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The Net: Free infrastructure for speech, enterprise and assembly

January 13, 2010 in Berkman, Business, Events, Future, Ideas, Past, Politics, Technology, infrastructure, music | 4 comments

I just posted this essay to IdeaScale at OpenInternet.gov, in advance of the Open Internet Workshop at MIT this afternoon. (You can vote it up or down there, along with other essays.)  I thought I’d put it here too. — Doc

The Internet is free and open infrastructure that provides almost unlimited support for free speech, free enterprise and free assembly. Nothing in human history, with the possible exception of movable type — has done more to encourage all those freedoms. We need to be very careful about how we regulate it, especially since it bears only superficial resemblances to the many well-regulated forms of infrastructure it alters or subsumes.

Take radio and TV, for example. Spectrum — the original “bandwidth” — is scarce. You need a license to broadcast, and can only do so over limited distances. There are also restrictions on what you can say. Title 18 of the United States Code, Section 1464, prohibits “any obscene, indecent or profane language by means of radio communication.” Courts have upheld the prohibition.

Yet, as broadcasters and the “content industry” embrace the Net as a “medium,” there is a natural temptation by Congress and the FCC to regulate it as one. In fact, this has been going on since the dawn of the browser. The Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act (DPRSA) came along in 1995. The No Electronic Theft Act followed in 1997. And — most importantly — there was (and still is) Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998.

Thanks to the DMCA, Internet radio got off to a long and very slow start, and is still severely restricted. Online stations face payment requirements to music copyright holders are much higher than those for broadcasters — so high that making serious money by webcasting music is nearly impossible. There are also tight restrictions on what music can be played, when, and how often. Music on podcasts is essentially prohibited, because podcasters need to “clear rights” for every piece of copyrighted music they play. That’s why, except for “podsafe” music, podcasting today is almost all talk.

There is also a risk that we will regulate the Net as a form of telephony or television, because most of us are sold Internet service as gravy on top of our telephone or cable TV service — as the third act in a “triple play.” Needless to say, phone and cable companies would like to press whatever advantages they have with Congress, the FCC and other regulatory bodies.

It doesn’t help that most of us barely know what the Internet actually is. Look up “The Internet is” on Google and see what happens: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q… There is little consensus to be found. Worse, there are huge conflicts between different ways of conceiving the Net, and talking about it.

For example, when we say the Net consists of “sites,” with “domains” and “locations” that we “architect,” “design,” “build” and “visit,” we are saying the Internet is a place. (Where, presumably, you can have free speech, enterprise and assembly.)

But if we say the Net is a “medium” for the “distribution” of “content” to “consumers,” we’re talking about something more like broadcasting or the shipping industry, where those kinds of freedoms are more restricted.

These two ways of seeing the Net are both true, both real, and both commonly used, to the degree that we mix their metaphors constantly. They also suggest two very different regulatory approaches.

Right now most of us think about regulation in terms of the latter. That is, we want to regulate the Net as a shipping system for content. This makes sense because most of us still go on the Net through connections supplied by phone or cable companies. We also do lots of “downloading” and “uploading” — and both are shipping terms.

Yet voice and video are just two among countless applications that can run on the Net — and there are no limits on the number and variety of those applications. Nor should there be.

So, what’s the right approach?

We need to start by recognizing that the Net is infrastructure, in the sense that it is a real thing that we can build on, and depend on. It is also public in the sense that nobody owns it and everybody can use it. We need to recognize that the Net is defined mostly by a collection of protocols for moving data — and most of those protocols are open to improvement by anybody. These protocols may be limited in some ways by the wired or wireless connections over which they run, but they are nor reducible to those connections. You can run Internet protocols over barbed wire if you like.

This is a very different kind of infrastructure than anything civilization has ever seen before, or attempted to regulate. It’s not “hard” infrastructure, like we have with roads, bridges, water and waste treatment plants. Yet it’s solid. We can build on it.

In thinking about regulation, we need to maximize ways that the Net can be improved and minimize ways it can be throttled or shut down. This means we need to respect the good stuff every player brings to the table, and to keep narrow but powerful interests from control our common agenda. That agenda is to keep the Net free, open and supportive of everybody.

Specifically, we need to thank the cable and phone companies for doing the good work they’ve already done, and to encourage them to keep increasing data speeds while also not favoring their own “content” subsidiaries and partners. We also need to encourage them to stop working to shut down alternatives to their duopolies (which they have a long history of doing at both the state and federal levels).

We also need to thank and support the small operators — the ISPs and Wireless ISPs (WISPs) — who should be able to keep building out connections and offering services without needing to hire lawyers so they can fight monopolists (or duopolists) as well as state and federal regulators.

And we need to be able to build out our own Internet connections, in our homes and neighborhoods — especially if our local Internet service providers don’t provide what we need.

We can only do all this if we start by recognizing the Net as a place rather than just another medium — a place that nobody owns, everybody can use and anybody can improve.

Doc Searls
Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Harvard University

[Later...] A bonus link from Tristan Louis, on how to file a comment with the FCC.

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The Past and Future of Radio

January 12, 2010 in Future, Past, radio | 2 comments

It’s so odd to look at the list of radio station ratings for Raleigh-Durham. When I left in ‘85 I was out of radio, but still deeply into it, and I could tell you something about every signal you could pick up there. Now I know squat. So many of the stations have changed owners, call letters, cities of license, transmitter locations and formats that the dial (another thing that no longer exists, really) there is all but unrecognizable to me.

Yet that change is nothing compared to the move of everything on radio and TV to the Net.

Most of my radio listening today is on computers and phones. Even in my car, driving around Boston, I’m listening to KCLU from Santa Barbara, WUNC from Chapel Hill, High Plains Public Radio, WWOZ from New Orleans, KGSR from Austin, Radio Paradise, Radio Deliro…

The “system” isn’t one. It’s all very ad hoc and not very reliable. Nobody yet has the right formula to reconcile their own costs and programming with the barely-known users and usages out there. How many streams should they support? Should they stream at 128kb and be audible only over ethernet and good “broadband” land connecitons? Should they stream in lo-fi at 24kb or 32kb so they stay audible on iPhones over 3G connections after those go away and the connection drops down to GPRS? (That’s my recommendation, generally.) Should they have multiple streams? (I also recommend that.) For radio on the Net (which also includes podcasting and on-demand), there isn’t enough common usage yet, much less common wisdom about how to serve it on the supply side. It’s like AM radio in 1924. The difference is that much more of it is outside regulatory control. The rules that matter are copyright more than engineering. Ever notice how little popular (or even known) music is on podcast? Thank the DMCA for that one.

In other words, it’s late for radio as we knew it, and early for radio as we’ll know it.

Looking up for noncommercial radio

January 11, 2010 in Business, radio | 2 comments

For most of radio’s history, at least in the U.S., ratings “books” ignored noncommercial stations. Commercial radio shares never added up to 100%. Usually the total was around 87%, give or take. In the market where I spent the most years caring about this stuff — Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill, back in the late ’70s and early ’80s (when Dean Landsman was also operating and becoming far more expert than I) — everybody knew that in Chapel Hill had serious numbers. But you couldn’t tell unless you went to Beltsville, Maryland, where Arbitron kept the “diaries” on which listening estimates were based. (In radio one often heard disgruntled managers of stations with unsatisfactory ratings saying “I’m going to Beltsville. I gotta see those diaries.”)

Well, times have changed. You can see noncommercial ratings now. Radio-Info.com is one service. Radio Research Consortium is another. I’ve known about the latter for awhile, but I’m new to the former.

Looking at the December ratings for Los Angeles, has a 2.2 share, which is quite good, especially since the station is just 600 watts (atop Mt. Wilson, where most of the other FMs are, some with over 100,000 watts). Classical has a 2.5. KCRW has a 1.0. (Perspective: the top station, KOST, has a 5.5. And many commercial stations are below both those non-comms. News landmark KFWB has an 0.7. Pacifica’s 110kw KPFK, considered the biggest signal in the whole country, has an 0.2.)

In New York, -FM has a 1.9, WNYC-AM has an 0.8. Freshly noncommercial classical (on a new channel with a weaker signal) has a 1.8. (We’ve had a thread going for months here about that change.) Jazz has an 0.5. (”Party 87.7), which is actually a low-power TV station on old analog channel 6, with audio on 87.7fm, gets an 0.2, but they’ve had as much as an 0.8, which is pretty good for a weak signal below the FM band from the top of the CITI building in Queens, rather than some higher place, such as the Empire State Building. The great music station (broadcasting a directional signal — mostly away from the city — from Fordham in the Bronx, but with boosters coming on all over the place) also gets an 0.2.

In San Francisco, is #4 in the market with a 4.8. (They also have the biggest FM signal, with 110,000 watts coming off Mt. San Bruno.) The big news there is that is tied for #1 with . Both have a 5.8, as both had the month before. KGO has been #1 since the Eisenhower administration. Classical has a 3.4. Jazz has an 0.7 (good for a signal that’s basically just the Peninsula and parts of the East Bay). Little , from the San Francisco Unified School District, gets an 0.3.

Here in Boston, has a 4.5. So you can understand why , with a bigger signal and just an 0.9 rating, decided finally to compete head-to-head as a news & talk NPR-based station. Also why they bought , the classical station with the edge-of-town signal. ‘CRB has a 2.9. , another great music station (but with a secondary signal in the market) had an 0.7. All-folk (with a signal mostly for the south side of town) had an 0.3. Harvard’s WHRB (with a directional signal) got an 0.2).

