Podcasting benefits

Have you guys ever been into a terrible traffic jam of your life? I been to a few and I really felt like time wasted down the drain.

I have always had this idea where you get to learn something on your go. There is no time to study everything as pre-requisite; nobody has the capacity to do that. To prepare well for future challenges, the only most valuable asset one must have, is the ability to learn anything whenever it is necessary. Yeah, you got to be smart, you needed to have the right mindset and skills, but no need for the biggest brain of all. It is ok to ignore the details, but you need to be able to imagine the concepts well.

Klang Valley, Malaysia has one of the most terrible traffic jams in the whole world due its lacking of township planning. One way for Malaysian to deal with wasting time is to actually listen to good audio during those jams. I used to think that it would be workable for someone to actually make request in a portal about what they would like to learn and wait for audio reply. For instance, you may have a lot of questions about other things which you are not familiar with:

How is it possible to avoid paying taxes?
What is the actual labor law for annual leave?

Someone actually pick the requests and start making audio feedback and then you may be able to download it and then burn in to a CD or something. So, a content management system is very important here, to assist you with automation of planning and inventory. The contributor will be paid according to rating system.

In all, before iPod and PodCast came off, I was just thinking that it might work to have one of such portal running to deal with requests and feedbacks as well as software for downloading and synchronizing contents to the media of CDs or cassettes tapes.

I rallied the ideas around and not long after that, iPod came out aggressively with availability of audio books. Now with PodCast, the puzzle is almost completed. I am obsolete! Anyway, doesn’t matter.

What is left to be done are the following:
* Player’s price.
- We have a choice of Apple’s iPod, Sony, Creative’s Zen and etc.
* Portal usefulness and flexibility.
- There must be enough free software tools for CMS and etc. If you look at http://www.odeo.com/, most of the contents are pretty much voluntarily uploaded and serious learner might not have the time to appreciate it well yet. We need something very simple, make a request or search for the things you would like to learn and wait for feedback. The only problem is that nobody might want to share their expertise with you! But with all these blogs coming which are unread most of the time, wouldn’t people share it, on top of the fact that they might get paid many times for one contribution?

For more on portable player, please check out http://www.reviewcentre.com/products18.html

iPod is priced around RM1k plus, you may get them from some handphone shop in town. But I still down see people do that very often; in fact it is very rare yet.

In all, the idea of downloading MP3 into a dedicated device might sound silly by next year when the 3G wave is well adapted by the average Malaysian.

thanks for visiting my tech blog :)

---------------evalet---------------------------------------------------
1. what is the application of CMS to podcast?
2. what is the threat of 3G to portable MP3 player?
3. when would Malaysia be a truly place of knowledge society?
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