Rather than calling President George W. Bush from his cell phone to lodge mid-concert political complaints in the future, U2 front man Bono may decide just to forward a Podcast recorded by the assembled masses instead.

Independent music site GarageBand.com introduced on Wednesday a new service dubbed Gcast that claims to be the most refined offering yet for consumers looking to create, publish and distribute Podcasts.

The San Francisco-based company launched its marketing campaign in support of the service on Thursday as part of the ongoing World AIDS Day activities, including messages from Bono, former South African President Nelson Mandela and others in support of the ONE.org global anti-poverty effort.

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Described by GarageBand executives as the Web's first end-to-end Podcasting service, Gcast seeks to become a central online resource for devotees of the medium, offering free recording and hosting tools along with access to the company's existing music catalogue.

The firm said it was motivated to create Gcast after a Podcasting feature introduced on the GarageBand site doubled the company's overall traffic.

Since the company launched its GarageBand Studio Podcasting tools in May, visits to the site jumped from an average of 1 million hits per month to over 2.25 million hits in the October, said Ali Partovi, chief executive of GarageBand.com and Gcast.

When people using the site began recording Podcasts that featured content unrelated to the bands and independent music detailed on its Web pages, the firm decided to launch the separate effort.

"Seeing the response we got with our music Podcasts, we realized that we could make this broader than music and offer Podcasting tools to anybody that wants to get their voice heard in any form," Partovi said. "Our goal was to make the publishing software as easy to use as sending an e-mail; for many people it's hard to get the motivation to publish something if it requires typing and a lot of work, and we think Gcast eliminates a lot of that extra effort."

Podcasts are audio recordings less than several minutes in length that are saved as MP3 files for consumption on PCs, portable music players and other devices that can carry digital content.

Popularized largely by users of Apple Inc.'s iPod multimedia players, the phenomenon has quickly spread across the Web and materialized in the form of millions of short-format programs focused on topics ranging from music reviews to Bible readings, and nearly anything in between.

Among the specific services that Gcast will offer alongside its hosting and publishing tools are applications for managing play lists for the files, embedding the clips in Web sites and adding music from the GarageBand.com archives to the audio programs.

But perhaps the most impressive feature that Gcast boasts is the ability to let people record and publish Podcasts using only their phones.

After setting up an account on Gcast, users can dial the company's toll-free line on any phone, enter a PIN and record their content, then publish the clips directly or save them to release at a later time. Partovi said he believes that this feature alone will encourage people who were previously uninterested in Podcasting to join the movement.

"The fact that you can do this with a phone call has a lot of potential for changing the way that people think about publishing on the Internet in general," he said.

While companies including Apple, Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. already offer services for finding and distributing Podcasts, Gcast maintains that it has little formal competition thus far for the publishing side of the process. Odeo Inc., another company that has promised to deliver a similar end-to-end service for creating and publishing audio clips, has yet to launch its own recording tools.

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Representatives from Odeo did not immediately return calls seeking more information on its time frame for introducing Podcast recording features.

The Gcast service remains ad-free today, but Partovi said the company will look to begin attaching short 10-15 second ads on the broadcasts in the future. Partovi said he doesn't believe that bringing commercial content into the Podcasting process will discourage people from using the medium.

In addition to offering the ability to fast forward through the ads, the executive said the firm will give customers the option to pay a fee to keep their Podcasts free of ads.

Despite admitting that some people might be turned off by the commercialization of Podcasts, Partovi said that finding a workable relationship for combining the content with advertisements will have benefits for both marketers and consumers in the long run.

"Podcasting has a great opportunity for targeted advertising based on the sort of content people seek out for themselves," he said. "Between better targeting and shorter ads I think there will be tolerance for advertising among users, and advertisers can find people who really might be interested in their products. This environment is still coming together, but there are similarities to the models currently used in Web site hosting that lead us to believe it will work."

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