This morning i was reading Jon Udell's blog and i came across this fascinating, and brand-spanking new, concept called PodCorps which is part of this other really fascianating project called The Conversations Network.

The premise behind PodCorps is this:  Every day there are hundreds of thousands of physical events -- lectures, meetings, political rallies -- happening somewhere in the world that might be interesting to thousands of other people.  Unfortunately, more often than not -- these events are not recorded and published to the web.  The reason is becuase participants don't have a clue about the mechanics of digital audio recording and Internet publishing.

That's where PocCorps comes into play -- PodCorps.org is an all-volunteer team of audio/video producers who record and publish spoken-word events anywhere in the world. Here's how it works:

• Stringers: are forming a community (database) of free-lance journalists who are willing to volunteer their time to record and pulish events.
• Event Producers: are people looking for a stringer to record an event.  All they have to do is register on eventuful.com and add the tag "podcorps" and the system will find a volunteer stringer near you whol will come to your event, record it, and publsih it to the web.

This is yet another example of how today's world is increasingly being driven by conversations which are occuring online.

From my perspective, it will be interesting to see how big an impact podcorps will have?  I am sure it will result in a proliferation of "spoken word" events being recorded and published to the web that would have never been captured otherwise. 

That said, I think the REALLY BIG impact will come from the proliferation of truly simple to use tools.  In other words, when college professors (or small business owners) can podcast by simply hitting a button on a machine and then uploading to a web page.

It will happen one day soon...and sooner than you might think.