There have been a number of responses to my call for Congressional podcasts (Questions for Congress). Many have been positive, such as Jeff Jarvis, who thinks we should have podcasts from all levels of government (Podcast Open the Doors).

I'll take it down a few levels and suggest that every town board and school board should be podcast....We should all storm our town halls and demand podcasts (and then politely explain what podcasts and iPods and the internet are).

Amy Gahran thinks there is a lot of possibility here and that the podcasts might be surprisingly popular among certain audiences (Podcasting, Government, and Cable TV: A Happy Medium?). She also thinks that the content should be available via a variety of delivery methods. Absolutely. The government stuff is in the public domain, anyone can do anything they want with it. Blawg is also supportive, arguing that the government needs a whole heck of a lot more RSS feeds; I agree (Hey Congress, Start Blawging...and Podcasting...).

There are those who think this is premature, such as Heather Green on one of BusinessWeek's relatively new blogs, Blogspotting, which has also sparked some excellent comments (Podcasting Congress?).

But Miller's request, seconded by Jarvis at Buzzmachine, that in Congress "every single darn committee, subcommittee, whatever, have a podcast (in the future, broadcatch) of its hearings" seems silly. Ok, if not silly, a little premature.

Faster access to digital transcripts, yes. RSS feeds for those transcripts,sure. But podcasts? When less than 4% of [US households] will be listening to podcasts by 2008, according to Forrester Research?

It certainly would be faster. Would the audience be large? Probably not, for most things, but the opportunity should be there. The audience for the transcripts would also be limited. I don't have the time to read every darn transcript, I'm going to have to rely on editors and filters. However, it would be really nice to have access to the transcript in order to check on my editors and filters or to get more information if I so choose.

Indeed, RSS-delivered audio files would be of use not only to the very limited number who will listen to hours of some of the most boring things in the world, but those who are interested in editing it for others. Recently I listened to two mind-numbingly dull hours of testimony on international copyright infringement. Few would so willingly abuse themselves this way. Having listened, I reported on the hearings, including elements that weren't part of the written testimony (Senate Judiciary IP Subcommitee Hearing On Int'l Copyright Infringement). Hundreds read my summary. Similarly, it would have been great to have the MP3 for editing purposes, to quote from for my own podcasts. Citizen journalism would certainly benefit from this availability.

The archival and future search abilities would be tremendous. Undoubtedly, Google, or one of its rivals, will soon be able to create a pretty good transcript on the fly and provide the ability to search through this audio much quicker than the government would. Furthermore, many of the subscriptions for these RSS feeds would be libraries, who would store this audio where it would be readily and easily available for future research.

Premature? Perhaps a bit, but not by much. Considering how long it takes government to actually do anything we should get people talking about and thinking about the possibility now.

Richard Bennett says that this is already happening and points to C-SPAN (Public Affairs Programming on C-SPAN Radio via C-SPAN.org). This is nice, but it isn't what I'm talking about. C-SPAN is broadcasting selected hearings, not everything. Moreover, it is radio, not downloadable podcasts. If I can't listen to the hearing when it is being broadcast, I'm out of luck. Nor is there an archive of what C-SPAN has carried. However, if it can be put on radio, how much more difficult would it be to podcast it?