Okay, so this is my first official podcast. And, since it addresses the issue of whether or not podcasts are a good idea since so many people can’t access them, I’m including a text post that covers some of the same ground.

Taran Rampersand, fellow Worldchanging contributor, takes me to task for jumping on the podcasting bandwagon. (I’m already feeling the karmic implications of my bandwagon jumping – as I sat down to record my first official podcast, my iPod died an ugly death. Coincidence? You be the judge.)

Taran points out – correctly – that podcasting is currently unaccessible for most people in the developing world:

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.

I’m sympathetic to Taran’s first objection – it’s totally unreasonable to expect people in developing nations to call into the US to record podcasts. I’m slightly less sympathetic to his second objection – when I pull down my email from cybercafes around the developing world, people at the terminals next to me are pulling down music and video. Yes, it’s slow, and yes, it’s expensive, but it is, in many cases, the content that compells people to get online.

And I’m with Taran, more or less, that the introduction of new technologies more often increases, rather than decreases, the digital divide. It was one thing to tackle the question, fifteen years ago, of how to get email access to everyone on the planet. Now that the bar is set at streaming video, it’s a much more difficult challenge to put everyone on a level playing field.

That said, I think audio blogging could have a substantial, positive impact for the developing world, if we figure out the way to solve a few technical challenges. One challenge that needs addressing – putting servers either in developing nations, where they are local calls, or putting them on the end of VOIP links (which generates a set of legal issues.) Obviously, we’ve also got to get smart about cacheing and compression as well, to alleviate bandwidth concerns.

But the upsides could be substantial. Many more people in the developing world have cellphones than have regular access to the Internet. Many more are used to expressing their opinions by calling in to talk radio shows than by writing blog posts. And many people with smart things to say have low or no literacy – being able to blog by phone goes a long way towards giving people who can’t write well a public voice.

So I’m cautiously optimistic. Sort of the way I feel about this first podcast – I’m sure you’ll let me know whether or not it worked.

Abraham McLaughlin, the Christian Science Monitor’s Africa correspondent, is in southern Sudan, reporting on the future of the region in the light of the peace agreement between the Sudanese government and the SPLA. He’s been maintaining a blog while on assignment, sometimes covering small details that don’t make it into his stories, sometimes offering personal thoughts on what’s happening that aren’t appropriate in a journalistic context.

Today’s post is fantastic, and tells about a bicycle ride he took around the village of Rumbek, the defacto capital of Southern Sudan. It includes short videos of dancers preparing for a celebration to welcome former rebel leader John Garang back to town, and two videos of women cooking. Probably twenty seconds of video combined, they provide information on southern Sudan that’s almost impossible to get from a conventional newspaper article.

At the Weblogs, Journalism and Credibility conference this past weekend, I found myself sympathetic to two (possibly contradictory) points of view. One, articulated by Jim Wales and Sam “SJ” Klein (both avid wikipedians), as well as Dave Winer, was the idea that passionate citizens might be able to do a good part of the hard work that newspapers do. The other, articulated by Jill Abramson of the New York Times and Rick Kaplan of MSNBC, is that certain types of journalism, especially international news, will always require expensive, overseas newsrooms and large budgets.

It’s my fondest hope that citizens around the world will start taking responsibility for reporting news. Not only will more news – and different news – get covered, but citizen journalists will become skilled media critics and intelligent media consumers. That said, it’s going to be a long time before there are a lot of bloggers in southern Sudan. And, in the meantime, I’m deeply grateful that CSM pays for McLaughlin to be in Rumbek, and doubly grateful that he’s willing to act like a blogger, sharing his travel photos, as well acting as a journalist.

What could be better than Abraham McLaughlin blogging from Rumbek? McLaughlin and CSM helping introduce blogging to Rumbek, possibly by sharing equipment or teaching classes (something I’ve been trying to do in my Africa travel.) News will happen somewhere on the African continent, and McLaughlin will find himself in Senegal or Sao Tome. There will be lots of interesting stories in southern Sudan, but we probably won’t hear about them, because there’s no one there to report.

In my ideal future, this never happens – everyone’s part of the conversation, and we hear about what’s going on in southern Sudan because there are people in southern Sudan. (We hear about it only if we’re listening – it’s still possible, and likely, that someone will speak and we won’t listen. Or we’ll try to listen and be held back by barriers of language or culture.) It’s a distant future, but it’s one worth working towards. And, in the meantime, it’s worth expressing a little gratitude towards the Christian Science Monitor and everyone else who help us keep in touch with the far corners of the world.