Saturday, June 6, 2009

Free File Hosting

One of the key components of podcasting is placing your audio files on the Internet where they can be easily downloaded by your listeners. Podcast hosting sites offer this service, but if you are trying to podcast from a blogging site like Blogger.com, you'll need a place to upload and store your audio files. Blogger will host video files and image files, but apparently they do not host MP3 or audio files.

This site maintains a list of free file hosting sites http://www.freehosting-review.com/free-file-hosting.php. What you'll need to host your podcats is a site that will host your MP3 files, but that will aslo allow "Direct Linking" so that your listeners can directly access your MP3 files using an http: web URL.

Looking for an all-in-one podcast host?

Well, there seem to be a few all-in-one podcast hosts still standing. I haven't used these sites, I was always more interested in building a podcasting site than actually doing podcasting myself (perhaps that was one of the challenges we faced?).

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but these are the names of sites that have been around for a few years offering free (or low cost) podcast hosting.

And if you want to track the industry, one source you can still turn to is http://www.podcastingnews.com/

I still want to put up a great tutorial on how to podcast with blogger, but I didn't want you to be without links to hosts to evaluate.

Mashable's Podcasting Resources

This link is about two years old, but at the time it was a pretty exhaustive list of podcasting resources. If you're looking for tools or hosting, this toolbox list may be out of date, but it is likely one of the best places to start your search.