Mobile phones have taken off across India and 70% of people have one – their only connection to the outside world.

People phone CGNet Swara’s hotline and choose one of two options – either record their own story, or listen to other people’s.

There’s a lot of tribal conflict in Gondwana, and CGNet Swara improves understanding between the different groups. The stories are translated into many of India’s languages by a team of volunteers.

Also, the stories get picked up by mainstream media – so this really is grassroots journalism from the very bottom up.

This is great audio innovation and Shu is really interesting… have a listen.

Whilst we hope our ‘how to’ discussion was more of a help than a hindrance overall, we would like to hold up our hands and admit a couple of mistakes- hopefully that way we can all learn from them!

In the first instance, we created a new post to house the Sound Cloud of Ruth’s Elsie Wade interview. We were careful to place it under the ‘Podcasts We Have Made’ category on our blog, so that it would form part of the ‘Podcasts We Have Made’ RSS thread that I’d already created. We used the URL of this post to create a basic RSS feed that we then ‘upgraded’ via Feedburner to a Rich Media RSS. We subsequently embedded a link to this feed in the sidebar of our blog, allowing visitors to our site to easily subscribe to the podcast. So far so good, or so we thought.

BUT- when we clicked on the link to the feed it didn’t take us to the true RSS we were expecting, it took us to a ‘Comments on Elsie Tanner podcast’ RSS. A kind of mini-feed that just allows subscribers to keep abreast of any comments being left on that individual podcast, rather than the podcast itself and all the other podcasts that came before it (I visualised it like a detour branching off our RSS superhighway!). So where had we gone wrong? Well, we realised that because we’d added Ruth’s audio to the ready-made category, which has a ready-made feed already up and running, we actually had no need to create another RSS through Feedburner! Simply adding the audio to a new post under that parent category meant that the new audio was picked up by the existing RSS, as if by magic (well, technology). If you click on the link here or in our sidebar, you’ll see that it’s there safe and sound. We’d made the point in the ‘how to’ podcast that the beauty of a Rich Media RSS feed is that it automatically updates as new ‘episodes’ of audio are added to the original destination, which simultaneously updates the accounts of any subscribers, so they don’t have to go looking for your latest work. We just hadn’t quite realised that as the podcaster, we didn’t need to go through the whole Feedburner process again- it’s that efficient! But hey, we had to go through the motions or else our ‘how to’ podcast would have been pretty redundant…

So that we can all see the error of our ways, we’ve left the Elsie Wade Comments link where it is, on it’s own feed (see for yourselves!). However, the ‘how to’ podcast we’ve been referring to has since been added to the correct feed here, to exemplify our point about one feed tying together many episodes in a podcast series. Phew!

Then there was our iTunes faux pas. We gave the impression that by clicking on the iTunes link in the Subscriber box on the Feedburner page that Ruth had sent her podcast straight to iTunes. Not so. She had subscribed to it via iTunes, but the audio wasn’t actually in situ yet! Only by either using the auto ‘share’ function on Garage Band (no need for Feedburner) or by visiting the iTunes store website directly, going to the Podcasts directory, clicking on the ‘submit a podcast’ link and then entering the magic RSS feed (generated by Feedburner) could we truly have made the Elsie Wade audio available via iTunes.

Until then, any would-be subscriber ticking the iTunes box on our Feedburner page would be receiving the virtual equivalent of an empty cellophane packet through their letter box and wondering frustratedly where their copy of National Geographic/ Horse and Hound/ The Economist had got to. Not a happy customer!

Hope that cleared things up, apologies for getting our RSSs and our HTMLs in a muddle there.

We recorded what we did in GarageBand, and in turn, made that into a podcast.

And here it is:

We used Feedburner to run our feeds through so that if people want to, they can subscribe to just our podcasts – not the whole blog.

There were a few mistakes / misunderstandings that Kirsty is going to document.