, my (#213) home market, was last ranked in Fall of ‘09. Classical KDB got a 4.2. It’s still commercial, though owned by a nonprofit. I don’t see any noncommercials listed, alas. I’d really like to see how well the new is doing there. Same for its FM, which is a 4-watt translator that does pretty well, considering..

Same goes for Sussex, the then-rural New Jersey market where I got my start in the earliest ’70s, on , a little station on a mountain overlooking Franklin and Hamburg. Back then WSUS was just 360 watts. Now it’s a whopping 590 watts. But it kicks butt in the ratings: down to 13.8 after peaking in the last period at 15.0. Those are very high numbers. I don’t see any noncommercials here either.

Nor do I see any for Raleigh/Durham on Radio-Info, though I’m sure WUNC, WCPE, WSHA and WNCU all do well. Radio Research Consortium is also opaque on the matter.

Continued in the next post.

Progress

December 26, 2009 in Future, Past, Science | 5 comments

Back when I started coming over to Europe for work (mostly to France), in the mid-90s, I listened almost every night to U.S. armed forces radio (then called the Armed Forces Radio Service, or AFRS) on 873KHz on the AM (or, in Europe, MW) dial. I’m listening again now, almost surprised to find it still there (at the top of this handy list in Wikipedia). Big station: 150kw, or 3x the max allowed in the U.S.

It’s the Armed Forces Network now, or AFN. Playing country music.

Here’s a Wikipedia page for the transmitter itself, in Weißkirchen.

Meanwhile, I’m also listening to ’s 96Kb AAC stream, from New York. Specifically, Strauss’s Elektra, Johannes Brahms, Rhapsody in B Minor, Op. 79/1, Ivo Pogorelich, piano, the station website tells me. Sounds terrific on my Sennheiser headphones.

Consider the fact that I’m listening at the far end of a weak wi-fi signal in one of the cheapest hotels in Zermatt, which is at the deep end of a long valley in Switzerland’s Alps. (Outside our window, the Matterhorn.) Puts some perspective on the comment thread, still lengthening here, that was set off by WQXR’s move to a weaker over-the-air signal (among other moves by when they took over the station from the New York Times).

Earlier today we visited some of the other hotels. The most impressive one in town is the Grand Hotel Zermatterhof. The Internet is not among its featured offerings. They do have a tiny “Internet corner,” occupying what appears to be old phone booth locations, and which we found occupied by two twelve-year-olds on the only terminals there. Makes me glad we’re at our good-enough hotel with its free wi-fi. Elsewhere service seems to be most commonly provided by Swisscom, at prices that make sense only to them. (I’d show a screen shot, but I lost it, alas.) Given the brutal prices already charged by the better hotels here, it would make far more sense just to bake the service into those price and let the guests use the Net for free, just like they use water, bedding and electricity.

But actually I care less about the right thing to do now than I care about the only thing to do in the future. That’s to build out the Net as a basic utility. Not as a secondary (or tertiary) service of phone and cable companies.

I know that’s not how it is now, and that’s not how it’s gong to be for awhile. Right now the Net is still seen as gravy rather than as meat. But this will change. Count on it. And count on more money being made on the transition than on maintaining today’s defaults. Also count on it all going faster if we can also handle our own end of it, in our own homes and neighborhoods.

Companies betting on the free and ubiquitous Internet of the future have the best chance of winning in the long run. They just won’t win by continuing to monetize the Net on the pay toilet model. (Or, for those who recall, the coin-operated television model. Yo, here’s the patent.)

Building better markets. Not just better marketing.

December 16, 2009 in Business, Future, Journalism, VRM | 11 comments

The comment thread in my last post was lengthened by Seth Finkelstein’s characterization of me as “basically a PR person”. I didn’t like that, and a helpful back-and-forth between the two of us (and others) followed. In the midst of the exchange I said I would unpack some of my points in a fresh post rather than branch off in the comment thread. So here we are.

We tend to be defined by what we do. Or, in some cases, what we’ve done. Many of our surnames describe the work of an ancestor. Carpenter. Baker. Weaver. Tanner. Of my own surname, it says here,

In his book, Surnames of the United Kingdom, Harrison writes that the surname Searle, Searls, Searles, Serle, Serles, Serrell, or Serrill is of Teutonic origin signifying “Armour or Arms”. It is derived from the Old Teutonic Serlo, Sarla, Sarl, Sarilo, Serilo. Serli ” and the Old English “Searo”, it is the equivalent of the Old High German “Saro” which is the same as the old Norse ” Sorus” meaning Armor arms, skill or device.”

A soldier, I guess. My father, Allen H. Searls, was a soldier, both before and during WWII (he re-enlisted at age 36). But basically he was a carpenter: a builder. So was his father, George William Searls. Also George’s father, Allen Searls. Also Allen’s father, Samuell Searls. I’m not, but my daugther Colette married Todd Carpenter. So my grandson is a Carpenter too.

By the time I knew him, my father was an insurance agent. But he saw himself more as an builder of useful stuff. Thus our basement was a workshop. Pop’s brother-in-law, Archie Apgar, was a banker by day and a builder the rest of the time. In the summer of 1949, the two of them together built our summer house in the woods of South Jersey. (In a paradise of pine, oak and blueberries, now home to a shopping center.) My father was also a longshoreman, a cable-rigger on the George Washington Bridge, and a builder of railroad trestles. He did that in Alaska, where he met my mother, a social worker who had grown up in North Dakota. They married after the War and moved to New Jersey, where Mom worked for many years as a teacher. Her maiden name was Oman, borrowed by a grandfather from a fellow Swede on the boat over from Malmö (or maybe it was Göteburg… someplace with an umlaut).

Mom was a good writer, and in that respect I took more after her than Pop. I started writing in high school, covered sports for my college paper, and the wrote for a variety of newspapers and  magazines across the many years since.

But I’ve done lots of other stuff too. I was a moving man. I drove an ice cream truck. I worked in frozen produce wholesaling (which consisted of moving skids of goods with forklifts and carrying clipboards in and out of freezing warehouses, railroad cars and tractor trailers). I worked in the fronts and the backs of restaurant kitchens, and waiting tables. I flipped burgers and worked counters in fast food joints. I worked in the kitchen at a hospital, and delivering food to patients. I worked in retail, both in sales and management. I worked as a community organizer in a social welfare project (a job that later gave me respect for Barack Obama’s work at the same job, especially since he was good at it and I was not). I worked in radio, doing everything from selling ads to spinning records to engineering, including maintaining transmitters and tower-climbing to change bulbs. I did site studies for FM stations, and made new facility applications to the FCC. I worked in academic parapsychology, helping with research and editing publications. I worked in a landlord’s sawmill when I couldn’t make the rent. And I worked in advertising and PR. Next to writing, that’s the job I held longest.

In 1978 I co-founded Hodskins Simone & Searls, an advertising agency in Durham, North Carolina. By 1980 we came to specialize in what as then called “high tech”. We did well and opened a second office in Palo Alto, moving there completely in 1986. A couple years later we created a division called The Searls Group, which specialized in PR, and eventually spun off on its own as a marketing consultancy. Our clients included Farallon, Symantec, The Burton Group, pieces of Apple and Motorola, Sun Microsystems, Hitachi Semiconductor, Zenith Data Systems and many more.

I had mixed feelings about doing PR, because I was still a journalist at heart, even though I was only freelancing at it during that time. And, while being a journalist made me a better flack, it didn’t make me less of one. I also found that PR folk had little leverage on corporate strategy. Their function was output, not input. So, after awhile, I moved The Searls Group’s work up the client stack, to the point where we did consulting at the CXO level, helping clients understand and engage their markets, rather than in helping them craft and send messages to those markets. You might say our job was delivering (often unwelcome) clues to the places where those clues were needed most. This shift started in the early ’90s and was done by the time Chirs Locke, Rick Levine, David Weinberger and I wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto, in 1999.

Not long after Cluetrain came out as a book in early 2000, Jakob Nielsen noted the use of the first person plural voice in the original Manifesto. When we talked about “we”, as with this here…

not

… we were not speaking as marketers. We were speaking as human beings, out in the marketplace. What happened, Jakob said, was that “You guys defected from marketing, and sided with markets against marketing.”

He was right.

The great irony that followed was that Cluetrain was generally classified as a marketing book, and its closest followers have been in marketing as well. Many marketers have been inspired by Cluetrain to improve marketing, including the practices of advertising and PR. Along those same lines, Cluetrain has also been credited with foreseeing the “social” movement in computing and communications, and with inspiring and guiding that movement as well. Look up Cluetrain+social on Google and see what comes up. (Here’s a Twitter search for the same.)

I’m not proud, or even happy, with either of those developments. Not long ago I even suggested that “social media” is a crock. My point was not to denigrate people doing good work in the social media space, but rather to point out that our collective vision of this space was wrongly limited to what could be done on Facebook, Twitter and other commercial “platforms”. Ignored was the freedom and independence granted by the Net’s own open and essentially ownerless platforms and protocols — and the need to equip individuals with their own instruments of independence and engagement: work that’s still mostly not done.

