Rhod Sharp, Kevin Anderson and Chris Vallance blog for Up All Night

Chris Vallance - 13 April 2006

There's not much to write about the programme, filled as it was by the Britcasters celebrating a year of British indie podcasting, Neil McIntosh telling us about the Guardians entry into the broadcasting business and student broadcasters from the National Student Radio Conference. It's great to see that podcasting is giving so many different people a chance to get an audience. Does this mean increased competition for us, or will MSM podcasts drown out these nascent voices? I don't think so, my sincere belief is that when it comes to podcasting a rising tide lifts all boats.

It's a year since we started "Pods and Blogs" and we would have struggled to keep it going without the help and co-operation of Harvard's Berkman Center. It's near to Rhod's part-time base in Boston, and before he came back to the UK he wrote us this overview of the centre's work.

"The last house on the Harvard campus, about ten minutes hard walking from the "T" station at Harvard Square , is a thin Victorian. By the door is a call box which in the event of an emergency would be answered by the ubiquitous campus police force.

Beyond the door, an assorted team of geeks, activists and legal eagles battle injustice in cyberspace and confront regimes where freedom of expression is limited by a kind of cyber-emergency facilitated by the latest in U.S. or European high technology.

This is the Berkman Center for the Study of the Internet and Society. The youngest foundation at Harvard began in 1997 with exceedingly modest resources and boundless ideals and has continued to live up to that early form. Lawrence Lessig, the author of Creative Commons, was named its first professor.

Non-resident fellows include veterans of the last revolution John Perry Barlow and Dan Gillmor and code wizards like Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales. Dan Gillmor's citizen journalism project has recently led him here too, to launch an online training academy for what he calls the Daily We.

Here can be found, on a given day, the co-founders of Global Voices Online, Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca McKinnon. Zuckerman's technical knowledge of the networking possibilities for countries like Ghana, where distance and lack of resources were once the handmaidens of ignorance, has turned the site into an easily-accessible source of information and views for members of ethnic diasporas and BBC producers alike.

McKinnon, whose tough style was honed in the dingy alleyways of the news network CNN, still spends a lot of her time travelling, talking directly to the people who need to get the word out, somehow.

Rising stars like Holmes Wilson come here, not just to show off their latest hacks, but to dream up the next step for Downhill Battle, now released as the video aggregator called Broadcast Machine. Most of this stuff passes neatly over a reporter's head, but ideas stick - like how to make all video completely free, to view and change at will.

The Berkman's reports into the technical controls resorted to by governments in China , Burma , Algeria and Iran have become required reading for people trying to work out the shape of a world that was supposed to have no such borders. Plentiful warnings by people like David Dingledine, the founder of TOR, indicate that Big Brother is not asleep closer to home, either.

People come when the Berkman calls - I just wandered in one fine day last spring and have been welcomed back ever since. Thanks to Amanda, Erica and Colin on the professional staff and the director John Palfrey and CEO Colin Maclay who keep those doors open. And especially to professor Charles Nesson, an ageless pixie whose fascination with the collision of a networked world and the world's legal systems finally persuaded the Law School to win one for cyberspace. 

Beyond Broadcast: Reinventing Public Media in a Participatory Culture, at the Berkman Center , Harvard University May 12-13. "