” component of the experience. This live component is very important, so think about it carefully. A “pros and cons” question arises right here: a good lecture is made far better by being there, but an average lecture could benefit from a pause or fast-forward button.

I have been to many lectures, most of them mediocre ones. However, even among the best of them, there is only one that I would have enjoyed as much in a recording as I did in person (it is luckily available as a download). It is telling that this lecture was given by a veteran radio correspondent — almost nobody else could pull it off.

The point is that not every recording makes a good podcast. If a lecture has been recorded, by all means post it online. But posting it online doesn’t mean you have to make it a podcast (with an RSS feed and a listing on iTunes). It is great to open up access to these resources and expand their reach beyond the “one room, one time” audience (this is the premise of the popular site IT Conversations). Ideally, these lecture recording wills be edited slightly to clean up mentions of PowerPoint glitches and pauses for sips of water — just this small amount of work will improve the listening experience tremendously

However, just posting the audio of a lecture isn’t a very good way to gain or maintain an audience. If you truly want to engage your audience, I would advocate podcasting an interview or edited “audio profile” of the speaker to give your listeners a good feel for the content. If you have also posted the complete lecture, invite them to download it from your site if they want more information on the topic. This way, you entertain and invigorate your audience with well-produced content, then drive the most interested group of them to your site for the full story.

It takes extra work to do this, but that work could make the difference between a podcast with a few casual listeners and one with a large number of loyal fans. Not only are you producing a podcast series that people will actually want to subscribe to, but you are also serving the smaller number of people who do want to hear recorded lectures by making those recordings available as well.