Sometimes you have to get beat over the head to get the idea. Today, I had one of these moments.

People often ask me about podcasting and I’ve continually given advice that puts them through hoops to get a podcast up and going. There are services out there that make it rather easy to podcast, but all services have their limitations, whether it be content, storage, cost, advertising, and so forth.

Most of these people want to podcast for their classes and they aren’t concerned with a snappy interface or “face” of the project. They are very practical. They want to get the audio out there to their students.

One podcast that I listen to occasionally is an edtech podcast (I’m not even sure of the name), but you can access their files from their del.icio.us account (http://del.icio.us/edtechlive/mp3). I’ve been looking at that for months but I never put it all together. All I have to do is tag links to MP3s in my del.icio.us account in a way that groups them logically, then add the feed to my iTunes….tah dah! Podcast.

Now for the cool part. They don’t have to be my files. They can be any MP3 file out there that I think is interesting. I can provide (push) this content to my students without them going to a website (pull) to retreive it.

I can do this from my blog by simply providing the del.icio.us feed and therefore connect my postings to the podcast. I can bypass the blog altogether and simple fill out the comments section in del.icio.us to describe each file.

I wish that someone had told me this before. Though, they might have and I just wasn’t ready to understand it until now. This, however, is going to change the way that I talk about podcasting with my students and anyone else who will listen.

To start this yourself, sign up for a del.icio.us account now at http://del.icio.us