Eric Rice is the co-founder of Hipcast, formerly known as Audioblog.com.
He is a prolific podcaster and an active evangelist for personal media creation.

I ran into Eric at the South by Southwest festival, recognized his name and voice from appearances on a number of different podcasts and asked him to do an interview with me.

Hipcast is an online service that provides hosting and delivery for self-produced audio (podcasts) and video (video casts). Audio can be recorded by a phone call to Hipcast, directly through the browser or uploaded from your computer. Video can be uploaded by all the above methods, emailed from a phone or pointed to offsite.

Eric's agenda is to help people make media. He says that though many people say video production is hard, it's important to remember that home movies have been around for 80 years; that the inital cost of barriers were greatly reduced by Kodak's technologies and later by VHS.

Despite these reasons to be optimistic about the future, one of the problems with multimedia production and consumption today, Eric says, is the unhelpfullness of some key consumer electronics vendors. Verizon, for example, offers great technology for content creation but keeps users in a walled garden when it comes to content consumption. Cingular, on the other hand, offers great options for content consumption but very little quality technology for media creation, Eric says.

For now, Hipcast aims to circumvent these barriers by going with the most common denominators - email attachments, phone calls and computer downloadable media. All of these greatly increase the accessibly of both ends of the process, production and consumption of multi-media content.

I asked Eric what he thought the self-made media milieu could use to move forward. These were his key points:

• There needs to be more evangelism about the fact that audio production isn't as hard as you might think when people are passionate about the content.
• Organizations need to lead by example so that others can bring pre-existing projects to the table to build support for their own multi-media initiatives.
• The Kool-Aid style Top 10 lists of prominent podcasts misrepresent the medium and make bad examples in advocacy for adoption. What do Dawn and Drew have to do with political activism? Nothing, Eric says. Evangelists need to and need to be able to point to more pertinent examples.

Hipcast is a business, it needs to fund its infrastructure and engage with the corporate world - but its founders are supportive of social change efforts. Eric says that many podcast creation and hosting service providers do have roots in social justice efforts.

Hipcast offers unlimited bandwidth for a small monthly fee and delivers your content through a wide variety of channels, including the most simple format available - flash files you can post on your site that visitors can click to play.

Eric Rice has written a guide to making a ten minute podcast, just one of many resources you can find on his blog. His company, formerly known as Audioblog.com, is changing its name to Hipcast.