Academic Aesthetic Podcast 64

Today's podcast is one of those stories where a problem leads to a better solution.

A couple days ago Ourmedia had a rather interesting glitch. Ourmedia.org, as you may or may not know, is a free, snazzy interface that allows you to upload almost any media file you wish to Archive.org's servers. Archive.org provides everyone with lots of space, but their method of uploading files is a little more ... involved.

In any case, after recording my Podcast # 62 I tried to upload it to Ourmedia, but instead was greeted with an error message telling me that my Archive.org password and user name weren't correct. This could be a problem, since without those you can't upload ANYTHING through Ourmedia.

A quick trip to Archive.org confirmed that my password was indeed correct, so I tried retyping it in Ourmedia.org.

I still had the same error message.

Well, I was a bit annoyed at all of this. I had my new podcast ready to be listened to by the world (or at least the 20 or so of you that actually put up with me), and I had no way of getting the mp3 file out there. Sure, I had a friend with some server space that could hook me up, but I felt I'd leaned on him enough for now so I needed some other kind of solution.

Enter "Big in Japan."

Big In Japan is not, in fact, a website that's big in Japan. Rather, it's a collection of free tools that, to quote their site, "can make you Big in Japan. And Jersey City. And Genoa. And Jakarta." In a nutshell, they do some of the back end work so you don't have to.

Now Big In Japan has a bunch of tools that you may or may not find useful, and may in fact find in other places. elfURL, for example, provides the same URL shortening feature that TinyURL provides. (I want to expiriment with SocialMail, though. Email converted into an RSS feed sounds intriguing.)

But I digress. The feature I was looking for that day was PodServe. PodServe is a podcast hosting service. You bring the mp3, and they'll give you a gigabyte of space, serve up an RSS feed for you, and even list you on iTunes & Odeo.

It's in Alpha testing still, but the only bug I've seen so far is a page that didn't load well the first time I tried it. I found the interface to be slick and more or less intuitive. The best part is they provide you with direct links to your uploaded files, so you can plug them in just about anywhere. (Like, say, this blog.)

So, that's Big In Japan, for you. Ourmedia.org is working again as of this morning, but I think I'm going to stick with Big In Japan for now. I'll still upload files to Ourmedia, but mostly for backup purposes.