So, recently, some of you have probably heard (or been told by myself in a fit of excited...-ness) that I recently was hit by the idea of doing a podcast. First of all, why? (Like you care.)

1. Something to do over the summer.
2. Something dealing with technology.
3. Free.
4. If this gets somewhat big (doubtful), than it could become something beneficial for the school and its attendees.

How? Well, I'll explain.
A podcast is, quite simply, an .mp3 recording of voices, usually done in radio talkshow format. As said before, it is very simple to make these... what's awesome are the hosts and communities coming together around this. There are tons of podcasts cropping up for webcomics and games (WoW) alone. These can be for entertainment, information, whatever you want. They're free to both you and to the listener, and the listener can even subscribe to these podcasts - that way, whenever they pop into iTunes (possibly other media players), the podcast will automatically update with the latest session and the listener can tune in whenever they want.

So, as I said before, the main idea and purpose of this in my head was kind of far from the beginning. My idea sprung from the mumblings of some teachers who were thinking of doing podcasts for their students.
So I said to myself, "Self, students tend to not listen to the news... what if someone did a podcast-broadcast for the students of Lexington High?"
Then it continued. "What about local activities? Dances? This could be like Lexington High Radio." And then the whole idea of blogging and -dance- ranting came to mind. Needless to say, I'm excited... although I doubt this could grow to such Radio-tastic proportions, it'd still be a bit of fun.

I'd hate to stab at this alone, and I've already asked most of you to join in. If you weren't asked personally and are not named Eric, Beatrice, or have a mullet , then you can feel free to get on this yourself.
The reason I really wanted the forum re-opened was to have a hub of communications to set up schedules, help eachother, etc. I also need to figure out a way of doing this like an actual talkshow without having two people in the same room... still researching that.

Anyway, if you want in, sign up here. All you need is a mic, preferably some headphones/headset (prevents voice echoing into the recording), and some software (free) (and legal).

Now, there are -tons- of ways of doing this... I'm picking the one from IGN for right now. First piece of software: Audacity. Audacity will take care of all of your audio recording and editing needs, and it will export in mp3 format after you download the LAME encoder. To quote the directions from IGN:
"Get your microphone and headphones plugged into your PC. Turn off any unnecessary programs. Launch Audacity. Make sure your microphone is selected as your recording source, that your soundcard is properly selected. For quality settings, go with 44,100 Hz as the Default Sample Rate and 16-bit as the Default Sample Format. This will keep your file size reasonable but still be fine quality for your voice.

For file format, choose WAV (Microsoft 16 bit PCM) as the Uncompressed Export Format, and below that, assuming you installed the LAME encoder library (which isn't hard) you should have a listing in the MP3 Export Setup section. Select 64 for the bit rate. Done and done!

The last setup step is to make sure you balance your microphone. In Audacity, turn on the monitoring toolbar, and take a look at the red lines the move as you speak into your mike. If the red bar is going all the way to the right, the recording will be clipping and totally wack, so adjust it downwards.

You're done! Put on your headphones, hit that record button, and tell the world just how you feel about Alias getting cancelled. Maybe Jennifer will hear you. Maybe she won't. Regardless, aim to plan your topics ahead of time, and try to keep things rolling. If you can think back to high-school, a 20 minute speech is an eternity. Fortunately, if/when you screw up, don't panic. Audacity makes editing a no-brainer: Just highlight the section when you started crying while reminiscing about Firefly's cancellation and hit delete.

All done? Don't forget to fill out the ID3 tag for your Podcast mp3 using iTunes or some such thing so people will know what an incredible genius you are. You can now upload your Podcast to a server so you can link it to your blog or distribute it through RSS or iTunes."

The RSS feeds mentioned can be looked at here. Note: I still have yet to get this far... I'm fiddling with Audacity at a slow pace, forgive me. If any of you look into this, post your findings here.

So... that's basically it. Through feeds, iTunes, and linkage, we could possibly get an interesting thing going. As far as linkage, some blogs will allow you to link .mp3s to posts or websites, and we may be able to use this site for updates.

This could be for news, rants, comic updates, randomness, whatever. So, yeah... GET INTO IT. If I'm the only one, I'll lose interest in, say, a week.