Audioboo.fm – useful tool for your radio station or podcast

Ever since the ‘Radio At The Edge’ conference held by the Radio Academy I have been keeping an eye on Audioboo. Audioboo has been described as ‘blogging without typing’ and it enables you to upload a maximum of 5 minutes of audio and include a title, tag it and add a photo if you want. They announced at the conference some of their future plans and it seems things are starting to be added to the site now. Here are some of my highlights and potential thoughts on how you could use it if you run a radio station or podcast.

Mobile Apps
There has been an iPhone app for quite some time and they now have an Android app available which allows you to record and publish a ‘boo’ from wherever you are if you have either type of phone. I can see this being of use for Travel problems, snow reports, on the scene news reports as you can add the location you are in at the time of recording. On the iPhone app you can see ‘Nearby Boos’ which may be useful for a local radio station.

Browser Based Recording or Upload
To begin with the iPhone app was the only way of getting recordings into audioboo but they have now added the ability to record straight from the browser. It seems to work only with Safari or Firefox but may work on IE. If you have a built in mic you can use this or plug one in. There is also the ability to upload a piece of pre-edited material (again to a maximum of 5 minutes). For their PRO users they are allowing the ability for them to embed the recorder in their own websites. Whether this then uploads to the main username of the account or each user needs to login separately I don’t know. I can imagine the time where on a station/podcast website users will be able to hit record and send in some feedback/song request in good quality and easily.

Tags
Each ‘boo’ can be assigned with ‘tags’. You can then search on these tags and when you click on them there is the ability to make a ‘podcast’ of all ‘boos’ tagged with the word(s) which will automatically download in iTunes. You could also add the feed to a feed reader just change the URL from itpc://audioboo.fm/tag/essex.atom to http://audioboo.fm/tag/essex.atom if you want to see all ‘boos’ tagged with the word essex in this example. Just ask your listenners to tag their boos with a set, and quite specific, word e.g. ‘radioquiet’ and set up a feed of that tag and whenever anyone records boo and tags it it will automatically download or be flagged to you for moderating and playing out.

Extra Bits
There is the ability to send any boos through to twitter or facebook automatically to ensure your boos get out to a wider audience and am sure it won’t be long before you can embed a boo player in your website/facebook page. There is also an option to phone in a boo at http://phoneboo.audioboo.fm/ but this method seems to lose quite a few of the benefit outlined above.

Conclusion
Keep a look on the site for new and improved bits to come. I am audioboo.fm/mattwade by the way!

Matt