a heads up from George Nemeth: Podcasting Goes Mainstream - eMarketer

George found an article that gives some excellent background material on the practice of podcasting, on which MeetTheBloggers capitalized beginning with its first session in August of 2005 (with our current Cleveland law director, Bob Triozzi, then a mayoral candidate). George has always been an early adapter. Podcasts accompanied by text renditions of the podcasts seemed an efficient way to span generations of users. Attempts to integrate video were of mixed result.

Last night at a public meeting at the Jones Home about ward division here in Cleveland, Anthony Fossaceca of the Ohio Daily Blog was recording the session, the flip charts, and the wall-chart presentations with a FLIP video camera, which he said was the smallest one FLIP offered and held one hour of video content, which could then be uploaded to the internet immediately. This seemed to be an excellent medium choice to marry to podcasts and text.

I'd like to have a presentation format that offered all three media. Add something like Betsey Merkel's Mogulus for live streaming video, and you have the perfect dialogue-type presentation, coming at you live and with interaction, able to be uploaded to YouTube quickly, available later in podcast format, and text-searchable. Two or three people could produce this easily.

Last night, though, it was comforting to have Henry Gomez Joe Frolik of the PD there, to pick up on the patter that only full-time journalists can share, and TV crews from 5 and 23 or 25. And, it was really fun to see people from all the wards coming together to, essentially, give the whole ward-healing process a big "WTF"? It's good to know we all agree on the basics, which is that this is more about the City Council itself than it is about any of us, or economies, or efficiencies, or improving the quality of life for each of us, or protecting individual rights. Gloria points out that we as a community may have voted for the ward revisions, but we certainly didn't want it all used for political infighting.

Podcasting Goes Mainstream - eMarketer