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

Chris Vallance - 16 May 2006

Rhod was in Boston and suffering ISDN (think of it as a high quality phone line) problems so he did the whole show via Skype I don't think you could really tell the difference.

We began with famine in Africa and a number of charities are starting to use podcasts to get their message across. UNICEF were one of the first into the fray, estimating 12 million downloads since they began podcasting.

Dan Thomas in New York and Andrew Heavens in Ethiopa helped UNICEF put together two very compelling audio and video podcasts released to coincide with the organization's new report into the crisis in the Horn of Africa . The report Child Alert Crisis in the Horn of Africa warns that 40,000 children are at risk of starvation. Both Andrew and Dan spoke to us about the podcast, the situation in the region, and what use charities can make of the new tech.

We went on air just after President Bush committed the national guard to patrol the border - in the continuing controversy in the US over illegal immigration. Two Latino bloggers with different perspectives on the issue spoke to us from America. Josue Sierra of Latinoissues.blogspot.com and Jose Quinonez of Bluelatinos.org Very different views on the solution, but some agreement that the present system wasn't working.

Iain Dale and Guido Fawke's new book "The Little Red Book of New Labout Sleaze" is the first to have been written collaboratively by bloggers. Compiled in around three weeks it marks a move from "on demand" publishing to "on demand" writing. Iain seems to be a bit of a convert to the VOIP tech we used to interview him.

Anne Bramley of the award winning Eat Feed podcast visited the UK to track down such culinary delights as afternoon tea and pie and mash. I'm not sure she was convinced by jellied eels.

Lastly we looked at what happened when Gretchen of the Mommy Cast discovered someone had assumed the musical identity of one of her favourite artists Jon Schmidt and posted his work under another name to the Pod safe Music Network.