The million and one options for creating and hosting podcasts generates more confusion than it should. In my mind, once you’ve got an audio file, the last thing you need to worry about is which tools to use in distribution. Windows servers vs. Linux servers. ASP pages or PHP pages to advertise your RSS feed. The Web server you use to host your files, IIS or Apache, simply doesn’t matter. As long as you can post an XML file to your server, you can podcast. Most tutorials on podcasting, including some of the stuff I covered previously assumes if you’re podcasting you must have a blog.

While I’m convinced most businesses and organizations could benefit from blogging, there are practical instances where adding a blog just to offer subscription audio or video distribution doesn’t make sense. After receiving a question about how to podcast for IIS, I realized that many organizations, like churches and clubs, have huge archives of audio files with no real need for blogging software to distribute them. The benefit of podcasting for these groups; the benefit of podcasting as a distribution method for multimedia, is in offering a subscription so regular visitors don’t need to remember to come back.

Churches, for instance, produce weekly sermons often available for download from the church Website. They already update the church site with a link to the latest sermon, including a summary of related information and Biblical passages. Offering a podcast subscription for the sermons makes sense, because the sermon, not the Website, is the message. While blogging software might improve the content management of the Website, it isn’t required to make sermons accessible as a podcast. If you want to podcast but don’t have or don’t want to have a blog, my latest tutorial on podcasting without blogging should point you in the right direction.

[tags]blogging,podcasting,iis,apache[/tags]