The impact of Podcasting

At the university where I work, we have several email lists that were originally created for the purpose of communicating important announcements. Unfortunately, these lists turned out to be a channel or medium used to deliver SPAM messages within the university that eventually turned these lists into an annoyance. To alleviate this, a new system was implemented where anybody could submit an announcement through a web application, and this announcement would be then classified accordingly. Then, each individual (end-user) would get an email with a list of the new announcements available, and they would have the ability to access only the announcements the end-users chose to view through this web application. Well, this system has been in place for almost a year, and based on recent survey results, almost nobody takes the time to go an look at these events.

On the other hand, sometime back, I was reading a magazine article about Podcasting. In this article they talk about the impact that podcasting is having in the corporate world, and how companies use podcasts as a way to communicate important information about new products or send "a message from the boss". Although companies are already experiencing the benefits of podcasting, the article also mentions that it will still be a while before we see this trend in other places or settings. However, this is a start, and with the help or RSS and Podcasting, users will be able to really "customize" pr "filter" only the messages that they want to listen or read through their news aggregator.