pokerstarts

Mobcasting pokerstarts is a term coined by Andy Carvin of the Digital pokerstarts Divide Network in January 2005 to describe groups of people using Internet-enabled mobile phones to create podcasts on a common subject, particularly in the contexts of civic engagement or political action. The term had been used as early as October 2004 by some bloggers as a way of describing podcast access via mobile phones, but Carvins interpretation emphasizes the role of groups creating podcasts with their mobile phones pokerstarts rather than one person creating or listening to them.In an essay entitled

"When Mobile Podcasting Leads to Mobcasting", Carvin describes the term through a hypothetical situation of a group of civil rights activists responding to police brutality during a political protest:: What do I mean by mobcasting? Well, its really a double entendre entendre, if you will: a play on both mobile podcasting and Smart mobs Mobs, Howard Rheingolds notion of virus social coordination enabled by information

and communications technologies. Smart mobs got a lot of hype last year in the mainstream media, usually in the form of surrealistic group performance art initiated pokerstarts over the Internet. But smart mobs are much more powerful than just a group of college kids showing up in an art gallery at 12:15pm, standing on one foot and yelling "Tevye, get off the roof!" before dispersing without further comment. Like the case of Short message service use during the pokerstarts anti-Joseph Estrada demonstrations in the Philippines, smart mobs can be any form of group social action enabled by ICTs.: A quick example: imagine a large

protest at a political convention. During the protest, police overstep their authority and begin abusing protesters, sometimes brutally. A few journalists are covering the event, but not live. For the protestors and civil pokerstarts rights activists caught in the melee, the police abuses clearly need to be documented and publicized as quickly as possible. Rather than waiting for the handful of journalists to file a story on it,

activists at the protest pokerstarts capture the event on their video phones — dozens of phones from dozens of angles. Thanks to the local 3G network, the activists immediately podcast the footage on their blogs. The footage gets aggregated on a civil rights website thanks to the RSS feeds produced by the podcasters blogs. This leads to coverage by bloggers throughout the blogosphere, which

leads to coverage by the mainstream media, which leads to demands of accountability by the general public. Thats mobcasting.Carvin set up two experimental blogs to test mobcasting. The first, at bushprotest.blogspot.com, was created to give protestors at the January 2005 President of the United pokerstarts States presidential inauguration a tool to post podcasts. Unfortunately, technical difficulties prevented the

tool from working. The second blog, however, proved more successful: mobcasting.blogspot.com was used successfully at the Harvard Law Schools Berkman Center for Internet and Societys conference on blogging, pokerstarts journalism and credibility on January 21–January 22 2005. During the conference, Carvin, along with Ethan Zuckerman and Brendan Greeley, successfully posted podcasts from their mobile phone to the blog. In February 2005, Carvin and a group of volunteers created The Gates @ Central pokerstarts Park, a mobcast that allowed pokerstarts visitors to Christos Gates art project to post audio clips, photos and text

from their mobile phones to a common blog. The site was featured in The New York Times and Wired magazine. Carvin is now exploring the creation of an open-source mobcasting tool that could be installed on a server to allow for community mobcasts via a local telephone call.See also Blogs MoPodcastingExternal pokerstarts links Essay: Mobcasting the Future mobcasting.blogspot.com SmartMobs.com