Click here to subscribe to the podcast:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/ElsieWadePodcast

I had several options- as I have a Mac I could have used the Apple software Garage Band which has a specialised podcasting feature and is handily integrated with iTunes- allowing users to construct a simple mix of tracks with added artwork and directly share them on the iTunes store or upload them on a dedicated website of your own design, via iWeb. However, because all new submissions to the iTunes store must be approved, it can be up to several days before they become visible and available and I wanted instant results. Neither did I want to plant my audio file on a brand new website somewhere else in cyberspace; I wanted it to remain as close to this blog as possible. Garage Band also has the functionality that allows you to simply ‘export podcast data to disk’ (it saves it as an M4a file). So if your existing website has the capability of hosting a large audio file, bob’s your uncle, but a free blog service like this one doesn’t support audio unless you pay extra for the privilege.

So what to do? Well there are numerous third party hosting sites, with names like Podomatic and Podbean. But I wondered if it might be possible to work with the existing Sound Cloud format I’d already set up on my original post, as I found it neat and user friendly. The embedable player reproduces the MP3 or WAV file that is hosted on individual users’ pages on the central ‘cloud’ server which, if made public, is accessible to the network of users.

Several You Tube tutorials later and I’d just about got the hang of Feedburner– an RSS tool now owned by Google which essentially soups up a standard RSS feed into something altogether more sophisticated and ubiquitous. Most importantly of all, it supports rich media files (audio and video). To generate the feed, first of all I had to create a separate category for ‘Podcasts We Have Made’ on the blog so that the post containing my chosen audio would stand alone. I then copied and pasted the URL, adding the extension /feed which gave me a basic XML set up. Logging into Feedburner with my Gmail account I entered this standard code  into the text box:  https://podcastsandslideshows.wordpress.com/category/podcasts-we-have-made/feed

Feedburner then got to work creating a feed with greater built in functionality for sharing and subscribing and for the all-important meta-data which makes a podcast more likely to show up in iTunes store searches (the same principle as Search Engine Optimisation). For this purpose it has a dedicated ‘SmartCast’ tab to ensure that the feed is pod-ready. It also comes complete with extensive ‘Publicize’ options to allow podcasters to embed their uber-feed using a ‘chick-let’ icon of their choice (see our sidebar). Once your readers have been directed to your feed page, they’ll be spoilt for choice with a plethora of subscriber options. Best of all, providing you always return to the original destination to upload subsequent audio files, any new ‘episodes’ of your podcast will be automatically added to the feed, as it updates to reflect new content and alerts subscribers to the latest editions of their soundtracks of choice.

Here’s the URL for our Feedburner feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/PodcastsandslideshowsPodcastsWeHaveMade

– still in its infancy but with trail-blazing RSS potential!

The reason I did that because I felt that in that particular instance a large thing that was important about the Eleventh Night was the music.  And the music was quite powerful and potent at times quite violent and I felt that it was a really key element not to leave out of the story.

And, as a landscape photographer, how would you generally make use of the audio slideshow medium?

There might be some background/ ambient sound in a landscape that I might record, but the main thing I’d do would be to interview people about what the landscape in my photographs meant and what the photographs were exploring conceptually.

For example at the moment I’m working on an audio slideshow about a town called Callan in Ireland and I just interviewed someone and I’m going to be using that sound alongside the photographs and some video as well.

Do you like mixing up video and still?

I think it’s great for viewing stuff on the web, which is obviously a relatively new format.

I think that traditionally images tended to be looked at as printed documents.  A lot of the work I do is for exhibitions so for that I tend to find it’s over kill to have a sound piece that you have to go and listen to and engage with and I like the photographs to stand in their own right.  But definitely in terms of getting stories across on the web I think it’s a really useful tool that’s being used a lot by lots of different people and I’ve found it to be kind of invaluable.

Do you like using a video camera for still shooting?

The way I use video is as a photographer rather than a videographer.  So I tend to have the camera on a tripod and its filming a scene and action is moving within that scene but the camera itself is not moving.

Like Dan Chung?