That’s why I welcomed the opportunity to add fresh chapters to Cluetrain for its 10th anniversary edition. For the last few years I’ve been working on Cluetrain’s unfinished (or unstarted) business, through ProjectVRM, at Harvard’s Berkman Center, and through its collection of allied efforts and volunteers, both around the Center and around the world. Thus my own chapter of the latest Cluetrain is titled Markets Are Relationships, and unpacks the ambitions behind VRM (which stands for Vendor Relationship Management):

  1. Provide tools for individuals to manage relationships with organizations. These tools are personal. That is, they belong to the individual, in the sense that they are under the individual’s control. They can also be social, in the sense that they can connect with others and support group formation and action. But they need to be personal first.
  2. Make individuals the collection centers for their own data, so that transaction histories, health records, membership details, service contracts, and other forms of personal data aren’t scattered throughout a forest of silos.
  3. Give individuals the ability to share data selectively, without disclosing more personal information than the individual allows.
  4. Give individuals the ability to control how their data is used by organizations, and for how long, including agreements requiring organizations to delete the individual’s data when the relationship ends.
  5. Give individuals the ability to assert their own “terms of service,” obviating the need for organization-written terms of service that nobody reads and everybody has to “accept” anyway.
  6. Give individuals means for expressing demand in the open market, outside any organizational silo, without disclosing any unnecessary personal information.
  7. Make individuals platforms for business, by opening the market to many kinds of third party services that serve buyers as well as sellers.
  8. Base relationship-managing tools on open standards, open APIs (application program interfaces) and open code. This will support a rising tide of activity that will lift an infinite variety of business boats, plus other social goods.

We don’t have those tools yet. When we do, they will change the way customers relate to companies, and therefore change the reverse as well. That will change the job of marketing, sales, and pretty much everything else a company does — so long as it responds to customers who are far better equipped to express demand, and otherwise relate, than they are today.

So, to sum up, there is a place where I stand in respect to all the above. That place is alongside customers, in the marketplace. Not alongside sellers, even when I’m consulting those sellers. My consulting hat is not a PR or a marketing one. It’s a customer hat. A user hat. (And, to the extent that I’m hired to help make sense of free and open source development, a geek hat.)

This is why I took offense to being labeled a “PR person.” I have no problem with good PR people. In fact I try to help them out, along with everybody else who’s interested in my input. But what makes me valuable, I believe, is where I stand in respect to customers. I’m on their side. I’m trying to help them out, and markets along with them. Maybe I’ll succeed, and maybe not. But I do believe that, in the long run, we will have VRM tools, and that these tools will make life better for everybody in the marketplace, including vendors.

Meanwhile, there is a temptation not only to confuse the past with the , but the present with the future. We tend to assume that, as John Updike once said (at a time when copiers, answer machines and faxes seemed miraculous), “we live in the age of full convenience”. We don’t. The present is just a draft for the future. Our conveniences are just prototypes.

I’m glad Seth and others (Dave Rogers, where are you?) are out there, calling bullshit on techno-utopians like me. A lot of what Seth and others on that thread had to say was sobering stuff. The flywheels of Old Skool industrial practices, and thinking, have not gone away. They even spin inside “good” companies like Google.

Markets are different now that the Net runs beneath them. There are fewer secrets, and both good ideas and bad can spread with alarming speed. Lately the split between the static and the live web (which most of us call “real-time” and some of us saw coming half a decade and more ago) has become dramatic and confusing. So has the split between fixed and mobile computing and communications. One can get lost through enthusiasm, despair, or both. Hey, the iPhone is a wonderful thing, but — what next? And why? And how?

Markets are no better than we make them. I’m not sure what one should call a person who works on tools to make markets better. But hey, that’s my job.

Guess I’m a builder after all.

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WGBH and public radio’s future

November 25, 2009 in Art, Berkman, Business, Future, Ideas, Journalism, Live Web, News, Past, infrastructure, music, problems, radio | 15 comments

@robpatrob (Robert Paterson) asks (responding to this tweet and this post) “Why would GBH line up against BUR? Why have a war between 2 Pub stations in same city?” (In this tweet and this one, Dan Kennedy asks pretty much the same thing.)

The short answer is, Because it wouldn’t be a war. Boston is the world’s largest college town. There are already a pile of home-grown radio-ready program-filling goods here, if one bothers to dig and develop. The standard NPR line-up could also use a challenge from other producers. WGBH is already doing that in the mornings by putting The Takeaway up against Morning Edition. That succeeds for me because now I have more choices. I can jump back and forth between those two (which I do, and Howard Stern as well).

The longer answer is that it gives GBH a start on the inevitable replacement of signal-based radio by multiple streams and podcast line-ups. WGBH has an exemplary record as a producer of televsion programming, but it’s not setting the pace in other media, including radio. The story is apparent in the first four paragraphs of its About page (which is sure to change):

WGBH is PBS’s single largest producer of content for television (prime-time and children’s programs) and the Web. Some of your favorite series and websites — Nova, Masterpiece, Frontline, Antiques Roadshow, Curious George, Arthur, and The Victory Garden, to name a few — are produced here in our Boston studios.

WGBH also is a major supplier of programs heard nationally on public radio, including The World. And we’re a pioneer in educational multimedia and in media access technologies for people with hearing or vision loss.

Our community ties run deep. We’re a local public broadcaster serving southern New England, with 11 public television services and three public radio services — and productions (from Greater Boston to Jazz with Eric in the Evening) that reflect the issues and cultural riches of our region. We’re a member station of PBS and an affiliate of both NPR and PRI.

In today’s fast-changing media landscape, we’re making sure you can find our content when and where you choose — on TV, radio, the Web, podcasts, vodcasts, streaming audio and video, iPhone applications, groundbreaking teaching tools, and more. Our reach and impact keep growing.

Note the order: TV first, radio second, the rest of it third. But where WGBH needs to lead in the future is with #3: that last paragraph. Look at WGBH’s annual report. It’s very TV-heavy. Compare its radio productions to those of Chicago Public Radio or WNYC. Very strong in classical music (now moving over to WCRB, at least on the air), and okay-but-not-great in other stuff.

Public TV has already become a ghetto of geezers and kids, while the audience between those extrmes is diffusing across cable TV and other media. An increasingly negligible sum of people watch over-the-air (OTA) TV. Here WGBH lost out too. It’s old signal on Channel 2 was huge, reaching more households than any other in New England. Now it’s just another UHF digital signal — like its own WGBX/44, with no special advantages. Public radio is in better shape, for now, because its band isn’t the ever-growing accordion file that cable TV has become; and because most of it still lives in a regulated protectorate at the bottom fifth of the FM band. It also helps public radio that the rest of both the FM and the AM bands suck so royally. (Only sports and political talk are holding their own. Music programming is losing to file sharing and iPods. All-news stations are yielding to iPhone programs that offer better news, weather and traffic reporting. In Boston WBZ is still a landmark news station, but it has to worry a bit with WGBH going in the same direction.)

So the timing is right. WGBH needs to start sinking new wells into the aquifer of smart, talented and original people and organizations here in the Boston area — and taking the lead in producing great new programming with what they find. I’ll put in another plug for Chris Lydon’s Open Source, which is currently available only in podcast/Web form. And there is much more, including Cambridge-based PRX’s enormous portfolio of goods.  (Disclosure: my work with the Berkman Center is partially funded through PRX — and those folks, like Chris, are good friends.)

In the long run what will matter are sources, listeners, and the finite amount of time the latter can devote to the former. Not old-fashioned signals.

P.S. to Dan Kennedy’s tweeted question, “Is there another city in the country where two big-time public radio stations go head-to-head on news? Can’t think of one.” Here are a few (though I’d broaden the answer beyond “news,” since WBUR isn’t just that):

All with qualifications, of course. In some cases you can add in Pacifica (which, even though my hero Larry Josephson once called it a “foghorn for political correctness,” qualifies as competition). Still, my point is that there is room for more than one mostly-talk (or news) public radio station in most well-populated regions. Even in Boston, where WBUR has been king of the hill for many years. Hey, other things being equal (and they never are), the biggest signal still tends to win. And in Boston, WGBH has a bigger signal than WBUR: almost 100,000 watts vs. 12,000 watts. WBUR radiates from a higher elevaiton, but its signal is directional. On AM that means it’s stronger than the listed power in some directions and weaker in others; but on FM it means no more than the listed power in some directions and weaker in others. See the FCC’s relative field polar plot to see how WBUR’s signal is dented in every direction other than a stretch from just west of North to Southeast. In other words, toward all but about a third of its coverage area. To sum up, WGBH has a much punchier signal. I’m sure the GBH people also have this in mind when they think about how they’ll compete with BUR.

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WGBH/WCRB go the way of WNYC/WQXR

November 23, 2009 in News, radio | 19 comments

The longest thread in the history of this blog belongs to Why WQXR is better off as a public radio station, which I posted on July 26, and still has comments this month. The post followed a complex deal by which the New York Times divested its legacy classical music station, WQXR — and by which the station’s format, call letters, record library and some of its personnel survived as a noncommercial outlet of WNYC, on a different channel with a weaker signal. From the comments one might gather that more listeners were unhappy than happy with the deal. My post mostly presented the upside.

Now here in Boston a similar move is underway. WGBH, “Boston’s NPR arts and culture station” will go the way of WNYC-FM, which phased out classical music starting in 2002, eventually shunting it to HD side-channels and Internet streams while populating the FM signal (as well as its AM one) with news and information programming, which tends to be more popular and to attract more money in listener contributions. By saving WQXR, WNYC returned classical music to the airwaves (although the city was still down one classical station, or two if you want to go back to the very late WNCN.) WGBH clearly had the same thing in mind when it bought WCRB, which was already weakened in the Boston metro when it moved from its old local channel (102.5) to its current channel (99.5) in Lowell. (Wikipedia has good background poop on WCRB’s own long saga.) While both WCRB signals have about the same range, the old 102.5 signal radiates from the Boston FM and TV antenna farm in nearby Needham, while the new one on 99.5 comes from a hill overlooking the I-495/I93 intersection, far to the north near the New Hampshire border.

