Last week I was up in Washington, D.C. speaking at the Publishing for Impact conference sponsored by the World Bank. On the one hand, it was fairly heady stuff for a guy who’s spent most of his career talking to fellow geeks. On the other hand, it was exciting to hear people talking about using new technologies to reach audiences in developing nations. I was talking about podcasting, and was interested to hear folks discussing the possibility of podcasts for distributing public health information in Africa. In nations where neither electricity nor telephone service can be counted on as a 24 x 7 commodity, podcasts are a great tool, since they can be downloaded to a battery-powered device during connection times and listened to sometime later.

More important for me was hearing people talking about technology that’s critical to someone’s life. We get used to thinking about technology as convenient or important to the way we do business–for most of us, a podcast isn’t going to be a life or death issue. There are places and people for whom it is that important, though–and it’s good for me to remember that as I work on these systems.

I haven’t mentioned the book in a while, so I’ll put a link down here in this post. If you haven’t read it, yet, I can certainly recommend it. the book is The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Podcasting.

Categories: General computing, Media, Enterprise