Hi Mandy,
Since August, I have been listening to your podcasts and recommending them quite enthusiastically to my English students. I've also started contributing to different forum topics, but I have unfortunately experienced a slight frustration in being limited to reading and writing when ideally we are trying to discuss spoken pronunciation and listening comprehension.
I wonder if it were possible to upload short audio files to accompany a forum topic about specific words or difficulties that people have when asking for advice on correcting their pronunciation. It's difficult to read and diagnose and explain someone's description of what they are pronouncing or what they have difficulty hearing correctly. It would be a lot easier to listen to a short audio file and then be able to quickly and clearly identify what they are talking about and answer their question without having to ask for further clarification or approximations.

One possibility is an external website, www.box.net. Users can upload 1GB of storage space for free and each file or folder, etc. can have its own link, which forum users can then copy into the pronuncian forum messages. If the audio file is saved and uploaded as an mp3 file, box.net has its own audio player, which means there is no need to download or convert etc the file in order to hear it.

I believe this could be an interesting way to further develop and enrich discussions about pronunciation.

Take care, and keep up the great work with the podcasts and website content.

Great idea, thank you!

Box might be a good temporary hack for implementing that functionality; I don't even know that we would need to do anything explicitly on our end, the code and links might just work if inserted into the forum posts. We actually use Box for some internal sharing... I'll play around with it and see what is possible.

We actually already have a built-in mechanism for students to record and upload files, our TrueVoice feature, and we have been slowly expanding the capabilities for that over time. The next thing on the list was to allow students to share their recordings directly with their teachers. Those are all subscriber-only features right now, though.

However, and this may be the first time I've mentioned this, our forums themselves are in for a major change, and that might be the perfect time to make some limited audio upload capability an integral part of them. I'll have to see what is possible and what we can work into the development schedule. But it is a wonderful idea, thank you for posting it!