Podcasting

First a quick word in response to January Girl, who wrote:

Unfortunately, the so called senior clerics you refer to our powerless. There is no central Islam, unlike the Catholic church. Islam is as compartmentalized as Christianity has become. And each branch observes and behaves completely differently. This makes the idea of "senior clerics," as in a way similar to the Pope et al, an impossibility.

I do understand what she means by this statement, but I take issue with the idea that there are no senior clerics to change the course of events. Iran for instance is run by senior clerics. Did the Iranian clerics condemn the attacks in London? Well I have to say that, to their credit, they did. But Ayatollah Mohammed Emami-Kashani, a respected cleric and powerful figure in Iran also stated that the results were a direct result of the UK's support for US and Israeli policies. That is no way to distance Islam and terrorism. It's hardly even a condemnation is it?

And this is what I mean when I say Islam should be held responsible for terrorism committed in its name until such time as it can properly distance itself from it. Islam must either support or condemn acts of terrorism or it must clearly split in two. There can be no middle ground here.

On a slightly different note, I saw Andy on the bus this morning and he reminded me that although the events in London were truly horrible, a similar number of people die daily in Iraq. It's a sobering thought isn't it. And not something I had paused to think about to be honest.

And on to something lighter...

I've been thinking about podcasting. When I first heard of podcasting I thought it was going to be a lot of hot air. Anyone can make an MP3 and leave it on a website to be downloaded right? Well yesterday I actually got around to downloading the new version of iTunes which supports podcasts and after some gentle investigation, I discovered that it's all much more advanced than I at first thought. It's all RSS driven for a start. So you can just give iTunes the URL and it will check for updates automatically. It then downloads the latest version of your podcast to a dedicated playlist on your iPOD the next time you connect it.

Of course there are a lot of teens with more enthusiasm than talent, making really awful one-off shows in their parent's garage. But there are also some high quality podcasts available. The BBC for instance has started releasing a few podcast shows. You have to admire the Beeb for this, they're boldly going. It has been possible for some time to listen to BBC radio programs on the internet for one week after they are broadcast. Ironically, they seem to have run into copyright problems doing the same thing in Podcast form. This is a great shame since I think there would be a huge market for such a service among the ex-pat community. Comedy shows, drama, and music shows (everything except news in fact) seem to be victim of the copyright issues.

But here's the thing that got me thinking; this is another issue for the big entertainment companies. Currently, if you look through the available podcast feeds around the internet, you will find there are a lot more than you thought. What's more, a large number are amateur or semi-professional bands, just posting their work somewhere in the hope that someone stumbles across them. These are the same people that can't get a break from the rich media companies that won't take risks with imaginative backstreet outfits when they can manipulate and clone manufactured boy bands which are a known quantity. Could podcasting, in the fullness of time, offer a more attractive, not to mention cheaper, means of connecting talent and listener? I think it could. And the media giants haven't even noticed yet that it's going to happen without them.