So now WGBH plans to move its classical programming to WCRB, whch will become a non-commercial station (as did WQXR), and to do more news and information programming on its own home signal (89.7), which is grandfathered at 100,000 watts on Great Blue Hill (hence the call letters) in Milton, on the south side of Boston. In terms of wattage alone, WGBH is New England’s most powerful station. (The largest coverage belongs to WHOM/94.9 on Mt. Washington in New Hampshire, which puts out 49,000 watts from the highest peak in the Northeast.) As a result WGBH can go head-to-head with WBUR/90.9, which is the incumbent public radio leader in Boston. (I’ve looked at the ratings, and WBUR has kicked WGBH’s butt for years — a fact that I am sure has rankled the latter.)

Still, many listeners are not happy. And not just about losing classical music.

WGBH is doing its best to gloss over the signal loss for classical (and other arts & culture) listeners, especially in the southern reaches of Eastern Massachusetts, where WGBH has a very strong signal and WCRB is mostly absent. To demonstrate, here is a comparison of coverage for WGBH, WCRB and WBUR, calculated by Radio-Locator.com:

gbh-crb-bur

Click on the image for a legible full-size version.

Still, my own take in the WGBH/WCRB case is the same as it was for WNYC/WQXR: this is the best that could be done for classical music on Boston airwaves — and it offers opportunities not possible for WCRB had it remained a commercial station. Go back to that first link if you want to see what those are.

As for me, I expect to be more likely to listen to a ‘GBH-run noncommercial WCRB than I did to the commercial one. First, the commercials were (and, at this writing, still are) annoying. Second, the WCRB repertoire was pretty close to all-hits, rather than the more varied and challenging fare found on WGBH. There should be a happy medium between the two, and I’m sure ‘GBH will work hard to find it.

But I’m privileged to live on the north side of the metro, so I get WCRB just fine. I think it’s a safe bet that more than one half of WGBH’s listening area won’t get a useful signal out of WCRB. And the area within which listeners can get WGBH’s HD stream is a subset of WGBH’s coverage area.

A digressive word about HD radio. I got one recently — a $99 Teac unit — at Costco. The tuner is remarkably good, and it gets most local stations’ HD side-channels. But “tuning” HD is a counter-intuitive chore. You tune in the partent station, wait for the HD symbol to appear, and then tune to the one or two HD channels of the station. It’s a multi-step selection process, with delays along the way. I’d be curious to know if anybody (beside those who pick a channel and stay put) has had a positive experience with tuning it.

For those who want to compare apples with apples, here’s some data:

One last thing. I for one (and I am sure there are many more) would love to hear Chris Lydon return to Boston’s airwaves. He has been a podcasting pioneer with an outstanding show. But coming on a live station would be fabulous.

Hey, how about Larry Josephson too?

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Toward post-Journalism journalism

October 31, 2009 in Journalism | 21 comments

On Thursday, right after failing to get a root canal for the Xth time (saga here), I participated in a square-table discussion (I say that because we sat around a table with four corners) titled “How to Make Money in News: New Business Models for the 21st Century — An Executive Session sponsored by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy”, hosted by Harvard’s JFK School of Government. My panel was this:

Panel 2: Disruptive Technologies and their Impact on Business Models in Other Industries
  • Sherry Turkle, Abby Rockefeller Mauze Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology, MIT
  • Tom Eisenman, William J. Abernathy Professor of Business Administration in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit, Harvard Business School
  • Persephone Miel, Senior Advisor, Internews Network
  • Virginia Postrel, author, The Future and Its Enemies; contributing editor, The Atlantic
  • Doc Searls, Berkman Center for Internet & Society
  • Moderator — Nicco Mele, Harvard University; founder and president, EchoDitto

It was a good one, and it was fun sharing the side (since there was no stage) with such bright and interesting folks. Nicco kindly let me speak last, since I was fighting major tooth pain at the time, and wanted a few minutes for the Tylenol to kick in. Other folks said I made sense. But I didn’t pull my various threads together since I kinda ran ahead of myself. So I thought this morning it would be good to share what I wanted to say, drawing from the outline I wrote on the pad kindly provided by the organizers there, and which I kept. Here goes…

Let’s take the long view here. Later I’ll bring in the paleozoic, but for now I’d like to start just a quarter-millennium ago, with The Enlightenment, the ideas of which were applied by the framers of our republic. The Enlightenment’s value system elevated the principles of liberty, freedom, self-reliance, personal rights, and reason, among other things. It was also a movement that was in some ways suspended when Industry won the Industrial Revolution, which, among other things, created the modern corporation. By “modern” I mean since they got big. (Although the East India Company was big enough deserve the Boston Tea Party in 1773.) Think railroads, oil companies, car companies, phone companies… and media companies, starting with the oldest of the biggies: newspapers.

The industrial system was this pyramid-shaped top-down thing that changed us from individual craftspeople to workers in a system that subordinated our originality to the positions we occupied in an org chart. Check your surname for evidence of some ancestor’s individual craft. Baker, for example. Or Merchant or Miller or Weaver or Tanner or Cooper. Nobody names themselves, or their kids, “Joe Middlemanager” or “Mary Drillpressoperator”. Collective power was all. This was believed by both the capitalist system and the communist and socialist thinkings that opposed it.

In the industrial system, nearly all industry, including orginal thinking — invention and innovation — took place within, and belonged to, some company. Governments, colleges and universities did some origination too, but The System still encompassed everything, and it subordinated the individual to its larger self. This was not a Bad Thing, but rather just how things worked. And it did lots of good. In the area of communications — our concern here today — this gave us magazines, newspapers, radio, TV, and a phone system that was smart in the middle and dumb at the ends. Innovation by the phone system, Bell Labs and all, included touch-tone dialing, the Princess Phone, the RJ-11 jack, call waiting and message recording. And that all happened over the span of about forty years.

Near the beginning of that stretch, in 1959, Peter Drucker coined the term “knowledge worker”. By then Drucker had already forecast the end of the modern corporation, and had compared management (his specialty) to conducting a band or an orchestra of self-empowered individuals, each good at what they did, and eager to learn more and improve. He said companies existed at the suffrance of the individuals who comprised them, even as it organized their work and put it to use.

As it turned out the knowledge workers who mattered most were geeks. Engineers. Programmers. These were the people who gave us the Internet, the PC and now hand-held Internet devices that still do old-fashioned telephony — but within the context of a zillion other things.

Consider the differences between the International Telecommunications Union, which started as the International Telegraph Union, and the Internet Engineering Task Force, or IETF. While the former governs its member companies through a complex and slow bureaucratic procedure, the latter uses a “request for comment” system that results in operative good-enough standards based on “rough consensus and running code”. The differences here are what account for the fact that the phone system never could have created the Net, and geeks did exactly that, and then some.

Anybody know when we first started talking about open source? The answer is February, 1998. That’s when Eric S. Raymond posted a short instructional missive titled “Goodbye, ‘free software’; hello, ‘open source“. In it he explained why Free Software, long in use as a term and accounting for much success in the computing realm, was not going to make good enough sense to businessfolk, and why a crew of fellow geeks were going to make the world talk about open source instead.  Look up open source, and you’ll now get 73 million results, give or take.  (In no small way this was the direct result of Eric’s charisma — I’ve watched him hold crowds of fellow geeks in thrall while pacing the stage and holding forth for more than three hours at a time — and his and skills at evangelism and polemics. In the midst of this work he also put out some of the strongest and most durable writing, including The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which now amounts to canon.)

The Net employs a principle called end-to-end. Among other things, it assumes that the bulk of intelligence is at the ends of the network — with people and the devices serving them — rather than in the middle, where the phone companies used to be, back when they thought, as old-fashioned formerly modern industrial companies, that most of the network’s intelligence should reside, and make decisions for us.

This principle provides an environment for creation and contribution that is radical, profound, and beyond huge. It’s as big as the invention of movable type, or maybe bigger. Or maybe an exposive expansion of it. In any case, it’s the new environment. It helps us pick up where The Enlightenment left off, and gives us endless ways to start carrying those old principles forward again. It supports dynamism out the wazoo, both for individuals and for whatever collections they form.

Which brings us to journalism.

Big newspapers, big magazines, big radio and TV… these are industrial age creatures. Some will persist in the new age that is coming upon us. But they will need to adapt to the new networked environment, where everybody can contribute.

That environment is very new. Think of today as a moment in the early paleozoic, say in Cambrian time. In that context Facebook is a trilobite. Twitter is a bryzoan. The Huffington Post is a primitive sponge. For small-j journalism, this is not the End of Time, but the beginning of it. Will big-J journalism survive? Only if it adapts. While some of that adaptation will be corporate, the leadership won’t be in the corporate system. It will be among the journalists themselves. Just as it was, and still is, with technology companies and the geeks they employ.

Bonus link: Dan Gillmor’s The Only Journalism Subsidy We Need is Bandwidth.

Cluetrainings

October 28, 2009 in Cluetrain, Future, Ideas, VRM, radio | 12 comments

Had a great time mixing it up with the BlogTalkRadio folks a couple nights ago, talking Cluetrain after 10 years. Here’s the show. Big thanks to Allan Hoving for lining up and co-hosting it with Janet Fouts and Jim Love. Janet tweeted it live. Afterwards Jim put up a very interesting follow-up post, in the midst of which is this:

The message in Cluetrain is as fresh today as it was 10 years ago. ” We are not clicks or eyeballs, we are people ….deal with it.”