Exactly like Dan Chung, who’s amazing.  And he is a photographer, first and foremost, who’s begun to use video.  And I think people like Dan Chung have shown that there’s a new technique for using video which is different from the way videographers have traditionally used the medium.  I mean obviously videographers have always used static shots but they’ve tended to splice them in with a camera walk through which I personally don’t like aesthetically so much and probably my brain doesn’t work in that way so well.

But the reason so many photographers are now do this because a new camera came out called the Canon HD Mark 2 which shoots video as well as stills, so everyone has this camera and then starts to use video as well; but they use it in a way that works with their own technique rather than trying to force themselves into a new way of working.  So I don’t think you should be driven by the technology but you should harness the technology to deliver what you think is going to be interesting.

What are the unique characteristics of the slideshow medium, as opposed to still photography or video?

Well I guess in documentary photography you would tend to have an essay accompanying the photographs, so what it does it it is makes that more immediate; it combines the essay element in maybe a more naturalistic way that hasn’t been written by a journalist but is conducted through interviews with the people that you might have been photographing or with people who know what you’ve been photographing. So that can be a lot more helpful and maybe more accessible, more watchable than reading a long piece of text.

Do you find audio slideshows quite poetic and lyrical in their style?

Good ones are and I think that’s probably the measure of a good slideshow.

But do you think that takes away from their journalistic purpose?

I’ve always believed that there’s no point in looking at something if it’s not beautiful; to make me engage with it visually, it’s got to be beautiful; otherwise it might just as well be written beautifully.  But in the same way as I wouldn’t want to read an essay or a piece of journalistic writing with lots of spelling mistakes, I don’t want to look at an image – video or still – that is badly composed.  That’s not to say you’d necessarily be photographing or filming things that are generally considered to be beautiful but that you frame them in a way that is visually arresting and that makes you want to engage with what you’re looking at that makes you want to watch it.

Do you have any plans to make further audio slideshows in the future?

I think it’s become a part of the way we all work now.  I think to close yourself off from that would be silly.

I think, in addition to that, it’s really important to have stuff up on the web and I think it’s the best way of showing things on the web.  I think it can be really problematic if you take a series of images and just apply music over the top of them.  So in that way it’s always useful if you can record some sound to match to the images.

And it makes a set of photographs easier to navigate.  Like a book is a very tactile thing, particularly a well printed photography book; it’s been designed in a way that makes you want to look at it.  Whereas a blog roll of images in a list with an essay beside it is not conducive to wanting to experience it.  And I think an audio slideshow is a way of creating a book style experience on the web

But don’t slideshows rely on their being a narrative amongst a set of photographs?

But there’s always a narrative. I mean when you make a book there’s always a narrative and you place things in a particular way. In a way having a blog roll is a bit like having a pile of prints on a table that you pick up and leaf through.  But when you make an audio slideshow you have to exclude stuff that doesn’t fit within the story or doesn’t fit visually, because it’s got to flow.  And so you tend to lose a lot of images when you’re making an audio slideshow, in the way you do when you’re making a book.  So you start off with maybe an hundred images and you cut it down to thirty or forty that work really well and the ones that work next to each other go in and maybe the ones that are great but are single pieces are often excluded.

And I think photographers aren’t just image-makers, they’re telling a story.  And particularly within documentary and photojournalism, unless you’re just selling direct to a newspaper which is pretty rare, I think you want to structure things in a way that gives you control over the story you’re telling.

For Henrietta’s website, please click here.

Photograph by Kirsty McQuire

The Everyday Moments series has been conceived rather like site-specific theatre, with a location and time of day in mind which is prescribed to the listener. Consequently the seven-minute long pieces are elevated from mere recording to performance, with a sense of occasion around them and a stage-managed atmosphere. The free to download ‘play-lets’ are produced once a month by Roundhouse Radio and feature the work of artists including the poet Lemn Sissay, the choreographer Hofesh Shechter and the comedian Josie Long. The first in the series, Bathtime Theatre, is based on the short story/ ballad ‘The Hole’ by Kazuko Hohki. Here’s my own audio response straight from my aquatic auditorium:

Photograph by Kirsty McQuire