Ericast 145 - Yup, It's Late

Another late episode and I'm taking this opportunity to talk about how we might avoid late episodes in the future... by asking you (the Ericast listener) to share ideas for a phone-to-podcast solution that 1) still exists and 2) might work for the Ericast...

• AudioBlogger.com worked great in 2005 but is gone (having been bought by Odeo.com, which is also gone -- at least at the moment)
• Gcast.com merged with GarageBand.com and GarageBand.com merged with iLike.com... and in the process, all of their phone-to-podcast offerings went away
• Gabcast.com went to a paid model -- not much cost to it, but still paid. Never used it more than the basic "play with it and check it out" level of experimentation.
• Cinch and AudioBoo seem like possible contenders?
• Drop.io has a phone-in offering (no security on the phone number and no way of knowing if you dialed the right one, which makes me uneasy...)
• Google Voice seemed like a logical option but I don't think there's an "automatic" way of getting the audio out of it -- voicemail isn't really the right solution for this kind of thing, anyway
• K7.net is outstanding for a listener feedback line or other voicemail option but it doesn't mail out MP3s (just WAV and some other non-MP3 format I forget at the moment)

Also mentioned is iSpeech.org, which is a neat text-to-speech-to-podcast option... but I still have the "how do I merge these feeds together?" question (and it seems like it doesn't automatically update its audio podcast; you have to go to the site and "ping" your blog, which is an extra step that I'd like to avoid.)

What are your thoughts/suggestions? You know the drill: 206-339-ERIC (a.k.a. 206-339-3742) or e-mail me (eric) at ericast.com. Thanks for listening!

P.S. For those who don't get the SNL "Pete Twinkle" references that I make here and there in the podcast, here's a clip from Hulu... which I probably don't need to explain is not "work safe". (In this particular "Ladies Bowling" sketch they proudly and colorfully tout their sponsorship by Vagisil. You've been warned.)