Podcasting and WebCred

Well, here's a new one for me: podcasting. According to Wikipedia, podcasting is when you make a radio program available for downloading to portable devices such as iPods. Get it? iPod + webcast = podcast.

Podcasting is to radio what blogging is to journalism. Maybe. Well that's one of the things that was discussed in Boston recently at the Blogging, Journalism and Credibility (aka WebCred) conference. Sounds like it was quite a meeting full of emotional exchanges of ideas about the role of journalists versus bloggers, the status of the mass media industry in an Internet world, and lots more. At one point, someone suggested the users of online information need to do more work. Karen Schneider spoke up on behalf of users suggesting that it should not be the job of users to do more work to make sense of the work journalists put online...it should be the journalists themselves

To listen to Karen's comments, find the post entitled "Karen Schneider: Don't Forget the Digital Divide" at http://mobcasting.blogspot.com/. You can listen to it online (it's a .WAV file) or you can download it to your favorite audio content player and join the world of podcasting!

I also recommend checking out Karen's weblog, Free Range Librarian in which she shares more about the conference from her johnny-on-the-spot point of view.