The ICT for development community of the Development Gateway has collected a number of links to podcasts in a feature about “Podcast Libraries“. There is a mention of the SIRU (Sistema de información rural urbana) podcast experiment in Cajamarca, a largely rural province in northern Peru. The BBC programme Go Digital recently did an optimistic story on this project a few years ago, but the project never went beyond the pilot stage. There are also links to the OneWorld Radio development news service and AGFAX Radio, a monthly package of programmes featuring interviews about agricultural issues.
Archive for the 'experiences' Category
UNESCO’s New Delhi office has just published a booklet “Forging Innovations: Community Multimedia Centres in Nepal”. The publication includes a collection of case studies on the Community Multimedia Centres (CMC) in Nepal and is intended to showcase the interesting and diverse growth of this initiative in spite of conflict and the lack of community radio regulation in Nepal.
I found an article about London pirate radio stations first published in Sunday Times magazine in September 2003. In it the author, Matt Munday, tells how mobile phones and SMS are being used at Xtreme FM to keep contact with listeners:
A show is in progress, the DJs taking turns to mix records together and exchange banter in a cockney pirate patois. The music veers from chunky hip hop to saccharine R&B - like most contemporary pirates, Xtreme champions “urban” sounds, a term that originated as a euphemism for black music. When not DJ-ing, they fiddle with their mobile phones: texting, reading texts, taking calls. Everyone has a top-of-the-range handset.
There is a studio mobile too. It vibrates every few seconds like a faulty alarm clock, as listeners call and text. Scrolling through its inbox, I notice scores of “missed calls”. Big N explains that this is how pirates gauge a record’s popularity. If listeners like a tune, they call in and then ring off, so the studio mobile registers a “missed call”. This costs callers nothing. If Xtreme receives over 20 missed calls from different numbers before a track ends, the DJs play it again. This is why teenagers listen to pirate radio: it’s interactive in ways legal stations can’t match.
In a paper entitled “Mobile Phones and Social Activism: Why cell phones may be the most important technical innovation of the decade” originally published on his blog, Ethan Zuckerman argues that the cell phone may be “may be the most important technical innovation of the decade”. Zuckerman, a Fellow affiliated with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law Schools in the United States, traces some trends in the use of the mobile phone around the world as an “activist technology”. His core thesis is that mobiles are powerful because they’re “pervasive, personal, and capable of authoring content.” Zuckerman’s article also addresses the issue of mobile phones used in conjunction with broadcast radio:
The only technology that compares to the mobile phone in terms of pervasiveness and accessibility in the developing world is the radio. Indeed, considered together, radios and mobile phones can serve as a broad-distribution, participatory media network with some of the same citizen-media dynamics of the Internet, but accessible to a much wider, and non-literate audience.
Continue reading ‘Ethan Zuckerman on “the only technology that compares to the mobile phone”’
Ben Grubb sent me an article he wrote about the eTUKTUK for an upcoming issue of the Telecentre Magazine, published by telecentre.org. I won’t steal anyone’s thunder by posting it here, but he also included some interesting links to online videos. A tuk-tuk is a motorised rickshaw or three-wheeled motorcycle, a popular form of transport in much of South and South East Asia. An eTUKTUK is (you guessed it) a tuktuk equipped with a computer and an internet connection, and Kothmale Community Radio’s eTUKTUK which is not only a mobile telecentre but also a mobile radio station (with it’s own low-power transmitter) and a remote broadcasting unit that send a signal via its CDMA connection back to Kotmale’s main transmitter for rebroadcast throughout the region.
Continue reading ‘eTUKTUK - taking Kothmale a little further’
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