How do I set up something (I don't even know what exactly) to enable a user to speak into his/her headset and record this as an OGG via some simple web interface to be saved on the webserver?

Essentially, "leaving a message on the webserver"-kind of script.

It's only audio required and I don't want Flash.

How exactly does "audio" get from the audio device into the browser to be uploaded?

How does the recording itself work? With some JavaScript recording something?

I think I know what you mean. I'm not a Javascript expert, but if you could write a script that captured audio when it was downloaded that would be a pretty big security problem! In fact if downloaded javascript had any access to the filesystem (not just the audio devices) it would be a worry.

I think the user would have to install some sort of application or plugin to make this possible.

EDIT: might be possible with a Java applet. Google "recording applet".

I already did my googling and found the Java applet and one or two Flash thingies.

And JavaScript _has_ access to the file system - usally within the realm of Firefox' chrome for example. And as Flash actually does work on the sound device for output, I thought it would have been possible to do the other way 'round and read from the sound device and send stuff for instead of writing to it after receiving audio.

I wanted to write a webservice where people can fetch and create vocabulary files for foreign languages - which are endlessly more efficient if you've got something _spoken_ in addition to just seeing the word.

And as things tend to work very much better if the access to participation is easy, I though of a nice website.. like "ok, let's speak some new spanish words, let's see, what's missing..." and people would essentially just have to read out loud in their headset.

Something like this.

(And bundle it nicely tagged per subject for easier learning and write a nice Python tool to use it on Nokia S60 based cell phones while sitting in the bus/metro/hanging around somewhere and waiting and so on...)