For those of you who missed it, the book started as a website, with 95 Theses splashed on a web page, in tribute, homage or just a scandalous rip off of Martin Luther’s famous set of 95 Theses.  If you don’t know about the original, shame on you.  Martin Luther was the renegade priest who started the Protestant Reformation by nailing 95 Theses to the door of a church.  Equally important but often ignored, he translated the bible from latin to the language of the people (in his case, German) and opened it up for all to read.  He also got married — remember he was a priest.  To some he was a heretic.  To others, he was a reformer who democratized an autocratic organization.

Whatever you think of him, he changed history.  Not on his own.  He didn’t invent the movable type that made it possible to print those bibles and distribute them widely.  He wasn’t the only figure questioning the institution — there was, at the time, a growing movement that were dissatisfied with what they felt was corruption and a lack of integrity in the church at the time.  It related to practices like the selling of indulgences — the ability to buy your way out of sin.  A number of people saw the church as a decaying, archaic and for some, even a corrupt institution.  They’d lost faith in it — literally.

Luther had the courage to say what he did.  In a world where the Catholic church was all powerful, this took a lot of guts.  But that doesn’t explain the power of what he accomplished.  No, he hit the zeitgeist of his era, he was a man of courage at the right place in history.  His ideas took off like a brush fire and the world was never the same.

It’s important to note, however, that this is the view from 500 years later.  It’s all compressed now and we can look back and see Luther’s document as a turning point.

The older I get, the earlier it seems. It’s funny that we chose 95 theses because that worked for Luther, but basically that’s why. (We also called it a manifesto because that worked for Marx. Karl, not Groucho, though the latter was much funnier. I also went to a Lutheran high school. Coincidence?) I don’t think any of us was taking the long-term perspective, though. We just wanted to say what we thought was true and nobody else seemed to be talking about.

But I’m thinking now that it will take many more years. Perhaps decades, before some of what we said will sink in the rest of the way.

Some marketers got it. Jim is clearly one of them. The Cluetrain Manifesto is required reading in the course he teaches. But the future is unevenly distributed. As David Weinberger likes to say, it’s lumpy. Cluetrain’s subtitle is “The End of Business as Usual.” I think that end will take a long time. We’re trying to hasten it with VRM, but that will take awhile too.

The short of it is that Business as Usual is insulting to customers. Take for example the form of Business as Usual that Bob Frankston (more about him here) calls the regulatorium. You get one of those when a big business category and its regulators become captive of each other.  For example, it was in revolt against a tea market regulatorium that citizens of the Massachusetts colony threw the East India Tea Company’s tea in the harbor. The colonists succesfully revolted against England, but customers still haven’t had a proper revolt against the belief by many companies that captive customers are more valuable than free ones. If Mona Shaw and her hammer are the best we can do, we’ve hardly begun.

The liberating impulse is independence, just as it was in 1773. Thanks to the Net, free customers are more valuable than captive ones. To themselves, to sellers, to the economy. We won’t learn that until we become fully equipped, as customers, to act on our independence.

At the end of the show Jim said he thought liberation would be a group thing. Customers getting power in aggregate. While I don’t disagree, I believe it is essential to equip individual customers with tools of both independence and engagememt. By that I mean tools that are as personal as wallets and purses, and just as handy and easy to use. We don’t have those yet.

But we will. And once we do, things will change radically. Count on it.

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Will LPFMs go mostly to evangelical christian broadcasters?

October 23, 2009 in radio | 10 comments

Looks like legislation opening up the FM band to more LPFM (low power FM) stations is moving through Congress. While Prometheus Radio celebrates, I gotta wonder if Calvary Chapel of Everywhere isn’t going to gobble a lot of those new licenses up. Since I can’t link directly to results (they’re from a database search, and are linkproof), go to FCCinfo.com, go to Search By / Licensee, and write Calvary Chapel in the Search Parameters box. Then click on Licensee_Search and see what happens.

Most of the results are for translators: low-power repeater stations. The ones with real call letters that end in -LP are for LPFM stations. These are legitimate stations, which, as the FCC describes here, “are available to noncommercial educational entities and public safety and transportation organizations, but are not available to individuals or for commercial operations”. That includes religious broadcasters, of which there are many.

Here’s Wikipedia’s list. (Man, there are so many good wikipedian obsessives on radio. I thought I could help with lot of this stuff, but these other folks are way past me at getting the details out there.)

There are some great LPFM stations. WCOM in Carrboro and KRUU in Fairfield, for example. But a lot of LPFMs are evangelical Christian stations, run by very resourceful outfits, which in the past have run rings around public and other community broadcasters.

We’ll see how it goes.

Thinking outside the Internet box

August 28, 2009 in Business, Future, Gear, Ideas, Past, Politics, Technology, infrastructure, problems | 7 comments

A couple days ago I responded to a posting on an email list. What I wrote struck a few chords, so I thought I’d repeat it here, with just a few edits, and then add a few additional thoughts as well. Here goes.

Reading _____’s references to ancient electrical power science brings to mind my own technical background, most of which is now also antique. Yet that background still informs of my understanding of the world, and my curiosities about What’s Going On Now, and What We Can Do Next. In fact I suspect that it is because I know so much about old technology that I am bullish about framing What We Can Do Next on both solid modern science and maximal liberation from technically obsolete legal and technical frameworks — even though I struggle as hard as the next geek to escape those.

(Autobiographical digression begins here. If you’re not into geeky stuff, skip.)

As a kid growing up in the 1950s and early ’60s I was obsessed with electricity and radio. I studied electronics and RF transmission and reception, was a ham radio operator, and put an inordinate amount of time into studying how antennas worked and electromagnetic waves propagated. From my home in New Jersey’s blue collar suburbs, I would ride my bike down to visit the transmitters of New York AM stations in the stinky tidewaters flanking the Turnpike, Routes 46 and 17, Paterson Plank Road and the Belleville Pike. (Nobody called them “Meadowlands” until many acres of them were paved in the ’70s to support a sports complex by that name.) I loved hanging with the old guys who manned those transmitters, and who were glad to take me out on the gangways to show how readings were made, how phasing worked (sinusoidal synchronization again), how a night transmitter had to address a dummy load before somebody manually switched from day to night power levels and directional arrays. After I learned to drive, my idea of a fun trip was to visit FM and TV transmitters on the tops of buildings and mountains. (Hell, I still do that.) Thus I came to understand skywaves and groundwaves, soil and salt water conductivity, ground systems, directional arrays and the inverse square law, all in the context of practical applications that required no shortage of engineering vernacular and black art.

I also obsessed on the reception end. In spite of living within sight of nearly every New York AM transmitter (WABC’s tower was close that we could hear its audio in our kitchen toaster), I logged more than 800 AM stations on my 40s-vintage Hammarlund HQ-129x receiver, which is still in storage at my sister’s place. That’s about 8 stations per channel. I came to understand how two-hop skywave reflection off the E layer of the ionosphere favored flat land or open water midway between transmission and reception points . This, I figured, is why I got KSL from Salt Lake City so well, but WOAI from San Antonio hardly at all. (Both were “clear channel” stations in the literal sense — nothing else in North America was on their channels at night, when the ionosphere becomes reflective of signals on the AM band.) Midpoint for the latter lay within the topographical corrugations of the southern Apalachians. Many years later I found this theory supported by listening in Hawaii to AM stations from Western North America, on an ordinary car radio. I’m still not sure why I found those skywave signals fading and distorting (from multiple reflections in the very uneven ionosphere) far less than those over land. I am sure, however, that most of this hardly matters at all to current RF and digital communication science. After I moved to North Carolina, I used Sporadic E reflections to log more than 1200 FM stations, mostly from 800 to 1200 miles away, plus nearly every Channel 3 and 6 (locally, 2,4 and 5 were occupied) in that same range. All those TV signals are now off the air. (Low-band VHF TV — channels 2 to 6 — are not used for digital signals in the U.S.) My knowledge of this old stuff is now mostly of nostalgia value; but seeking it has left me with a continuing curiosity about the physical world and our infrastructural additions to it. This is why much of what looks like photography is actually research. For example, this and this. What you’re looking at there are pictures taken in service to geology and archaeology.

(End of autobiographical digression.)

Speaking of which, I am also busy lately studying the history of copyright, royalties and the music business — mostly so ProjectVRM can avoid banging into any of those. This research amounts to legal and regulatory archaeology. Three preliminary findings stand out, and I would like to share them.

First, regulatory capture is real, and nearly impossible to escape. The best you can do is keep it from spreading. Most regulations protect last week from yesterday, and are driven by the last century’s leading industries. Little if any regulatory lawmaking by established industries — especially if they feel their revenue bases threatened, clears room for future development. Rather, it prevents future development, even for the threatened parties who might need it most. Thus the bulk of conversation and debate, even among the most progressive and original participants, takes place within the bounds of still-captive markets. This is why it is nearly impossible to talk about Net-supportive infrastructure development without employing the conceptual scaffolding of telecom and cablecom. We can rationalize this, for example, by saying that demand for telephone and cable (or satellite TV) services is real and persists, but the deeper and more important fact is that it is very difficult for any of us to exit the framing of those businesses and still make sense.

