What do you need to record a podcast?
If you wanted to really boil it down, there are three things that you need; the process is three-pronged. You must have the means of getting the podcast out there, so you have to have a way of getting it onto iTunes or Wippets, or one of the many people who do this sort of thing. It's not my field of expertise. Somebody needs to do that and make sure you have it. You need to have some way of recording the podcast - that can vary from literally the stuff you've got in your computer - the average PC will have enough power to record your voice perfectly and adequately for the kind of files compressed the way they are produced on most modern podcasts. You need a way to get it delivered, you need something to record it on, and most of all you need something to say, and that's the critical thing. You can't - you could, but it's not advisable - go on, just sit there and babble, but people won't find that interesting. At the very least, you've got to have a structured idea of what it is you're going to say. Once you get going, like live radio or live television, where it goes is often down to the other people who are contributing, whether they be in the studio in your face, or on telephones, or through emails, but you need to have some kind of structure to start out with. Also, once you get it going, if you have furniture - people like to hear the theme music, and know they're in the right place. They've talked about this for a while - there's a stab, an interstitial, a piece of music that breaks the thing up; I know now that I can take a deep breath and we may come back to something else. These are the furniture or the road signs that make the listening experience better for people. There is one other thing that you should think about, and that is of course, bizarrely, people listening on certain devices - computers, handheld devices, even mobile phones - they have the ability these days to get some images. This is not the vodcasting, the sort of video podcasting, but just occasionally, for instance, when we interviewed the English footballer Michael Owen, pictures of Michael Owen kept coming up as you were listening to the podcast. As I said, essentially, you need a means of recording, a means of getting it to the people, and something to say.
