I have a better idea. How about a reddit/digg style podcast channel on YC News where users can submit links to mp3s, and the community upvotes them. And then YC offers the top 10 as a podcast feed so you can automatically download them.
mp3s can be on startups, tech, entrepreneurialism etc.
I think thats a great idea. I am just so hungry for good podcasts and I go through them by Wednesday every week. If they can do jobs, podcasts should be easy.
Maybe the reason that IT Conversations still sticks everything into a single RSS feed is that they are secretly hoping for somebody else to do the fancy classifying and tagging for them...
Personally, I like to podcast by sound waves. It's totally cool, I use this flap of skin to move air around and I can podcast to people around me at the same time. It has limited range though....
My personal feelings are strongly anti-podcast. I find them a great inconvenience. I can read faster than people can talk and I can't think or work effectively when someone is talking. Written communication is by far my favorite way of getting information.
For users, not creators. They take a lot of work to do properly (Doug Kaye, The Secret Lives of MP3 Files, http://pa.gigavox.com/shows/detail1600.html mp3, 54min, 25Mb ) and besides articles are way more bandwidth efficient given their size.
I meant this relating to time. It takes a long time and a couple of revisions to write a good polished essay (or blog post) I think for creating a podcast you write down what you want to talk about in point form and then you talk and elaborate on these ideas.
That would be the equivalent of writing down a few notes for your essay beforehand and then posting the first draft. The revisions are needed for a reason, which doesn't go away if you're talking instead of typing.
mp3s can be on startups, tech, entrepreneurialism etc.