I would safely bet many of you are part of producing podcasts, many more likely active listeners to podcast, plus others using/creating podcasts as part of their open education efforts.
And likewise there are many routes to publishing podcasts. This is in no way an endorsement as it is a service I do not use, but I came across an news story from Blubrry offering a free podcast hosting plan (normally $100 per month) to educators.
And you can find more details on what is offered via their Educator Podcast page.
OE Global Podcasting Done on WordPress
The reason we do not need a podcast hosting service is our OE Global Voices podcast is hosted completely in our own WordPress site.We do use the free Blubrry PowerPress plugin that enables the episodes we publish to be automatically syndicated to a few services like Apple and Spotify.
Flowing Automatically Into The Podcast Index
I have discovered that at least having a podcast go to Apple Podcasts, that it will get indexed into the mega listing of the open source Podcast Index, a key data provider for over 4,000,000 podcast shows.
Without us doing anything except publishing new episodes on our WordPress site, it becomes available as both a means to listen but for other data services to tap into
What do I mean by that? Well i I found the linkage to the Episodes.fm service that offers a means to search or link to podcasts, and it provides a way to subscribe to a podcast in one click with almost 40 different podcast apps, look at the listing for OE Global Voices in Episodes.fm
You really need to try these to experience what an amazing ecosystem is built off of the Podcast Index.
This has nothing to do with the service from Blubrry, but I could not help myself because I find this so interesting.
Automatic Podcast Publishing to YouTube
I will also add that a very important outlet channel for podcasts is YouTube. You can have your podcasts automatically published to a YouTube podcast by setting it up ni YouTube with your show’s RSS feed.
This we also do for OEGlobal Voices- again it takes no extra steps as each time we publish a new episode on the WordPress site, by the power of an RSS feed, our YouTube playlist of episodes is automatically updated.
In the Name of RSS
Note, if anyone ever utters the expression about “RSS being dead” or “RSS died when Google axed Google Reader” ask them how to they think that podcasts get automatically updated? That is all RSS feeds,
What Is Your Podcast Publishing Set Up?
If you publish or participate in any podcasting, share us a link. Where/how to you host your show? And explore to see if you can find it in the Podcast Index and/or Episodes.fm.