Second, infrastructure is plastic. The term “infrastructure” suggests physicality of the sturdiest kind, but in fact all of it is doomed to alteration, obsolescence and replacement. Some of it (Roman roads, for example) may last for centuries, but most of it is obsolete in a matter of decades, if not sooner. Consider over-the-air (OTA) TV. It is already a fossil. Numbered channels persist as station brands; but today very few of those stations transmit on their branded analog channels, and most of them are viewed over cable or satellite connections anyway. There are no reasons other than legacy regulatory ones to maintain the fiction that TV station locality is a matter of transmitter siting and signal range. Viewing of OTA TV signals is headed fast toward zero. It doesn’t help that digital signals play hard-to-get, and that the gear required for getting it sucks rocks. Nor does it help that cable and satellite providers that have gone out of their way to exclude OTA receiving circuitry from their latest gear, mostly force subscribing to channels that used to be free. As a result ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox and PBS are now a premium pay TV package. (For an example of how screwed this is, see here.) Among the biggest fossils are thousands of TV towers, some more than 2000 feet high, maintained to continue reifying the concept of “coverage,” and to legitimize “must carry” rules for cable. After live audio stream playing on mobile devices becomes cheap and easy, watch AM and FM radio transmission fossilize in exactly the same ways. (By the way, if you want to do something green and good for the environment, lobby for taking down some of these towers, which are expensive to maintain and hazards to anything that flies. Start with this list here. Note the “UHF/VHF transmission” column. Nearly all these towers were built for analog transmission and many are already abandoned. This one, for example.)

Third, “infrastructure” is a relatively new term and vaguely understood outside arcane uses within various industries. It drifted from military to everyday use in the 1970s, and is still not a field in itself. Try looking for an authoritative reference book on the general subject of infrastructure. There isn’t one. Yet digital technology requires that we challenge the physical anchoring of infrastructure as a concept. Are bits infrastructural? How about the means for arranging and moving them? The Internet (the most widespread means for moving bits) is defined fundamentally by its suite of protocols, not by the physical media over which data travels, even though there are capacity and performance dependencies on the latter. Again, we are in captured territory here. Only in conceptual jails can we sensibly debate whether something is an “information service” or a “telecommunication service”. And yet most of us who care about the internet and infrasructure do exactly that.

That last one is big. Maybe too big. I’ve written often about how hard it is to frame our understanding of the Net. Now I’m beginning to think we should admit that the Internet itself, as concept, is too limiting, and not much less antique than telecom or “power grid”.

“The Internet” is not a thing. It’s a finger pointing in the direction of a thing that isn’t. It is the name we give to the sense of place we get when we go “on” a mesh of unseen connections to interact with other entitites. Even the term “cloud“, labeling a utility data service, betrays the vagueness of our regard toward The Net.

I’ve been on the phone a lot lately with Erik Cecil, a veteran telecom attorney who has been thinking out loud about how networks are something other than the physical paths we reduce them to. He regards network mostly in its verb form: as what we do with our freedom — to enhance our intelligence, our wealth, our productivity, and the rest of what we do as contributors to civilization. To network we need technologies that enable what we do in maximal ways.  This, he says, requires that we re-think all our public utilities — energy, water, communications, transportation, military/security and law, to name a few — within the context of networking as something we do rather than something we have. (Think also of Jonathan Zittrain’s elevation of generativity as a supportive quality of open technology and standards. As verbs here, network and generate might not be too far apart.)

The social production side of this is well covered in Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks, but the full challenge of what Erik talks about is to re-think all infrastructure outside all old boxes, including the one we call The Internet.

As we do that, it is essential that we look to employ the innovative capacities of businesses old and new. This is a hat tip in the general direction of ISPs, and to the concerns often expressed by Richard Bennett and Brett Glass: that new Internet regulation may already be antique and unnecessary, and that small ISPs (a WISP in Brett’s case) should be the best connections of high-minded thinkers like yours truly (and others named above) to the real world where rubber meets road.

There is a bigger picture here. We can’t have only some of us painting it.

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A Jean Shepherd podcast?

August 23, 2009 in Past, problems, radio | 10 comments

Imagine a “News from Lake Wobegon” without the homespun prairie jive, lasting for more than an hour every weeknight, and packed with great stories, mostly of being a normal kid from greater blue-collar Chicago. That was Jean Shepherd, who was Required Listening in New York — and the whole Northeast — from the ’50s to the ’70s. “Shep” was also a writer of books and articles, a public performer, an artist and a screenwriter best known for A Christmas Story the 1983 hit movie that has since become required showing on holiday season television.

So I’m listening right now to “A Voice in the Night: A Tribute to Jean Shepherd”, on one of the Sirius public radio channels. I can’t tell which one because the display on the receiver is too dim, and the service’s own guide is nearly clue-free. (And I wont get rid of this receiver, because it’s one of the early ones with an illegally strong FM transmitter, which I like, and because it fits in three different cradles that will fit none of the newer units. I will, with regret for losing Howard Stern, dump Sirius when my subscription runs out later this year.)

Anyway, I’m busy and would love to hear this show later on a podcast. Alas, the only listen-link on the show page goes to a RealAudio stream that requires sitting at your computer (and having a Real player). If anybody knows how to get this on a podcast, let the rest of us know. Thanks.

Geology vs. Weather

August 13, 2009 in Art, Blogging, Geology, Ideas, Journalism, Life, Live Web, News, radio | 12 comments

I love this:

despair_socialmedia

… and I hope the good (or evil, depending on your perspective) folks at Despair.com don’t mind my promoting their best t-shirt yet. (If it helps, I just ordered one.)

You’ll notice that blogging isn’t in the diagram (though Despair does feature it in four other purchasable forms). I bring that up because I think there is a difference between the social media in the Venn diagram and blogging, and that difference is akin to that between weather and geology.  The former have an evanescent quality. I’m still haunted by hearing that users get a maximum number Twitter postings (tweets) before the old ones scroll off. If true, it means Twitter is a whiteboard, made to be erased after awhile. The fact that few know what the deal is, exactly, also makes my point. Not many people expect anybody, including themselves, to revisit old tweets. The four names in the diagram above are also private corporate walled gardens. Blogging itself is not. True, you can blog in a corporate walled garden, but blogging is an independent category. You can move your blog from one platform to another, archives intact. Not easy, but it can be done. More importantly, your blog is yours. That’s why I dig Dave’s Scoble, your blog still loves you post. And why in the comments I said,

FriendFeeds and Facebooks and Microsofts will come and and go. They can be bought and sold, because they’re not human. Robert is human. Companies can’t be charming and lovable. They can, sometimes, for awhile. Ben & Jerrys did. Zappos did. But they got sold. You know, like slaves.

The only publication on Earth that’s all Robert’s is his blog. That’s where his soul is, because he can’t sell it.

It was while pondering the difference between social media and blogging that I posted this tweet today:

Thanks, @dnm54 But I still feel like my posts lately have the impact of snow on water. Too wordy? Not tweety enough? Not sure.

That got some reassuring responses, several playing with the snow-and-water metaphor. That’s one I’ve used often ever since first hearing “Big Ted”, by the Incredble String Band (from their Changing Horses album), played by the great Larry Josephson on his morning show on WBAI, back in the earliest 70s. “Big Ted” was a dead horse, about which the band sang, “He’s gone like snow on the water. Good bye-eeee.”

For a long time I harbored a fantasy about writing a history of radio, titled “Snow on the Water,” because that was its self-erasing quality. It was like unrecorded conversation that way. You get meaning from it, but you don’t remember everything verbatim, for such is the nature of short-term memory. Eight seconds later you might remember what somebody said, but not exactly. Tomorrow you might remember nothing more than having talked to the person.

Now I’m thinking “snow on the water” applies to social media as well. They’re conversational in the literal sense. They’re weather within which tweets fly and fall like flakes, and disappear into the collective unconscious.

On the other hand, blogging is geology. A blog’s posts may be current and timely, and constitute one person’s contribution to conversation around a subject or two, but each post is built to last. It has a “permalink”. Over time posts accumulate like soil deposits. You can dig down through layers of time and find them. What do tweets have? Temp-o-links?

From the beginning I’ve thought of blogging as journalism in the literal sense: Blogs are journals. Yet much of traditional journalism seems to have, on the whole, not much respect for its archives on the Web. Editorial “content” scrolls behind paywalls, doesn’t keep durable URLs, or disappears completely.

Which brings me to this comment by Tom Matrullo, left under this post about advertising. It’s way too deep to leave buried there:

There is no question that advertising requires us to be in the here and now, and not in the there and then, because it seeks to influence our desires and actions. Active repression of time, history, the past is basic to most commerce and commercial speech.

But I’d go further, because this is a large and important topic. Broadcast itself as a medium tends to put the past at a distance, even when it is about the past, because it makes it into spectacle. Something we watch from our NOW, the big now of advertising and current media.

And yet further: no media are more dis-attuned to the past than news media. It is all about the next story. That one last week that was entirely wrong? Ancient history. To be current, in news-speak, is to develop a sort of targeted Alzheimer’s in a certain direction.

Maybe this is one reason why the news media — on the whole, seems to me — have embraced social media of the temporary sort while continuing to put down blogging. Yes, they’ll set up blogs for their writers, but there’s often a second-class quality to those blogs, and the blogs willl get erased after the writer leaves — or even while the writer is still there. Dan Gillmor’s blog at the San Jose Mercury-News disappeared a number of times. Now it’s gone permanently. Dan’s columns are there, if you’re willing to pay $2.95 apiece for them.

It still blows my mind that, on the Web, newspapers give away the news but charge for the olds. Why not charge for the news and give away the olds? That would be in alignment with what they do with the physical paper. People will pay a buck for today’s paper, and nothing for one three days old. In the physical world, old papers are for wrapping fish and house-breaking puppies. If papers gave every old story a true permalink, search engines would find them, could sell advertising on them, and progressively elevate the whole paper’s authority.

