Mobcasting Pros and Cons.

Andy Carvin has posted about mobcasting, which is an interesting thing. Of course, there are problems with it.

For one, you may have to dial a long distance number. That sucks. The other part is really the audience. In a world where the lowest common denominator is a 56k dial up modem (and even lower in some places), sound bytes suck because of the sheer size.

How many people do you know well enough to wait around waiting for 10-15 minutes or longer to hear speak for 3 minutes? Plainly this is an issue. So while the blogosphere goes googoo over mobcasting and podcasting, it's really not helping with the digital divide. It's increasing it. We have a bunch of well off people in the developed world able to communicate with each other better. Wow.

Something I thought the illustrious and widely acclaimed Ethan Zuckerman would have pointed out somewhere.

So it costs more to do because of long distance calls right now - which, in time, may go away - but it still doesn't really cater for people with slower connections. This is the same problem with IT Conversations.

It really has to be an interesting topic and person discussing the topic for me to want to download that.

So the question I have is - how would mobcasting/podcasting be leveraged to build infrastructures to support it in the developing world? It's a good idea, it's a lot like ARCTX. But just like ARCTX, there's a matter of credibility that needs to be addressed.