The moment I heard about AudioBoo on MacBreak Weekly, I fell in love with the concept. I started my podcast ‘career’ with live audio recordings from Saint Peter’s Square, but they required a digital recorder and lots of post-processing to edit the audio and post it to the web.

It could sometimes take days, if not weeks, to get this audio content to my audience.

With AudioBoo, I can share audio impressions of events in my life without the hassle of post-production. I can record something, post it to the web via my iPhone, and share it with the world minutes after I record it!

What’s more, AudioBoo makes your updates available in an RSS feed that people can subscribe to in iTunes, so that they can download them automatically.

The short form (5 minutes max) is ideal for a number of podcast series that I produce, like ‘Healthy Catholic’, where I share my tips on how to live a healthy life.

But all these updates end up in the same RSS feed. So how could I use AudioBoo to record podcasts and have them automatically being added to the various podcast series that I produce?

Step 1: use tags

When you create an AudioBoo, you can add tags to each recordings. This is the cornerstone of the method I developed to distribute the recordings. For a recording that I want to be inserted into my ‘Healthy Catholic’ feed, I add the tag ‘HC’. For an update for Catholic Insider, I add the tag ‘CI’.

Step 2: use Yahoo! Pipes

Yahoo Pipes is a service that enables you to analyze, modify and recompile web content and RSS feeds. It offers very advanced options, and might be a little overwhelming at first, but it’s not as hard as it sounds.

In my case, I wanted to add new Healthy Catholic AudioBoos to an already existing RSS feed.

So I created two ‘Fetch Feed’ modules that will be merged into one new feed: the existing Healthy Catholic feed and the general AudioBoo feed.

I only want the items in the AudioBoo feed that are tagged ‘HC’, because the other recordings are for other shows. So I have to create a filter, that permits all posts that contain the iTunes keyword ‘HC’.

(For advanced users: I also added a Regex filter to replace the generic AudioBoo description, summary, author and subtitle by other texts).

I also had to create another filter to actively block all items that do not contain the iTunes keyword ‘HC’.

The result of that filtering is a feed that only contains my AudioBoos tagged with ‘HC’. Using a ‘union’ module, I merge those results with the original Healthy Catholic feed.

And finally, I updated my Feedburner feed (that people subscribe to in iTunes and on SQPN.com) to get its information from the Pipe Output.

And voilà: the subscribers to Healthy Catholic now receive updates produced with AudioBoo and the updates that are produced and posted in the ‘old-fashioned’ way!

I can repeat the process for any other show that I want to produce with AudioBoo; I could create a new pipe for ‘CI’/Catholic Insider updates, ‘DB’ for mini Daily Breakfast episodes, etc.

Step 3

There is no step 3!

P.S.: you might have noticed that I use jingles in some of my AudioBoo episodes. No magic tricks here: I just play them over my computer speakers and record them on the spot

You can download the audiobook for free via this link (goes to the US iTunes store, check your local iTunes store to see if it’s available there as well).

The Long Tail

‘The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More’ was very influential on my understanding of podcasting as an ideal way of evangelizing via new media productions like podcasts, online video and blogs.

The concept of the book is simple: to gather a big audience in the past, you needed to have a ‘bestseller’, a hit series like ‘Lost‘ or a book like the ‘Catechism of the Catholic Church‘. It was too expensive for stores to keep stock of books that only generated small sales, or to air TV series that didn’t get picked up right away by a large audience (Firefly anyone?).

However, thanks to digital distribution and online stores, publications and media productions with a limited immediate appeal can still gather a substantial audience over time, it just takes longer. So a couple of ‘bestsellers’ might cause a spike in sales during a short period of time, but in today’s internet economy, there is also a ‘long tail’ of products that are generating sales or gathering an audience over a longer period of time. The only thing you need as a distributor is a large warehouse (Amazon), or a very big hard drive in case you are in the digital business.

Harry Potter

Take for instance the SQPN podcast series about the religious and Catholic themes used by JK Rowling in her famous Harry Potter Saga. A new episode of ‘The Secrets of Harry Potter’ might get 5,000 downloads in the first week after publication. But after two months, the number of downloads might have grown to 50,000!

And since new listeners discover the series on a daily basis, and can download older episodes as well, some shows have now been downloaded more than 150,000 times. Not bad considering that it only took an hour to produce such an episode.

