I turned up at the VON Podcasting session hosted by Scott Rafer, Eric Rice and Adam from WordPress and ended up in a long dinner session that also included James Seng and Carl Ford. While Scott and Eric were probably disappointed by the lack of a crowd, we had a wonderful broadranging session.

Two clear agenda items came out for me. First was the demand and interest in Skype for Podcasting and thus making SkypeCasting easier. It was simply amazing how the discussion moved to Skype and recording Skype calls. There is a real demand for extracting SkypeVM and turning it into podcasts. These are currently just mini-briefs... now up to 10 minutes although I'm sure Skype can create solutions that provide a "longer" time capture. There are two areas where Skype can really turn up the heat in the Podcasting.

First is enabling simplified capture of phoned in information. This format would be very similar to what Eric is doing with AudioBlog. He also tells me he is the "podcast" organizer and guru behind Weblog Inc's activities in this area.

Second is to simplify the solution we outlined in SkypeCasting. Concurrently with the number of podcasters on macs --- Skype should consider offering a solution for this as well. We'll define one in another post. For capturing conversational exchanges the easiest solution is for Skype to enable a Podcast capability in a modified Voice Mail client. The downside is the current client doesn't have a stop / start function etc. Thus extra features are required. For example. I purchase with my skype account a recorder account / profile. Thus Skype opens a second profile for me. Note this doesn't need to be on my PC or running. It's just a client that I can call into I can bridge it in to any conference call. Whenever it is in a conference call it automatically text's both parties letting them know that a live recording is in progress. Just like the VM solution it is recorded on my PC and then uploaded to both parties at the end of the call.

The other solution is to automate the Skypecasting solution.

Separately, as the evening progressed.... I learned more and more about WordPress an open source blogging platform that has been challenging MT for some time. Many MT users migrated a year or so ago. As I listened I became more and more impressed. I've been disappointed in MT ever since they imploded on licenses last year. Recently I added a commercial license as well. However, frustrations still abound. I get more and more trackback spam, comment spam is controlled although hard to deal with. Then recently all the sites were consolidated under SixApart. Navigation has to be learnt all over again and I'm not sure that the forums and the information has the "vibrancy" that it had a couple of years ago. Listening to the WordPress points of difference I simply made a commitment to pay attention and download and install.