CATchat podcast: it's about Catalonia, not cats!

The mod­ern world is all about the flow of in­for­ma­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion ex­changed over the in­ter­net and, more often than not, for free. As a re­sult, in the past few years we have seen a pro­lif­er­a­tion of on­line media for­mats, from blogs and web­sites to so­cial net­works and apps. One dig­i­tal for­mat that has be­come in­creas­ingly pop­u­lar is the pod­cast. A sort of reg­u­lar on­line radio pro­gramme, from both am­a­teur en­thu­si­asts and es­tab­lished media out­lets, pod­casts can be down­loaded or streamed, pro­vid­ing their sub­scribers with news, in­for­ma­tion, ad­vice, dis­cus­sion or de­bate, on just about every topic imag­in­able. And, as with any­thing these days, it pro­motes in­ter­ac­tion be­tween pod­cast­ers and their lis­ten­ers due to a shared in­ter­est that costs noth­ing and pro­vides an orig­i­nal al­ter­na­tive to con­ven­tional media for­mats.

The good news (es­pe­cially if peo­ple like it and sub­scribe) is that Cat­alo­nia Today has started its own pod­cast, called Catchat. As with our mag­a­zine, the Catchat pod­cast will deal with is­sues re­lated to Cat­alo­nia in Eng­lish (there'll be very lit­tle about cats!). At the be­gin­ning of every month, when the new issue of the mag­a­zine comes out, a group of us will get to­gether for an in­for­mal dis­cus­sion of some of the is­sues of the mo­ment, bring­ing you up-to-date on what we are up to at Cat­alo­nia Today and cre­at­ing a forum for us to in­ter­act with our sub­scribers, read­ers and lis­ten­ers. The pilot episode to test that every­thing is ship-shape and work­ing is al­ready out there on the Sound­cloud audio plat­form (sound­cloud.com/cat­alo­niapod­cast) and will soon also be avail­able from other major pod­cast dis­trib­u­tors, such as iTunes. Also com­ing soon will be a Twit­ter ac­count and Face­book page for the Catchat pod­cast, so that you the lis­tener can get in­volved as well as keep­ing abreast of all the lat­est pod­cast re­lated news.

The Catchat team is made up of my­self (as host), ed­i­tor Marcela Topor and long-stand­ing Cat­alo­nia Today con­trib­u­tors, Matthew Tree and Bar­ney Grif­fiths. Yet, we hope to make the best use of this audio space to bring you other con­trib­u­tors and spe­cial guests in the fu­ture. How­ever, above all, we want lis­ten­ers to give us feed­back so that we can in­cor­po­rate your sug­ges­tions and re­quests so as to make the pod­cast as rel­e­vant, in­for­ma­tive and as much fun as pos­si­ble. One of the great things about pod­casts is that there are few rules, it is a free space we can do what­ever we like with, and when I say 'we' I mean both the pod­cast­ers and the sub­scribers. Join the rev­o­lu­tion and see (or rather hear) for your­self!