Podcasting: Some Ideas...
One idea that we've been thinking of implementing is the ability for any of our users to set up his own podcast. It's not that hard to enable (basically, they can post 'episodes' of their podcasts as normal blog posts—just attach an MP3, and it will be put into the individual user's blog feed.
However, I have two concerns about this: 1. My hosting costs - it would be ideal if I had a plain old media server where the file uploads went to; right now, I only have one hosting account, and if some peoples' podcasts get quite popular, my web ecosystem would go down; LOLSaints, Midwestern Mac, and other websites would go down. Does anyone have some online storage space they'd be willing to share, or have any other ideas for ways to implement this?
The other concern is that of moderation; I wouldn't want someone making anti-Catholic or dubious podcasts. Before I can implement this feature, I'd want to have some of the community aspects of this website to be filled in...
Comments
Jeff, I would suggest that people use either http://www.libsyn.com for media file hosting or use Amazon's S3 service. Both are cheap and move the load of serving bandwidth-heavy material to networks that are built to handle it.
Interesting - Never tried libyn - will check into it, for sure!
Advancing the faith.
Jeff, what's the advantage of doing your own podcast service vs just letting people use some other service and then just pulling them into OSC in a cool way? Then you don't have to hassle with the bandwidth and server issues?
Some of the podcast services may even have an API for using their service? And you could integrate that into OSC to make your own podcast service...not sure though! And if not an actual podcast service API, just a file sharing API. Then you just create the RSS feeds on this end and store/stream the files from elsewhere. Just throwing out ideas.
The API thing sounds good... I'll have to investigate that further. I might be able to borrow some storage/bandwidth from a friend, though, and copy all the media files across to that server as a quasi-cdn.
Advancing the faith.
I wouldn't worry about moderation; I'd assume that the first person to smell something fishy would say something pretty quickly.
Was Jesus a PC? I sure hope so!
@ clapointe - I tend to agree there... I just started a single podcast over on LOLSaints.com, and I'll see how that goes; if I can adapt that setup to a multi-user, automatically-formatted/generated feed system, then I might just be able to get the podcasts going here!
Advancing the faith.
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