| 17 April 2007 | ||
| 11:00 am | to | 12:30 pm |
PRODUCER: Abbie Thomas
CHAIR: Bernie Hobbs
SPEAKERS: Ian Allan, Abigail E. Thomas, Chris Smith, James Massola
SESSION REPORT: Podcasting: Radio on the Web
By John Bohannon
The fact that the room was fully packed for this session reveals the keen interest among journalists to explore the virtual world. Ian Allan gave an overview of ABC’s online venture, which was launched in 1997 and has evolved into the wildly popular Website called The Lab. One of the moments in ABC’s online history that most moved Allan was after the 9-11 attacks in 2001. Volunteer engineers, firemen, and other experts who gathered spontaneously on their online forum, called Self-Service Science, worked out the reasons for the World Trade Center towers’ accordian-like collapse weeks before it emerged in the mainstream media.
He holds this up as an example of how creating spaces for discussion can generate valuable content, but only so long as the participants come with a spirit of good will.
Abigail Thomas took us on a tour of the strange new world known as Second Life, a massive online community who inhabit — and continually create — a 3-dimensional world. It ain’t just for geeks. NASA has set up shop in Second Life, building virtual museums, staging educational events, and even providing a replica of the surface of Mars based on data coming in from the probes.
Other “islands” have been created by NOAA, the Centre for Water Studies, as well as the ABC. Thomas, a.k.a. Abi Goldflake, encouraged us to visit Second Life, create “avatars” and explore the world for ourselves.
To everyone’s dismay, Chris Smith was not naked as advertised. But his account of how a weekly science podcast known as The Naked Scientists has skyrocketed to the top of the iTunes download charts was inspiring. The show’s website now has some 6 million visitors a week and the podcast is downloaded by 60,000 people weekly. One wonders how he has time for his dayjob: virology research at the University of Cambridge.
Insisting that he is not in fact an ex-Jesuit, James Massola provided a state-of-play of the new phenomenon of “citizen journalism.” The roughly 100 million blogs now spooling out on the Internet have provided a voice for the masses and much of the content is high quality — if you can only find it. Massola claimed that the learning curve for D.I.Y. internet publication — blogs and their ilk — no longer have a discouraging learning curve due to new software packages.
On a cautionary note, he pointed out that misinformation is rife, so readers must be cautious. But there’s no avoiding it, he added, considering that a third of media is consumed online and that portion is growing.
I attended this session. This is a good summary. I thought all the speakers were very good, though I would have liked to hear more about the different systems that can be used to run a website.