Don Dunnington asked earlier about our podcast publishing tool.

At present, this tool is available to all IBMers to self-publish and syndicate audio/video content internally at IBM, ie, inside the firewall.

The tool is extremely easy to use and rich in functionality. After creating your content, you upload it to the tool, fill in a few description fields that let the audience know what the podcast series is about, and what each episode contains, then press the publish button. The tool burns the RSS feed, posts it to the relevant landing page for your podcast series, and places your podcast in its library of content.

The audience can use this library to search IBM podcasts and see how they rank against each other - by number of downloads, etc. It also shows how many people subscribe to each podcast using the RSS feed.

Also, the tool has built-in comment fields for audience feedback on each podcast episode, and a one-to-five star ranking system.

We launched the tool in October 2005. Apart from an initial article published to the intranet news service, marketing of the tool to the IBM population has been strictly word of mouth. As of this morning, we had 302 podcasts listed on the tool, 1,075 episodes and 236,000 downloads. Working from an average file size of, say, 5mb, that's 1.18 terabytes of podcast goodness moved over the internal network in 8 months. Usage is accelerating.

We plan to pilot a version of this tool for external publishing from ibm.com this summer. At the moment, the tool is not available commercially. That may change, however...