Mobcasting
Mobcasting is a term used by Andy Carvin of the Digital 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 Carvin's interpretation emphasizes the role of groups creating podcasts with their mobile phones rather than one person creating or listening to them.
In an essay titled "When Mobile Podcasting Lead to Mobcasting," Carvin describes the term and offers a hypothetical example: a group of civil rights activists responding to police brutality during a political protest. Carvin writes:
What do I mean by mobcasting? Well, it's really a double entrendre, if you will: a play on both mobile podcasting and Smart Mobs, Howard Rheingold's notion of viral-like 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 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 SMS use during the anti-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 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 capture the event on their video phones — dozens of phones from dozens of angles. Thanks to the local 3G (or community wi-fi) 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. (Or perhaps they all podcast their footage directly to a centralized website, a la OneWorld TV but with an RSS twist.) 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. That's mobcasting.
Carvin set up two experimental blogs to test mobcasting. The first, bushprotest.blogspot.com, was created to give protestors at the January 2005 U.S. 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/Berkman conference on blogging, journalism and credibility on January 21–22, 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 Park (http://nycgates.blogspot.com), a mobcast that allowed visitors to Christo's 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. 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.