> I have been told by senior staff that we do not have enough space >on our website, I wonder if anyone knows how much space a 60 minute >podcast would take up. Also, what kind of technology would be >required to post a podcast on our website?
Both Kurt and Avi have given some good answers; I'll chime in with a little more. Doing a quick round of snooping, it looks like you have about 10gb of disk space with your hosted web account. (I'm making some assumptions, but it looks like the IP address for your website is owned by web.com and their hosting plans based off their sitebuilder tool each have 10gb of disk space. See <http://www.web.com/Hosting/SiteBuilder.aspx#compareHosting> and click on hosting features) For what you're trying to do, 10gb is a fairly good chunk of space. Looking at the sizes of a half-dozen podcasts I have on my computer, that are all 45-55 minutes long, they're about 25-35mb (podcasts from NPR that are mostly talk). Based on that math, and not knowing what else is part of your site, you could potentially put 250+ podcasts on your site. (That being said, Kurt's made a great offer that potentially solves your problem without doing much additional work). The other part to consider is what you actually want to deliver. If you really just want to be able to play audio from your website, or let someone download the audio file, then Ari's advice is pretty good. If you want to make a true 'podcast' that other software will recognize (such as iTunes) and treat as a podcast rather than just another audio mp3 file, then you'll want to create an rss feed for the series (you *are* going to do more than one, right?). There are a variety of tools that will help you package up your audio as a true podcast -- if you want to head down this path, contact me offline and let me know if you're using windows or a mac and I can point you in a few directions. >The museum has a myspace profile, and part of the reason we >established it was the possibility that the podcast could be >downloaded from there. You can certainly do that, although it looks like people are generally just hosting audio files rather than true podcasts. One thing you'll want to be mindful of, no matter where you decide to upload your files, is making sure that the site's terms and conditions let you retain ownership and copyright to the files you're uploading. With Myspace, you're in the clear - <http://www1.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=misc.terms> and scroll down to section 6, "Proprietary Rights on Content...". >We do have a completely edited podcast ready to go and hope to have >it up and running by the summer. If you've already done the hard part -- getting it ready to go -- get it out there. You'll get quicker feedback about what you're doing right (and wrong) and keep learning as you actually go through the process. Nothing says that you can't try to host in more than one place - the museum's website, Kurt's offer of Museumpods, and Myspace. I'm wiling to bet that they serve generally different audiences but in each case, you'll learn something. Don't aim for this summer. Aim for February to get it going. ;) -bw. -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Bruce Wyman, Director of Technology Denver Art Museum / 100 W 14th Ave. Pkwy, Denver, CO 80204 office: 720.913.0159 / fax: 720.913.0002 <bwyman at denverartmuseum.org>
