Making a subscribable podcast for Galloway shows

[Meta4]

Hey everyone.

Now we've got a better internet setup and I can record the GG radio show to sound a little less like it was recorded in a toilet, I've been thinking about whether to make it available via RSS.

At the moment, people can come to the site and download the show. But (bear with me as I show my lack of technical knowledge) I always thought it was pretty good that when I open itunes, it downloads stuff for me automatically that I subscribed to when I was drunk.

I'm wondering, would it be worth doing this with the GG show? Apart from Saturday night, when I fell victim to a bug in my system's BIOS (unless I use a time server every few minutes, the system's clock gains several minutes an hour; I accidentally closed the clock program without realising it, so we're missing some of the show), I now want to start offering people a full mp3 file, or separate mp3 files for each hour of the show.

Is there any benefit to me, George, listeners or the site for us to make the downloads automatic? I don't even know if they *are* automatic - sometimes itunes complains when I try to close it cos it says it's downloading, other times it doesn't; it never tells me if a new show is available or if one is ready to listen to, so sometimes I go into my podcast folder and find 5 or 6 new shows in there.

Which might mean that it wouldn't really benefit people to have such a setup.

Also, there's tension in terms of what we're all trying to achieve: George does the show entirely in the hope of building the movement; that's the same reason we want to develop the website into such a resource too. If people can simply have the radio show on their computer without doing anything, it will stop a lot of them ever remembering to visit the website.

That's the reason we embed Youtube in separate php files on the site - so that people watch, and then the rest of the site is available to them; our experience is, take people away from the site and they start surfing pretty much straight away. I would rather make people positively *choose* to leave, rather than make it the default action.

So, what's your thoughts on it? Part of me wants to make all GG's media appearances, speeches, campaigning etc. as widely available as easily as possible; the other part of me wants to do that, but to have the website as the central place from which people access what we offer.

Actually, I'm starting to come down against a podcast subscription model now. Hmm.

[Brown Sauce]

For what it's worth, I'd say keep us having to visit. We are all lazy. If we get what we're after by doing less, we'll keep on doing less.

Also, if you do go for rss, then change it because your hits take a tumble, the folk are going to wonder why.

[faceless]

I've no idea how I missed this thread when it was posted, but it seems moot now...