There are quiet a few ways in which you can add your own music, a podcast or any audio for that matter onto your blog. In her flipped lecture, Jenny talks about two such ways – Audacity and Garageband. Both of these are free softwares you can easily download. Garageband is available only on Apple products. I did some research and found another software that you can use – Podbean. The advantage of Podbean is that you can use it to store your music online and it provides an embedded music player that you can use on your blog. When downloading Audacity, make sure that you do not download the beta version till you are a computer whizz. After trying it out, I also suggest using your own microphone and not depending on the inbuilt one on your laptop.
The actual usage of these softwares is pretty easy as we are all familiar with the various button types, like play, record, stop, forward and the like. Jenny uses various youtube videos to explain how to use the software. I think this is the best way to go if you have a problem while using it. Play around with what you can do and you can pretty much just go from there. The Podbean application can be used to put your audio on the blog. You can do this by uploading your audio on Podbean, getting the code it generated and posting the code on your blog. What this will do is embed a player with your audio file on there and you are set.
I think the difficulty comes in actually deciding the content of your podcasts or audio files and I found this really good blog which has a decent number of tips which you can listen to and decide on what to follow.
http://theaudacitytopodcast.com/
I think podcasts are a great way to attract people to your blog. With millions of blogs out there, I find that finding one with an audio file is just welcoming and a relief truthfully. Rest your eyes, lie back or sit with a cup of tea and listen away. Makes life much easier I think and can really stand out in the crowd. Music is also a great way of convincing someone to stay on your site and explore it more.
I plan on using several podcasts in my interactive story as a way of inviting people to take interest and interact more with my idea. It is a good way to introduce different people’s interests and personality on a social media which is a major part of my story. My group and I are discussing something along the lines of digitally arranging marriages for which we need several characters we shall be introducing and some of the introduction will be done through different episodes or even varying formats of podcasts.
I was doing some research on this and I really like some different podcasts – music and intro podcasts that I might get ideas from for my blog. Some of the stuff I found:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/arranged-marriages-can-be-real-love-10-03-11/
This one talks about the believe in the western world that arranged marriages are loveless marriages, which can be refuted. I also love the length they have used for the podcasts restricting it to only a minute. I would want to set that as an average time for the podcasts that I use in my project.
These are a bunch of pod interviews with some bollywood stars. I like it. If you think you have some great pods you would like to share, which might help with my research, comment!
Prachi Daga 