I hadn't started producing a weekly IT Conversations news podcast like Doug did. He's continuing his for the Conversations Network. I may do that in the future. Even so, I want to comment about shows I especially enjoyed. I did that yesterday with Larry Weber's talk from Syndicate. I tried something new: audio clips.

Audio clips are one of chronically underused features at IT Conversations. You may not have noticed, but underneath the "Play Now" controls on each shows detail page is a link that reads "Create a Clip or Excerpt." When you click on this, you get a box to type in a start and end time and then the tool returns the URL that goes with that portion of the show you're excepting. Couldn't be easier.

I used it to clip five parts of Larry's talk and highlight the text. I think it's a great way to blog about some portion of a show. You may not want to do five clips from a show, but even adding one to blog post can add real information, in the speaker's own words, to your entry. Give it a try.

Someone asked me how I did the little speaker after the link. If you look, it's not in the source. I added a class="audioclip" attribute to the hyperlink anchor and then put this in my CSS file:

a.audioclip  {
    background: 
        url(/images/ico_speaker.jpg) center right no-repeat;
    padding-right: 18px;
}

I think it would be even neater if we could just use an embedded flash player like we have on the IT Conversations homepage , but right now, the stream application used by the flash player doesn't understand the start and stop parameters that the clip application uses.