And while on the topic of nonprofit podcasting, the thread on TechSoup has a great post by Eric Williams from the Walker New Media Initiative. I'm a big fan of the Walker's experimentation with blogs, wikis, and podcasting. Eric posted some excellent thoughts on the problem that Cambodian bloggers have to get past - podcasting without electricity. Since I can't point to the specific post in the thread, I'm excerpting here.
We have a couple of projects going on at the Walker Art Center that are audio based. We started off wanting to make audio tours freely available to all of our patrons and we were unhappy with most of our commercial options. We were also concerned that if we used podcasts we would either limit ourselves to patrons who had iPods and who planned ahead to load the files or we would have stock the audio players ourselves. Stocking the players would mean we would have staff overhead/expense of checking ipods out keeping them updated not to mention the expense of buying the ipods. So we opted for cell phones.
In some ways this may help with your question about podcasting without electricity. Of course that's an extreme you can't play any audio with out electricity or batteries but cell phones are one of the worlds most ubiquitous technologies. Although most people in the world do not have cell phones I think it's safe to say that generally people will have access to a cell phone years before they will get access to an ipod+computer+high speed internet.
Of course there is not a cell-casting movement and listening to your cell phone for long periods of time without talking could seem strange with out a headset but there could be some potential there especially with the adoption of faster cell service by many countries.
Art on Call
Art on Call Homepage
or phone number: 612.374.8200
And after we saw how popular podcasting was getting we packaged the same audio up as podcast (on that same page). We are hoping that offering the content up to multiple playing devices will help get it heard more.
Also we've been using podcasts with some success on mnartists.org just by making and "audio only" feed in our existing RSS implementation. This is a pilot of a larger concept for the site but there is a sponsored project on the site called Radio mnartists that was a good opportunity for a podcast because it offered regularly updated audio content.
The project page is at:
Radio mnartists
and the podcast feed is at:
Radio mnartists Podcast
We implemented the same RSS/podcast feeds for individual artists on mnartists.org but have had a very limited adoption of that so far.
Eric: I have a question for you. Do you know why there is limited adoption?
Well i think part of the problem is people haven't heard about it enough. We sent out an announcement but generally there needs to be a lot more encouragement to try a new site feature. Especially on mnartists.org which is designed for a very non-tech savy audience (not everyone on there but most people).
Part of it is RSS doesn't have the mind share that Podcasting has right now. People by and large just don't know what RSS is. In that generalization i would probably include most of the staff that interacts with the public on behalf of mnartists.org. They are great people and good at their jobs but they are slow to adopt new technologies like RSS or podcasting themselves so they generally don't know how to encourage the artists on mnartists.org to use RSS feeds to their best advantage.
On a more positive note we just introduced new gallery labels that feature Art on Call more prominently and we've seen a lot more traffic. So that project is seeing a good amount of use as an audio guide, it just needed a bigger visual cue (literally we made the logo on the labels bigger and added more content).
Posted by: Eric | November 17, 2005 at 04:14 PM