1.I know Kris Smith at Palegroove Studios, built a custom flash player distributed for email he used with MTV. He also has a CastLock service for RSS feed authentication that could be used for corporate internal projects. I don't know who he has done this for, but it is a viable option for corporations seeking to podcast internally.

2.Thanks, James; I'll get in touch. By the way, Amy Gahran had some sparkling things to say about you when I met her last week! Were your ears burning?

3.I wouldn't think iTunes would be a good choice since this would potentially expose the podcast to the general public.

One alternative to using a podcatcher would be to utilize an open source system like Drupal as management system for the delivery of media internal to the organization.

There are a couple of different Drupal modules that can be used to manage audio podcasts as well as internal subscriptions for different podcasts by registered users.

4.[Source: a shel of my former self] quoted: While I certainly have heard of companies employing RSS and news readers for text, most companies producing podcasts for employees are delivering them by email, either as attachments or embedded links. All of these organizations hope to move to RSS as soon as infrastructure issues or IT roadblocks are addressed.

5.Well Shel, after taking your webinar and getting a set of podcasts up and running (we have five different ones live so far) we are now in the stages of developing new podcasts for internal communications purposes. All of our podcasts are available by feed and we do publish a weekly announcement in our daily newsletter to staff who can then go to the page to listen, but these are our only podcasts now. Our IT department "doesn't support this type of software" and with 19,000 staff members, it will be hard to figure out how we're going to get everyone hooked up. There is a little-known iTunes U project that will allows us to provide authentication to staff members for specific podcasts that we are considering. That's a benefit of being part of higher ed. The problem is, not all staff have iTunes on their workstations, but could have them at home, say when they've called in to sit on the couch at home and want to listen to the State of the Health System address... I'm questioning the value really - the more people who have their speakers going around here, the harder it is to do my work and if they're driving home, I doubt they;ll want to listen to our EVPMA waxing poetic about cost cutting and expansions. The ideas are still floating and I will let you know once we get this problem worked out if you care to hear it. I suspect we'll have to develop an application internally.

6.We've done one-off audio messages to targeted employees via e-mail and Web links. Is there a benefit to doing these as podcasts with an RSS feed and podcathers or are those really more beneficial for recurring comms?

We want to use cutting-edge audio techniques to deliver exec messages internally, but also deliver a cost-effective solution with a friendly user-experience.

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