Gabcast - Annotate Your Blog

I've been a cellist for 25 years, and one of things I've had to overcome is stage fright. I'd say the past five years have been stage-fright free, so it took 20 years of playing on stages of all sizes before I conquered my fears. I bring this up because speaking or singing into a microphone gives me the same feelings. I'm not sure if it's because I don't like the sound of my own voice (which is common) or if there is just something intimidating about having a microphone in front of me. Whatever the case, I'm pretty sure recording your voice has to be a barrier to podcasting for many people.

Most people, my two-year-old son excluded, can talk on the phone with no issues. There is something comfortable about talking into a phone. It's less intimidating than talking into a microphone. So, if you can talk on the phone but a microphone makes you nervous, Gabcast may be the product for you.

To record your podcasts, you call an 800 number and Gabcast publishes your podcast on its site. You can later link to or embed the podcast in your blog or forum.

Once you call into Gabcast you are prompted for your channel ID and password. Those are assigned to you after you sign up at gabcast.com. Then you are asked if you want to record a new episode or start a conference call. The conference calling feature is somewhat unrelated to podcasting, but might be useful as a low-cost conference calling solution.

Recording an episode is basically just like leaving a voice mail. If you aren't happy with the episode, you can erase it and record again. Then, from the website, you can manage your list of episodes by choosing which ones to publish.

What's Hot: 
I found the best use of Gabcast is for annotating a blog or forum post. Sometimes you don't want to load up full podcasting software, create your audio, and then find a web host and upload it. Gabcast offers a really easy alternative by just having you call in to record your podcast and then letting their hosting service take care of things.

Last week I was reading a forum on my mobile phone and was asked to reply to a post. I knew my reply would not be short and I did not want to type the whole thing out on a mobile phone, so I called into Gabcast and recorded my reply. I then posted the embedded player with my reply into the forum.

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What's Not: 
Conference calling runs you $10 for 100 minutes. Each party in the conference call will burn a minute, so a $10 pack of minutes would buy you a 25-minute conference call with four parties. That's not a tremendously good deal, in my opinion.

Upgrading a channel to Premium (for more storage and features) costs $6/month for the Pro version and $12/month for Premium. The Pro version nets you 400 MB of storage and the Premium 1,000 MB. There are also some minor differences between Pro and Premium with regard to password-protected channels and branding.

Gabcast has something of an odd way of compelling you to upgrade. Instead of just selling on value, you see things like "Won't you support us by upgrading?" and Google Ads all over their pages. I would expect such a pitch from a community project, but Gabcast is the product of a corporation. Shouldn't they just provide so much value for my $12/month that I can't resist upgrading?

What's Not: 
The whole navigation of Gabcast is not intuitive. Tiny icons and odd pathways to get to common features really hurt.

When I was creating a new channel, I filled out the form wrong and did not use a numeric password. When I hit the Submit button, I saw the error message and had to completely fill out the form again. This is really aggravating, especially since I'd put a lot of time into filling out the channel create form.

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What's Hot: 
During channel creation, you can choose to link your channel with an account on one of the popular blogging sites. Gabcast has built-in support for Blogger, Blogspot, Friendster, InsaneJournal, Life With Christ, LiveJournal, Travelling Guy, TypePad, and WordPress. There is even an option to link to your custom blog, provided it supports the major blogging APIs.

It was easy to link a Gabcast channel to a LiveJournal account, and when I created new podcasts on Gabcast, they were added to the LiveJournal blog.

What's Not: 
Sound quality is, of course, going to be an issue when recording over a telephone. In my tests, I would rank the quality in order of worst to best: cordless phones, classic phones, a good cell phone, and VOIP. The quality of some of my recordings over a cordless phone was a little too embarrassing to post, but the recordings from a VOIP device were certainly acceptable.

Of course, things like music are not ever going to sound good over the phone, so you should instead point Gabcast to an MP3 file if you plan on having music.

What's Hot: 
I have to give Gabcast an Excellent rating for installation and setup. The beauty of software as a service is the easy installation and setup, and kudos to Gabcast for figuring out how to deliver something traditionally as rich as podcasting through a website.

Optional client software to go along with the service and telephone interface would just be killer. Gabcast could really get a leg up on the competition by marrying their powerful hosted solution to software that power users could use to create higher-quality podcasts.

They could also become the "audio YouTube" by creating a better community around the content. The start of a community is in place, with a way to browse Gabcasts. There doesn't appear to be critical mass around comments, ratings, and Gabcast-celebs.

Gabcast might be a gimmick, but it's a gimmick I'm glad exists. In its current form, I can't see using Gabcast for more than occasional blog entries. I like my podcasts more highly produced, which makes an over-the-phone solution difficult. I do love having Gabcast in my bag of tricks, but I'm just not sure I want to pay $6 or $12 per month for that. I'll definitely be keeping a close eye on Gabcast to see how it evolves.