I think they don’t do it for two reasons. One is that they’ve always charged for access to “the morgue.” Another is that embalming old papers has always been expensive. For many decades they bound them up like books for storage in libraries. I still have three of these, each for a whole week of New York Times papers from the ’50s and ’60s. The library at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill sent them out for recycling in 1975. The whole huge pile was rescued by buddies of mine who ran the recycling operation. The newspaper and the library at the time were modernizing by putting everything on microfilm. At the “Will Newspapers Survive” forum at MIT a couple years ago, I asked the panel (which included Dan Gillmor) about why papers charge for the olds and give away the news. Ellen Foley of the Wisconsin State Joural replied,

Speaking for the nation’s regional papers, one of our biggest problems is that today’s issues are all on microfilm tomorrow, not online. It would cost more than a million dollars to digitize our archives. It’s hard for me to make this argument to our publisher, who is trying to make money and make ends meet.

It’s not in the transcript, but I recall her adding something about how storing archives on disk drives was also expensive. That didn’t sit well with the audience, which knew better.

Anyway, my point is that, on the whole news organizations don’t care much about the past. They care about the present. I think social media tend to do the same thing. I’m not saying this is a bad thing. Nor am I trying to elevate blogging into the Pulitzer sphere. (But hey, why not?)  I’m just trying to get my head around What’s Going On.

Here’s my thinking for now. What I write on blogs isn’t just for the short term. I also have the long term in mind. I’m making geology, not weather. Both have their places. The more durable stuff goes here.

Bonus link.

[Later...] Joe Andrieu has a thoughtful response.

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Tuning time and place

August 7, 2009 in Business, Fun, Ideas, Live Web, News, VRM, infrastructure, music, radio | 7 comments

In Curation, meta-curation, and live Net radio, Jon Udell begins, “I’ve long been dissatisfied with how we discover and tune into Net radio”, but doesn’t complain about it. He hacks some solutions. First he swaps time for place:

I’ve just created a new mode for the elmcity calendar aggregator. Now instead of creating a geographical hub, which combines events from Eventful and Upcoming and events from a list of iCalendar feeds — all for one location — you can create a topical hub whose events are governed only by time, not by location.

Then he works on curation:

I spun up a new topical hub in the elmcity aggregator and started experimenting.

That ran into problems from sources. Still it was…

…great for personal use. But I’m looking for the Webjay of Net radio. And I think maybe elmcity topical hubs can help enable that.

So Jon leverages what Tony Karrer described in Second Calendar Curator Joins to Help with List of Free Webinars, and adds,

What Tony showed me is that you can also (optionally) think in terms of meta-curators, curators, feeds, and events. In this example, Tony is himself a curator, but he is also a meta-curator — that is, a collector of curators.

I’d love to see this model evolve in the realm of Net radio. If you want to join the experiment, just use any calendar program to keep track of some of your favorite recurring shows. (Again, it’s very helpful to use one that supports per-event timezones.) Then publish the shows as an iCalendar feed, and send me the URL. As the meta-curator of delicious.com/InternetRadio, as well as the curator of jonu.calendar.live.com/calendar/InternetRadio/index.html, I’ll have two options. If I like most or all of the shows you like, I can add your feed to the hub. If I only like some of the shows you like, I can cherrypick them for my feed. Either way, the aggregated results will be available as XML, as JSON, and as an iCalendar feed that can flow into calendar clients or aggregators.

Naturally there can also be other meta-curators. To become one, designate a Delicious account for the purpose, spin up your own topical hub, and tell me about it.

I really like Jon’s idea. Sometime this weekend I’ll set up what he’s talking abouthere. Or try. I’ve always found Delicious a little too labor-intensive, but then blogging in Wordpress’ writing window (as I’m doing now) is a PITA too. (One of these days I’ll get my outliner working again. That’s so much easier for me.)

The new radio dial is a combination of tools and each other’s heads. Given how the Net has eliminated distance as a factor in”reception” (a rapidly antiquifying term), the new frontier is time — how we find it. Or, in radio parlance, how we tune across it to find what we want, and then listen live or off stored files, either in our own devices (podcasting) or in the cloud (on-demand).

As we develop whatever this becomes, we need to avoid the usual traps. For example, there is this tendency for developers — commercial ones, anyway — to believe that the only available paths are –

  1. Making a commodity
  2. Trapping the user

So they do the latter. That’s why we get stuff like the iTunes store, which works with only one brand of mobile devices (Apple’s), and which nearly every other phone maker now, derivatively, wants to copy. (iTunes’ radio tuner, which is nothing more than a directory, works with nothing but itself, near as I can tell. As with most of the iTunes environment, it veers far from Apple’s reputation for ease of use — in addition to being exclusive and non-interoperable.)

What Jon’s doing here is one more among many necessary steps by which control of the marketplace shifts from user-trappers to users themselves.

Speaking of which, there is plenty of user input to the new, improved, and still-improving UI on the Public Radio Player, which now finds programs as well as stations. So, for example, I’m going to be on The Conversation with Ross Reynolds today on KUOW in Seattle, taking about the new 10th Anniversary edition of The Cluetrain Manifesto. The show starts at noon (though my segment comes in a bit later). When I looked up “conversation” on the Player, I found Rick’s show in the list results, and went right there. This goes a long way beyond tuning the way it used to be. But it still has a long way to go.

We’ll get us there.

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Why WQXR is better off as a public radio station

July 26, 2009 in Art, Business, Future, Live Web, News, Places, VRM, infrastructure, problems, radio | 112 comments

In his comment to my last post about the sale of WQXR to WNYC (and in his own blog post here), Sean Reiser makes an important point:

One of the unique things about the QXR was it’s relationship with the Times. The Times owned QXR before the FCC regulations prohibiting newspapers ownership of a radio station were enacted. Because of this relationship, QXR’s newsroom was located in the NY Times building and news gathering resources were shared. In a precursor to newspaper reporters doing podcasts, Times columnists and arts reporters would often appear on the air doing segments.

It’s true. The Times selling WQXR seems a bit like the New Yorker dropping poetry, or GE (née RCA) closing the Rainbow Room. (Which has already happened… how many times?) To cultured veteran New Yorkers, the Times selling WQXR seems more like a partial lobotomy than a heavy heirloom being thrown off a sinking ship.

For much of the history of both, great newspapers owned great radio stations. The Times had WQXR. The Chicago Tribune had (and still has) WGN (yes, “World’s Greatest Newspaper”). The Washington Post had WTOP. (In fact, the Post got back into the radio game with Washington Post Radio, on WTOP’s legacy 50,000-watt signal at 1500 AM. That lasted from 2006-2008.). Trust me, the list is long.

The problem is, both newspapers and radio stations are suffering. Most newspapers are partially (or, in a few cases — such as this one — totally) lobotomized versions of their former selves. Commercial radio’s golden age passed decades ago. WQXR, its beloved classical format, and its staff, have been on life support for years. Most other cities have lost their legacy commercial classical stations (e.g. WFMR in Milwaukee), or lucked out to various degrees when the call letters and formats were saved by moving to lesser signals, sometimes on the market’s outskirts (e.g. WCRB in Boston). In most of the best cases classical formats were saved by moving to noncommercial channels and becomimg public radio stations. In Los Angeles, KUSC took over for KFAC (grabbing the latter’s record library) and KOGO/K-Mozart. In Raleigh, WCPE took over for WUNC and WDBS. In Washington, WETA took over for WGMS. Not all of these moves were pretty, but all of them kept classical music alive on their cities’ FM bands.

In some cases, however, “saved’ is an understatement. KUSC, for example, has a bigger signal footprint and far more to offer, than KFAC and its commercial successors did. In addition to a first-rate signal in Los Angeles, KUSC is carried on full-size stations in Palm Springs, Thousand Oaks, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo — giving it stong coverage of more population than any other station in Los Angeles, including the city’s substantial AM stations. KUSC also runs HD programs on the same channels, has an excellent live stream on the Web, and is highly involved in Southern California’s cultural life.

I bring that up because the substantial advantages of public radio over commercial radio — especially for classical music — are largely ignored amidst all the hand-wringing (thick with completely wrong assumptions) by those who lament the loss  — or threatened loss — of a cultural landmark such as WQXR. So I thought I’d list some of the advantages of public radio in the classical music game.

  1. No commercials. Sure, public radio has its pitches for funding, but those tend to be during fund drives rather than between every music set.
  2. More room for coverage growth. The rules for signals in the noncommercial end of the band (from 88 to 92) are far more flexible than those in the commercial band. And noncommercial signals in the commercial band (such as WQXR’s new one at 105.9) can much more easily be augmented by translators at the fringes of their coverage areas — and beyond. Commercial stations can only use translators within their coverage areas. Noncommercial stations can stick them anywhere in the whole country. If WNYC wants to be aggressive about it, you might end up hearing WQXR in Maine and Montana. (And you can bet it’ll be on the Public Radio Player, meaning you can get it wherever there’s a cell signal.)
  3. Life in a buyer’s market. Noncommercial radio stations are taking advantage of bargain prices for commercial stations. That’s what KUSC did when it bought what’s now KESC on 99.7FM in San Luis Obispo. It’s what KCLU did when it bought 1340AM in Santa Barbara.
  4. Creative and resourceful engineering. While commercial radio continues to cheap out while advertising revenues slump away, noncommercial radio is pioneering all over the place. They’re doing it with HD Radio, with webcasting (including multiple streams for many stations), with boosters and translators, with RDS — to name just a few. This is why I have no doubt that WNYC will expand WQXR’s reach even if they can’t crank up the power on the Empire State Building transmitter.
  5. Direct Listener Involvement. Commercial radio has had a huge disadvantage for the duration: its customers and its consumers are different populations. As businesses, commercial radio stations are primarily accountable to advertisers, not to listeners. Public radio is directly accoutable to its listeners, because those are also its customers. As public stations make greater use of the Web, and of the growing roster of tools available for listener engagement (including tools on the listeners’ side, such as those we are developing at ProjectVRM), this advantage over commercial radio will only grow. This means WQXR’s listeners have more more opportunity to contribute positively to the station’s growth than they ever had when it was a commercial station. (Or if, like WCRB, it lived on as a lesser commercial station.) So, if you’re a loyal WQXR listener, send a few bucks to WNYC. Tell them thanks for saving the station, and tell them what you’d like them to do with the station as well.

