“Podcast” has been chosen as the Word of the Year by the editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary. We’re nothing if not trendy around here so my novel hackoff.com: an historic murder mystery set in the Internet bubble and rubble is now being serialized free as a podcast as well as in the text editions that many of you have been reading.
If you absolutely can’t wait, you can listen to the first episode just by clicking here.
There are lots of ways to listen to the podcast. You can go to www.hackoff.com and choose episodes one at a time from the table of contents. Each episode for which we have posted audio has a symbol like this 
If you use iTunes and want episodes on your iPod, click here to get them free through the Music Store.
You can also subscribe to the podcast and have episodes delivered by email to your mailbox (click here) or by RSS feed to your feedreader (click here). Those of you who subscribe to the text serialization have told us that you like choice so we’ve implemented even more choice than we did with text. Not only can you start with any episode but you can also decide how often you want new episodes delivered, even specify that you want new episodes only when you ask for them. You can pause the serialization at any time if you fall behind or are traveling and resume it when you wish.
We will make these expanded choices available for text subscriptions, too, but haven’t done so yet.
I narrate most episodes. However, just for fun, sometimes other people join me and play some of the characters. In episodes two and three, for example, the very talented Terry White plays Donna Langhorne.
As usual, it took a cast of characters to make this happen. Ace programmer Jason Northrup from Signals patiently turned our incomplete specs into complete functionality. Publisher and webmaster Kelly Evans at dotHill press bulldogged the various pieces including the production and located the right recording technology for multi-person episodes. This technology is a combination of Skype and a product called Virtual Audio Cables which tricks Windows Sound Recorder into recording both sides of a Skype call. How to use this is described in an excellent post by Stuart Henshall in Skype Journal. By the way, for various technical reasons, sound quality is BETTER with this VoIP implementation than it would have been on the traditional phone network.
Again we made use of APIs from FeedBurner and FeedBlitz. Either of them might have told us to buzz off with our use of individualized feeds which don’t scale as well as mass feeds. Both of them immediately responded to our request by saying they understood the need of our listeners and would support meeting that need.
Brad Feld listened to some first takes of episodes and coached me on how to make them better. I couldn’t take all of his advice so I and no one else am responsible for all short comings.
Please help make the podcasts better by commenting either here on Fractals of Change or in the hackoff forum. All suggestions welcome.
Happy listening.