A few years back, I read from a work-in-progress at a reading in a local bookstore to a crowd that included my wife, our three children, four other students in the fiction writing class I was taking and a few of their significant others. I believe the total audience numbered at least...12, if you include the store cat.
I assumed that it would take years, along with the completion, publication and worldwide recognition of my novel as a literary masterpiece, before I starred in another reading.
But that was before I discovered podcasting, which is why I can invite you to attend my latest reading by directing your browser to
Chip's Podwriter, a blog I created to learn more about the increasingly digital society that Dan Gillmor aptly calls "
We the Media."
Podcasting is TiVo for the ear. An amalgam of old media (broadcasting) and new media (webcasting and the IPod audio player) and conceived only in the last year, podcasting is blogging's mouthy cousin. In the same way that bloggers can dispense with printing presses and transmission towers, podcasters don't need a recording studio or a radio station to store recorded audio that can be played anytime.
From podcasting, it's not that many mouse clicks to "mobcasting," the digital equivalent of "flooding the zone," a sports term that competition-driven editors usurped to overwhelm a hot story with resources. To learn more, the Wikipedia's podcasting entry is an ideal start.
Digital activist Andy Carvin, who came up with the idea, put it into practice last weekend at a conference of bloggers and mainstream journalists at Harvard when he and five others phoned in intermittent reports from the scene. "My idea of mobcasting is simple," says Carvin's inaugural post on Mobcasting.blogspot.com:
...giving a group of people involved in a particular event (a protest march, a public gathering, etc) the ability to post their own podcasts to the Internet and aggregate them in such a way that other Internet users can access them as a collective experience.
Carvin describes a scenario custom built for mobcasters: police brutality at a protest rally. "Rather than waiting for the handful of journalists to file a story on it, activists at the protest capture the event on their video phones -- dozens of phones from dozens of angles ... This leads to coverage by bloggers throughout the blogosphere, which leads to coverage by the mainstream media, which leads to demands of accountability by the general public. That's mobcasting."
Reporters equipped with the same technology and inclinations could do the same.
Although the operations behind some podcasts are very sophisticated, I'm proof that you don't need to be a technical wizard to find your voice online. I followed a set of instructions provided by Carvin and turned myself into a mobcast of one.
Create a blog (I did mine at Blogger.com) or if you already have one, just sign up on AudioBlogger.com, and your phone becomes a microphone capable of delivering your message, whatever it may be, to the Internet in close to real-time. You can also podcast without a phone by doing your own audio recording. I recorded one version of the opening of my short story, "Mad Looper," using a Sony Digital Recorder.
If you only feel like listening, you can subscribe to podcasts on a growing number of topics. Most are generated by one-mike shops, but a few mainstream outlets have jumped on the podwagon. I used iPodder, software that turns your computer into an audio receiver.
Listening to Carvin's reports from the Harvard conference, I found myself thinking back to the first government meetings I covered 30 years ago with pen and notebook. What would it have been like, for instance, to feed live reports on the zoning board's decisions without ever leaving my chair, or to transmit my interviews from news scenes without having to drive back to the newsroom and transcribe my notes?
Today's reporters -- and citizen journalists -- don't have to wonder.
Hi Chip, I just wanted to thank you for writing...
