Recently, I’ve been emailing back and forth with a friend who is working on getting Person to Person Aid up and running. We got into a discussion about podcasting, and I’ve decided to take an email that I was starting to write to her and make it a more general discussion.

She wrote, “once our project p2paid.org is up, I’ll encourage our users to load their recordings. I’d love to hear music from the Andes directly from a village out there. It will give me the chills.”

It made me think of Global Voices. They describe themselves as “an international effort to diversify the conversation taking place online by involving speakers from around the world “ and recently won the 2005 Best of the Blogs for best journalistic blog in English. Thinking about what Paola said, it seems as if it would be great if there could be a few songs added to the conversation that Global Voices is interested in.

From there, my mind went to Alan Lomax. Imagine an army of young Alan Lomax’s traveling around the global gathering great music and oral history. Imagine this being available as podcasts through projects like Person to Person Aid or Global Voices.

It is worth noting that the Smithsonian Global Sound project “delivers the world's diverse cultural expressions via the Internet in an informative way for a reasonable price.”

From there, my mind wandered to Story Corp. I’ve listened to Story Corp stories on NPR. They should be podcasted and new ways of gathering oral history through Internet technology should be sought.

All of this leads me back to my thoughts, here and here about Opportunity Rocks.

Gathering the songs and stories of people around the world, as they fight poverty and disease can bring hope and inspiration, and I hope to hear some of the songs and stories in podcasts.