Mustard Seed

That is why the Catholic Church should invest much more into digital productions like podcasts – a one time investment can touch hundreds of thousands of people over time. SQPN has received countless emails from people who returned to the Church or converted thanks to the big catalogue of Catholic podcasts produced by the network.

The image of the mustard seed could be the biblical equivalent of Anderson’s ‘long tail’: SQPN’s new media evangelization effort starts small, almost insignificant, but over time, it grows and shelters many souls.

For profit or For Free?

There is an ongoing debate among Catholics that are active in new media about how to turn these activities into ’sustainable models’. How can you make sure that you can organize new media evangelization in a way that guarantees its survival – how do you fund it? I see two paths:

The first path is that of creating for-profit organizations that will provide Catholic new media products for a fee. The model is similar to that of traditional Catholic publishers: you guarantee quality products and customers will have to pay a price.

The second path is to go the non-profit route, essentially giving away your media products for free; generating income through voluntary donations or via sponsorship. It is the path that SQPN has taken right from the start.

Both models coexist, and they each have advantages and disadvantages.

The for-profit model could provide a more solid basis for development and growth. But it could also create a barrier for not-yet-Catholics: why would you pay for a Catholic product when you aren’t a Catholic? And even existing Catholics might hesitate to pay for digital media when the economy is tight, and so much content can be found for free on the internet.

The non-profit model completely removes the threshold for anyone who is curious and wants to sample what is offered. SQPN would be rich if we would have received $1 for every podcast episode that was downloaded in the past 5 years, but with that price tag, we would have never reached the large audience that we have! The downside is that there is less of a guarantee that you will have funding in the future, since you completely abandon yourself to the generosity of your audience.

Chris Anderson’s new book makes a case that, in many instances, organizations and businesses can profit more from giving things away than they can by charging for them. I can’t wait to listen to this audiobook, and I will soon post more thoughts about it on this blog. In the mean time, share your thoughts in the comments below!

The problem is obvious: how can you possibly keep track of all those updates? Sometimes there are over a hundred new items each hour in my newslist!

As in real life, your social contacts can be divided into several groups like concentric circles.

There is the broad neighborhood, people you cross and greet on the street – but you might not know them very well.

There is a group of people you see more often; in my case for instance, my parishioners, collegues, or fellow podcasters.

And there is an even smaller group of close friends and family members.

Is there a way to make that same division in Facebook, so you can take a closer look at the updates of just one of those groups, instead of just watching the endless feed of updates from everyone?

There is! And here is how you do it:

1. Click on ‘Home’ in the Facebook menu. The default setting lets the page display the general News Feed.

5. When you are done, click ‘Create List’. The new list will be added to the menu on the left. You can now drag it to a new position to change the order of the menu. If you place the list at the top of the menu, you will see the updates of that list as the default on your home page.

That’s it, you’re all done! Hope this helps to bring some more order into the social networking chaos in which we live

Walking through Audioboo from Mark Rock on Vimeo.

Thanks to Leo Laporte’s MacBreak Weekly podcast, I heard about this great new application for the iPhone, called ‘Audioboo‘. When installed on an iPhone, it allows you to record short, 5 minute long audioclips, and upload them to the Audioboo server, where they become instantly available as a podcast you can subscribe to. Even though the app uses the standard microphone of the iPhone, the sound quality is stellar – much better than what you hear in many existing podcasts.

The most exciting aspect of Audioboo is, of course, that you can now podcast from anywhere, at any time! If you can make a phonecall, you can now also make a podcast. Whether you are walking around in Vatican City, or in the middle of an inspiring retreat: you can now share those experiences with the world. The threshold to podcasting has never been lower!

A few seasoned Catholic media producers have already started to experiment with this service, like Greg and Jennifer from the Catholics Next Door, and Fr. Seraphim Beshoner from ‘Catholic Under the Hood’:

• Greg and Jennifer
• Fr. Seraphim Beshoner

I am still waiting to get my own iPhone a couple of weeks from now, but I’m already looking forward to using Audioboo as well!

Italian state-controlled energy provider electricity company Enel will be the first enterprise to advertise its services via Vatican Radio, beginning on July 6.

“We are proud to have been chosen as the first advertiser on one of the world’s most widely broadcast radio stations,” Enel’s chairman Piero Gnudi said at the Vatican newsconference announcing the deal.

In recent times, huge commericial advertisements became more and more frequent on scaffolding during repairs on buildings around St. Peter’s Square.

Source: De Morgen | Earth Times

What do you think? Post your comments below.