Here’s the second in a series of eight cartoons from the fab new podcasting book, The Business of Podcasting by Donna Papacosta and Steve Lubetkin. Check back every Monday for the latest one!

And one of the tools that has been making podcasting so easy for so long is Audacity, the open-source audio editing software. True, it could be easier to use (case in point: for license-compliance reasons, you need to separately install a geeky program or two so you can import and export audio formats like MP3). But the sheer power of the thing is crazy.

Ditto The Levelator, a simple utility to optimize audio files. For thousands of podcast creators who didn’t have the technical chops to tweak their levels in something like Audacity, and more to the point, for their listeners, The Levelator was a lifesaver.

And now for a quick game of six degrees of separation.

• The Levelator was created in part by Bruce and Malcolm Sharpe.
• Bruce Sharpe oversaw the video recording and editing of keynotes at the 2009 Northern Voice blogging conference.
• One of the keynotes he edited together was mine.
• And in my keynote, I talked about… podcasting!

Yes, there is video. The podcasting stuff starts at the 5:00 mark.