Podcasting hits the UK Election trail

Well I'm pleasantly surprised to see that the Lib Dems are the early adopters of technology in the forthcoming UK Election with the first Podcasting (see also explanations here, here and here) of the election. The cast was of Charles Kennedy on Iraq. Found this gem here at Robin's blog with a related view of how the trend has affected US politics from the BBC.

Podcasting is somewhat related to Internet Radio with the added advantage of a RSS feed so it allows you to have an audio stream with metadata so dates, titles, and descriptions are embedded within the stream. Another advantage is that the user can download it at any time like a standard file so they're not stuck to listening to it live like a Radio stream. Does this mean that all political speeches will now be added to party websites and be available to be searched for by topic / speaker / time / location / etc ? Down the road perhaps but not just today I think. For those interested in making Podcasts I recommend this article and also this one.

And for the really advanced stuff like recording interviews or conference calls from Skype (for developers), you can then investigate SkypeCasting.