Radio 2.0 for development » podcasts

Podcasts to broadcasts

bg — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 15:26:47 +0000

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.

The three projects have one thing in common — they see podcasts as first and foremost a way of distributing programming to radio stations for rebroadcast over the air, rather than to individuals with MP3 players, a strategy that surely helps them reach much larger audiences.

Broadcast your podcast

bg — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 18:10:20 +0000

Broadcast your podcast (BYP) is a micro transmitter that offers podcasters the chance to transmit their podcasts on FM. BYP units are handmade FM transmitters made following the circuit design of micro radio pioneer Tetsuo Kogawa. By connecting a BYP unit to your computer or mp3 player podcasts can be transmitted on FM to your neighbourhood. The BYP can broadcast 100 metres or more and uses a 9 volt battery. The Broadcast your Podcast website has step-by-step instructions for making your own BYP with materials readily available at an electronics store.

Podcasting in Development Wiki

bg — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 13:47:31 +0000

Knowledge Management for Development (KM4Dev) has a wiki about Podcasting in Development. It hasn’t been updated in a while, but it does have some useful links.

http://www.km4dev.org/wiki/index.php/Podcasting_in_Development

Podcasting for development concept paper

bg — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 13:39:02 +0000

Michael Roberts of Bellanet and Partha Pratim Sarkar of Bytes For All wrote a paper about the potential of podcasting for development in 2005. The authors note that podcasts are not only for listening to on MP3 players or computers, but can also be used as a way of networking programming to be broadcast on local and community radio stations.

They also note that:

Over the next several years, mobile companies such as Nokia and Motorola will be rolling out millions of digital audio enabled phones allowing owners to listen to a whole variety of content. In addition, emerging standards such as WiMax5 will continue to facilitate increasing use of broadband Internet that could provide greater access to broadband over the next several years.

This has yet to happen, but with mobile phones becoming as common as radio receivers (one writer estimates that there were 2.7 billion mobile phones in use at the beginning of 2007, and somewhere between 3.2 and 3.8 billion radios receivers, with phones catching up quickly) it is conceivable that the phone will replace the radio as the main device for receiving audio.

Download the concept paper – Podcasting: Knowledge sharing for development through dialogue

SW Radio Africa uses SMS to bypass Zimbabwe censors

bg — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 12:39:55 +0000

It’s not exactly a local station, but SW Radio Africa does use technology in the service of a community. Faced with one of the most repressive media environments in the world, Gerry Jackson founded SW Radio Africa located in the UK and broadcasting on shortwave and on the internet. The shortwave signal is jammed in urban areas (thanks to Chinese technology, accrding to Jackson), but gets through to rural zones. The station sends headlines to phones in Zimbabwe using SMS, and also streams it programming on the internet and produces podcasts.

From an article Texting news to bypass censors

When we started, we had set up our website to stream and archive broadcasts, specifically for the four to five million Zimbabweans who have fled and are living outside the footprint of the broadcast signal.

We also send transcripts of key interviews to an extensive email address list and these get picked up by various organisations and circulated even further.

But currently we’re most excited about our latest endeavour – sending SMS news headlines into Zimbabwe, via mobile phones.

We generate news headlines on a daily basis anyway – so this is just another way of using what already exists.

It’s nice and cost effective for any additional donor because there is only the one cost, actually sending the texts. In two months we’ve built up an address database of about 2,000 mobile phone numbers.

Like many, Zimbabweans truly love their mobile phones and of course what we’re banking on is the virus effect.

We also get up to 100 requests a day to be added to the service so it’s growing rapidly. What becomes interesting is what business model to use?