Phil Windley’s first podcast includes clips from, and his commentary on a recent edition of The Gillmor Gang. Good stuff. But as Phil points out, it’s a whole lot less work to express commentary in text. One of the best-kept secrets of IT Conversations is the clip feature that allows you to insert audio from any IT Conversations program into any text blog or web page. In addition to being far less work than creating a podcast (not that that isn’t a perfectly good idea, too), using clips avoids the double encode/decode operations that make Thomas Barnett’s audio sound quite distorted. In fact, in Phil’s excerpt of Barnett’s speech, there are three encode/decode operations because the original audio was encoded using AAC-LD to get it from Pop!Tech in Maine back here, live, to the IT Conversations studio. The Gillmor Gang telephone audio in Phil’s excerpts suffers only two encodes/decodes. Using the clips feature, it would sound as good as the original MP3.