Radio New Zealand may actually benefit by its slow adoption of Internet technologies, available for the the dissemination of their programmes, on the web. eStuff recently ran a couple of articles about Internet technologies for broadcasters. One about the BBC’s innovative use of the Internet, for making its programmes accessible worldwide, and the other about podcasting.
Not only, has the BBC made available all its programmes on the Internet, but it has now started to experiment with podcasting. Podcasting is a service which allows PC users to download an MP3 version of a broadcast, which they can then transfer to their portable MP3 players. There are now in excess of twenty programmes, as podcasts, from the BBC.
They are not alone in this. The UK commercial broadcaster, Virgin Radio, is making available a thirty minute podcast of excerpts from its breakfast show. In Australia the ABC is trialling podcasts for Radio National, and also provides several shows from Triple J as podcasts. Not content with providing its own content as podcasts, a radio station in San Francisco has taken the rather unique step of accepting podcasts from anyone, and then broadcasting them on the radio. KYOURadio is the first radio station, in the world, to broadcast podcasts from its listeners, 24 hours a day.
So perhaps Radio New Zealand should look into podcasting its programmes. It certainly looks as though it’s definitely a technology here to stay.
On a different subject completely. Gmail is a webmail service provided by Google. Users of Gmail are able to use the web, anywhere in the world, to read their email. It works much the same way as Hotmail, but being a Google product has more “street cred” attached to it, not to mention better features. It also offers 2GB of storage. That should be enough space for anyone to keep all their email, and never have to worry about deleting any of it ever.
Google carried out extensive research into email usage, by using Gmail, in-house, for two years, before releasing it to the public. In all Google identified 6 types of email user. However, they never expected anyone to use their webmail account to gain extra space for their computer files. When you offer 2GB of space you must expect some people to think outside the square. GMail Drive creates a virtual filesystem on top of your Google Gmail account. This allows you to add a new drive to your computer under the My Computer folder, where you can create new folders, copy, and drag’n'drop files, just like it was a hard drive in your computer.
[...] eStuff – Radio New Zealand Podcastsing [...]