MIT Plans To Convert Cell Phone Users Into Podcasters

robyn217 writes "A new research project at MIT's Media Lab, entitled RadioActive, aims to turn every cell phone or PDA carrying member of the public into a podcaster, and every mobile device into a virtual podcasting studio. The project defines a large-scale asynchronous audio messaging system in which voice messages can be threaded like text in a discussion forum (like on Slashdot) as a method of 'discussion-on-demand.'"

Comments

Re:Ohh thats lucky

[porcupine8]

Wouldn't phones be a lot nicer if they were just plain and simple?

Mine is quite nice as it is. No color display, no MP3 player, no camera, heck I'm not even sure I can download ringtones to it. I've had it for nearly three years and it works just great for exactly what I need it for - making phone calls.

When my husband got his first cel phone last year, he was annoyed that the most basic free one they'd give him was a flip-phone with a color display. He wanted one as simple as mine.

Quality counts, not quantity.

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Quality comes from editing. This MIT progect would seem to increase quantity with no effective means to edit, so quality will slide and make the whole project meaningless.

There are some very high quality podcasts and these will take approx 10 hours of editing etc per hour of audio, but for the most part podcasting is becoming a way for people to dump their vacant minds on audio. Podcasting is much like blogging in that respect except it is far easier to generate a crap podcast (push mike button and spew forth) and far harder to generate a good one (editing audio is harder than editing text). Further, for the reader/listener it is far easier for a reader to skip through a blog to see if it is worth reading than to do the same thing with audio.

Similiar to Vaestro.com

[ready29003]

http://www.vaestro.com/ is already doing this in a web based version. It is pretty clear to see how this could be integrated with a mobile phone interface.

Re:Ohh thats lucky

[Zadaz]

In what sense are Japanese phones getting more simple? Like this one by au? or this one from DoCoMo?

I live in Tokyo half the year and I'm much more likely to see people video conferencing or using 3D GPS mapping, or using it as a credit card than using the grandpa phone. Of course people hardly talk on the phone in Japan. My Japanese calling plan give me 50 minutes of talk time a month, but unlimited text messages (the most popular plan with my carrier). In hind sight I should have gotten the 10 minutes of talk time plan. My Japanese phone I bought about 6 months ago has TV (with DVR) 2mp camera with "flash", full featured GPS (integrated with train schedules, etc), miniSD, barcode reader, music service, Java and Flash player, English and Japanese dictionaries and a bunch of features I've never bothered translating. All for about half of what I paid for my craptacular Razr. I never did figure out how to do half the crap on my Razr, but I can use most of the features of my phone in Japan (In a language I, for the most part, can't read) because they designed and engineered it well. I'd be happy with an American phone that just made calls, however I'm sure someone would screw up the UI to even make that stupid.

To stay on topic...
It's a shame that a company is trying to make money by increasing noise to signal when everyone knows the money is in the signal, not the noise. (Ask Google.) Maybe they're going to make money by charging people to not have access totheir crap.