Recently I enjoyed a forum at the Nextwave festival in Melbourne in which Mark Pesce, spoke on the impacts social networking technologies are having on our interactions with each other and power structures in society generally.

Mark’s talk (above) in particular was most intriguing as he described how his twitter network informed him of the Sichuan earthquake’s epicentre, impacts and ‘ground truths’ as he calls them well before the global mainstream media networks were able. Quite amazing when you think this is one mans’ twitter network. He made the point that these networks are one of the biggest threats to global news media. Another two examples of how social networks are changing and challenging the power structures of society follow, one in which he describes how a blogging site played a pivotal role in bringing down a US Attorney General (no less!).

More on Mark’s blog

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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…

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• John (Web Directions): iPhone/Safari is the Mosaic of the Mobile Web (key point: wifi and Safari in iPhone make web usable).
• Dave Winer: Why no iPhone SDK? (answer: the threat to telcos that Skype represents)

It won’t take long for someone to work out how to get Skype on the iPhone, SDK or not. And like iTunes, Apple seem to be taking a “trojan horse” approach – restricting the platform, then working to open it later.

I’m still not sure on the significance of Safari 3 more generally (iPhone fun aside) – I’ve seen very little commentary on it, which is surprising. But the combination of wifi on the iPhone is going to be a bit of a game changer methinks.

Update: interesting take – perhaps Safari is the SDK?

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