Introduction to Citizen Media
Georgia Popplewell, the first podcaster from the Caribbean, interviews a young kite-flyer in Trinidad and Tobago. On Caribbean Free Radio, she interviews local artists and personalities, sharing little-known aspects of Caribbean culture with the rest of the world. http://www.caribbeanfreeradio.com/blog
Great Podcasts:
The Kamla Bhatt Show is an independently produced podcast that features aspects of modern India that most of the world is not familiar with.
Tango City Tour is produced in Buenos Aires by two passionate lovers of Tango Music. Through the songs and musicians they feature on each podcast, we learn more about Buenos Aires and Argentina.
CitizenReporter.org with Bicyclemark is a weekly podcast produced by a Portuguese-American living in Amsterdam. Each week he covers a new topic in a new country and often interviews local bloggers to get help understanding the latest news.
Take the radio with you
Just as anyone can now produce a TV show from his or her bedroom, it is also possible to now produce your own radio program on a regular basis and distribute it via the Internet. This new kind of Internet radio program is called a ‘podcast’ - a play on words which combines ‘broadcast’ and ‘iPod’, the popular mp3 player.
Internet TV requires that you sit in front of your computer to watch the show. A podcast, on the other hand, is something you can take with you and listen to in the car, while you’re going for a walk, or while you are sitting on the bus or metro. MP3 players are becoming cheaper every month and a lot of new cell phones also allow you to play audio files (such as podcasts) through your headphones.
Although podcasts don’t allow you to see a person’s facial expressions or the moving images that make video so appealing, they do let you hear the tone of a person’s voice, the sounds from his or her country, as well as music. Unlike traditional radio programs which require that you are near a radio at a certain time and day each week, podcasts are available to listen to whenever you want. If you believe that part of the program is boring, you can simply fast-forward. Wouldn’t it be nice if we were able to fast-forward through all the boring parts of radio?
Creative Commons and a culture of sharing
As soon as people discover the power of podcasting, often times they want to start a music podcast to share their favorite music with others. Unfortunately, most songs are under copyright restrictions, which means you must first pay an expensive fee to the musician’s record company. Fortunately, many musicians who are more interested in sharing their music than making money are starting to publish their songs under Creative Commons licenses, which allow you to use their works so long as you give them credit. Some Creative Commons licenses even allow you to remix their songs and/or make money from them. We’ll look at ways to find songs with Creative Commons licenses in the guide, “Intro to Podcasting.” An example of a Creative Commons music podcast can be found at http://indieish.com/revolution/.
