Global Dialogue

Around the world the interest for podcasting is spreading among companies, organisations and institutions. For instance has the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) started a experiment where they record different kinds of activities at the university, and afterwards offer them as podcast. That gives student who were prevented to participate in a lecture, possibility to hear it afterwards. Also interested outside the university can recieve the podcasts
In may 2007 the Radio-programme ‘Harddisken’ interviewed Bjarne Nielsen, who manage the project, about their experiences so-far:
”The students seem to be pleased about it, and see it as a good supplement to the instructions. But it is will take some time to make the teachers understand the possibilities of it. Some of them are rather sceptical. Some are afraid that their colleagues will listen to the podcast and afterward tell that they have said something wrong. And some are afraid that they will be rather superfluous, because the students no longer like to appear at the lecture hall.

Also political parties are beginning to make use of the new media. The danish Socialist Party (SF) has for instance both audio- and videopodcast at their homepage,about their political ambitions.
”We have talked about making podcast for quite a long time, but when we heard rumers about the approaching electrion it speeded up the process,” says Ann Lübbers from SF’s press-group.
You dont necessarily have to subscribe, you can also just listen or watch the podcasts a their webpage. Ann Lübbers tells that they have an impression that most people do that. It is only a few month ago the party published the first podcast, and has therefor yet no statistic in how many who use them.
”We do it as a sort of experiment to se if it brings more people to our webpage. And to make a greater appeal. We hope that some of those electors who dont find it interesting to read a twenty-page party-program, would rather listen to a podcast or watch a video,” says Ann Lübbers.

What is podcast

Podcast is a method to publish audio- or video files on the internet. The madia gained popularity in 2004, and since 2005 the danish nationalradio (Danmarks Radio) offered podcast of some of their programs. Today you can reviece most of their programs via podcast.

The users can subscribe RSS-feed, and automaticly rechieve the audio-files, and transfer them to a portable media player.
The term “podcast” is a portmanteau of the words iPod and broadcast. Apple iPod was the brand of portable media player for which the first podcasting scripts were developed. A popular alternate folk etymology attributes the meaning of “pod” as an acronym for ‘portable on demand’.
To recieve podcast you need a speciel piece of software – a client which pulls down files containing the Internet addresses of the media files

Relevant links:

http://www.dr.dk/
Download podcasts from Danish national radio and share comments in the debate about the phenomeno

http://www.podhead.dk
A collection of podcast about subjects like food and fashion, news and nature,, economy and education, sex and science.

http://en.wikipedia.org
What is podcast? Links to international sites about podcast.