A discussion about corporate and business podcasting with tips and guidelines

As I find myself becoming more involved in new media, I spend more and more time away from my j.o.b. In fact, I would conservatively estimate that I conduct more business in my home office, coffee shops, sidewalks and shopping malls than anywhere else.

In the transparent world of new media, I don't see a problem with people just calling me directly on my cell phone whenever the fancy grabs them. To that end, I post my cell phone number on my personal blog and many, many people have taken advantage of that and called me.

One thing that I wished I had, though, was a fax number. I'm sooo not into plunking a fax machine down in my house somewhere because paper is just so...well...useless to me. I live on my Palm Treo 650 and that's where I want my voicemails, phone calls, appointments, and faxes to go. While there are a lot of fax-to-email services out there, they're all pretty pricey (yes, I consider $10 - $20 a month for a service I might use a dozen times in a year to be too pricey).

I think I've found the answer to my problem: Voice Nation.

I signed up with Voice Nation last night. For the paltry fee of $4.95 a month I get a 1-800 voice and fax number good in the US and Canada. When someone faxes me, the system recognizes that, accepts the fax, and emails it to my Treo in PDF (or TIF) format. When a human calls me, there's a variety of options, but I have it set up to allow callers to either leave me a message or press zero be put through to my cell phone (complete with hold music while they're being put through). The message also gets emailed to me in MP3 (or WAV) format.

There's a 7c per minute charge for airtime, but that seems pretty decent to me. Even an hour long call would only put me out less than $5 and nobody's going to talk to me for an hour.

Just one more little trick to make me sound like I know what I'm doing.