I am working through a backlog of blog reading today and spotted Seth Godin’s post Bobcasting (and Google Reader).

In the post he covers a few points, but specifically related to “Bobcasting” he writes:

I want to suggest something that takes no new technology but could have a big impact on the way you do business: Bobcasting.

I call it that because instead of reaching the masses, it’s just about reaching Bob. Or Tiasha. Or any individual or small group.

The future of online communication is micro-pockets of people getting RSS feeds in their Google Reader or on their Google home page. Amazon updates? Bobcast em to me. Fogbugz summaries for the customer service manager? Bobcast her three times a day.

I’m not sure if Seth knows, but the “Bobcast” already exists…

About a year ago Digital Eskimo ran an ‘Innovation Workshop’ with the Greens political party about ways that Bob Brown, the party’s leader, could use technology to better communicate with his supporters.

The result was ‘BobCasts‘ - a podcast enabled by Bob using his mobile phone to leave a message, that was then distributed using podcasting technology (RSS in particular - you can subscribe using your RSS reader or “podcatcher” using this RSS feed).

One of the things that worked well was the personal nature of the approach - it was like Bob was leaving a message specifically to each supporter.

As far as we know, Bob was the first politician to podcast in this way (in fact, I’m not aware of any politician podcasting here in Australia).

So Seth’s “Bobcasts” are already a reality ;) Of course, that’s not quite the point of his post, but I just had a chuckle and thought I’d pass it on…