DigitalDivide
From The Science Media Network
Here are a few notes and resources.
Web design guide lines: http://www.aptivate.org/resources/webdesign/Home.html. For a short first read, read the Outsourcing section: http://www.aptivate.org/resources/webdesign/Outsourcing.html
I wrote the first drafts of the Multimedia chapter: http://www.aptivate.org/resources/webdesign/Multimedia.html. The chapter promises links to further tutorials, and more materials on podcasting and general audio work will become available in the Tutorials section fairly soon.
It seems to me that there is an interesting use of podcasting and rss here. In the chapter, I briefly mention that
Delivering your content through RSS syndication (e.g. as podcast) is an interesting delivery option. By default, episodes are retrieved in the 'background', and some podcast receivers, such as iTunes, naturally support resuming downloads. This means that content can be retrieved quite robustly over longer periods of time.
To expand: Rather than the user having to browse your website, they just download the rss file e.g. into iTunes. Within iTunes, the user can then decide what to download. iTunes will download the items slowly, and can be stopped and restarted at any time. Downloads are natually resumed whenever iTunes is restarted. Of course there is an up-front investment here, i.e. downloading the "pod catcher" in the first place, but once you have it, you can manage your downloads well. Of course details depend on software configuration and use, but it seems to me that (at least in principle), the "podcasting phenomenon" doesn't go against low bandwidth requirements. Note that iTunes can also deal with pdfs, so pdfs can be transferred in the same way.
On a different topic, for network administrators: The "Bandwith Management and Optimisation" book is here: http://www.bwmo.net/. I'm just promoting this: It's free, and an excellent resource for network administrators wanting to get more out of their available bandwidth (particularly within the developing world).