I could add more points (and maybe I will later), but that should suffice for now. I need to crash and then get up early for a quick round trip to northern Vermont this morning. Meanwhile, hope that helps.

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More on WNYC(s) + WQXR(s)

July 21, 2009 in Art, Business, Future, Ideas, infrastructure, radio | 24 comments

Edward Rosten and I have been having an interesting dialog in the comment section of my last post, which was mostly about WNYC buying WQXR from the New York Times (which has owned it forever) for $11.5 million — and moving QXR’s classical programming up New York’s FM dial from 96.3 to 105.9, where the maximum transmission wattage is far less than allowed on the old frequency.

There has been much hand-wringing and prognosticating over the whole thing. What Would You Do With the New WQXR? is a post on the NYTimes site that is followed by a great many comments. Says Edward, “Post #58, I can assure you, is representative of ‘input’ from people who’ve given ANY thought to how the proposed changes will play out. (’Power to the people’ has yielded to ‘power to the 24/7 classical music station, whatever its name!’)”

So here’s a summary of my own thinking about why this was a good move by WNYC.

  1. $11.5 million is a bargain for any FM signal radiating from the center of Manhattan, even in these depressed economic times.
  2. There will be a 24/7 classical station in New York called WQXR. It will continue to play much, if not most, of the music its current audience likes. It will also employ some of the same people and air some of the same programs. Doing even a subset of this is to buck the tide that is drowning classical stations everywhere in the U.S.
  3. The signal on 105.9 will pack less punch than the old one on 96.3. The new one is 610 watts while the old one was 6000 watts, from the same antenna on the Empire State Building. The difference, however, is smaller than the wattage would indicate. On FM, height matters more than wattage, and those are the same. And signal strength increases as the square root of the wattage. This means that the new signal will be about a third the power of the old one, rather than one tenth. Either way, it’s still plenty of signal for the boroughs, southern Westchester, Jersey counties bordering the Hudson, and Nassau County. Not bad, considering.
  4. WQXR will now be a noncommercial station owned by the top public station in the top metro market in the country. There are many upsides here that are not available to commercial stations — least of all one owned by a struggling newspaper. These include…
  5. No commercials, beyond the usual noncommercial radio pitches for listener support. For an example of an alternative outcome — having a legacy station and its call letters shunted to a secondary signal while remaining commercial — check out WCRB, Boston’s equivalent of WQXR. The Wikipedia entrty provides copious (and depressing) background. What they don’t say is that WCRB plays lots of commercials, in spite of a commercial free sections of its schedule. (I’d suggest checking out WCRB’s live stream, but they’ve discontinued it.)
  6. The opportunity for listeners to support the station directly, and involve themselves in the station’s missions. In the past one could support WQXR only by buying a car or a mattress from an advertiser. Now you can put some money where your ears are.
  7. WQXR can use translators to enlarge its signal, and bring it to places outside its local coverage area. Translators are low power stations radiating the same audio on a different channel from the original signal. WQXR currently has translators on 96.7 in Asbury Park and 103.7 in Poughkeepsie. Now here’s the cool deal: While commercial stations can only use translators to fill in holes in their home coverage areas, noncommercial stations can put translators anywhere they please. Of course, these have to be on unoccupied channels, and most channels are occupied in most places. There are two ways WNYC can go here. One is to buy up, swap or otherwise deal for existing translators. (There is lots of horse-trading going on in any case between public broadcasters and religious ones. The latter have been much more resourceful about maximizing coverage and spreading translators everywhere.) The other is to find open spots where translators can be wedged in. Anywhere in the country.
  8. The Internet is a wide-open frontier. I listen to WNYC’s classical stream (also carried on the air over the station’s HD service on FM) here in Santa Barbara. I also listen to many other stations (including a dozen or more classical ones) here as well. I use either my iPhone or our home Sonos system. Those are my radios, and they sound fine. There are no limits to the number of Internet channels WNYC/WQXR can choose to put out there. For models of station/stream proliferation (and brand extension) see what KCRW and Minnesota Public Radio do. This multi-million-dollar move by WNYC serves notice that it plans to be one of the country’s public super-stations.

I could go on, but you get the point. The opportunities for WQXR as a WNYC property are far wider than the New York Times would dream of contemplating. I advise loyal listeners of both stations to get behind the effort with cash and helpful input, rather than complaints about signal differences and what WNYC might do with WQXR. Hey, WQXR will be a public station soon. That should give you more influence than ever before.

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The best thing on radio, right now

May 30, 2009 in Art, Fun, Places, music | 1 comment

– is All A Capella, on WERS/88.9 in Boston. Listen here. Or on the Public Radio Tuner. Or on WERS own iPhone app. Or iTunes (it’s in the list called “Public”). They just started tweeting too: @allacappella889. The performances are just freaking astonishing. You’d think they were playing instruments. And harmonies tight enough to make Manhattan Transfer envious. Awesome shit. Dig. Really.

I’ve blogged about WERS before. My mind hasn’t changed. I can’t stress too strongly how good this station is. You may not like everything on there. (It would be odd if you did.) But the quality is always good, and the goods always original.

There are original stations out there too, of course. KPIG, Radio Paradise, WIOZ, KGSR…  the list goes on. I’d continue, but I have to drive.

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We all have our crosses to climb

May 28, 2009 in Blogging, Ideas, Journalism, VRM, problems | 17 comments

Yesterday I reported hearing that the New York Times was thinking about putting its editorial behind a paywall again. Today James Warren gives substance to the rumors:

Here’s a story the newspaper industry’s upper echelon apparently kept from its anxious newsrooms: A discreet Thursday meeting in Chicago about their future.

“Models to Monetize Content” is the subject of a gathering at a hotel which is actually located in drab and sterile suburban Rosemont, Illinois; slabs of concrete, exhibition halls and mostly chain restaurants, whose prime reason for being is O’Hare International Airport. It’s perfect for quickie, in-and-out conclaves.

There’s no mention on its website but the Newspaper Association of America, the industry trade group, has assembled top executives of the New York Times, Gannett, E. W. Scripps, Advance Publications, McClatchy, Hearst Newspapers, MediaNews Group, the Associated Press, Philadelphia Media Holdings, Lee Enterprises and Freedom Communication Inc., among more than two dozen in all. A longtime industry chum, consultant Barbara Cohen, “will facilitate the meeting.”

I can see the headline already:  Newspaper Bigs Form Trust To Set Content Prices.

Just kidding.

We do need to be serious here. The Situation is dire. Humpty Dumpty is reaching terminal velocity.

But don’t bother wishing the king’s horses and men luck with the fix. They can’t do it. No newspaper trade group, no collection of top newspaper executives, will come up with a creative solution to problems that have already earned Top Rank status in the innovators dilemma casebook. The best these execs can do is make Humpty’s fall a drop into cyberspace. They have to make Humpty Net-native. They can’t do that just with better-and-better websites, or with “monetization” schemes such as “micropayments” or other scarcity plays with a net-ish gloss.

As disruptive technologies go, it’s hard to beat the Interent. The Net didn’t just push  Humpty off the wall. It blew up that wall and the whole world on which both sat. In that wall’s place is a wide-open space where abundance is not only the prevailing condition, but a severly reproductive one that’s especially suited to interesting “content.” As Kevin Kelly aptly puts it, The internet is a copy machine. One measure of content’s worth is how much it gets copied and quoted. How the hell do you monetize that?

In a New Yorker piece this week, Bill Keller, the Times‘ Executive Editor, said, “There’s a crying demand for what we do and, sadly, a diminishing supply of it. How we get the demand to pay for the supply is the existential question of newspapers in general and the Times in particular.” He’s right in all but one respect: that first person plural we. Unless he’s referring to a population of sufficient generality to include readers. Or, more importantly, hackers. Geeks bearing gifts.

As it happens, we (the geeks) have one. It’s called EmanciPay. It hands the pricing gun over to the customers (readers in this case) and then makes it easy for them to pay as much as they like, however they like, on their terms. Or at least to start with that full set of options. Whatever readers decide to pay, the sum of it won’t be $0, which is what readers are paying now. (Online, at least, in nearly all cases.)

Evidence:::

Peter Kafka reports this from the D7 conference today (over a Wall Street Journal AllThingsDigital blog):

Time for some polls! No surprise: People like to read newspapers online. Also no surprise: But people don’t pay for it. Somewhat of a surprise: People say that they are willing to pay for some kind of news.

My boldface.

I conduct similar audience polls often, though my subject is usually public radio. “How many people here listen to public radio?” Nearly all hands go up. “How many of you pay for it?” About 10% stay up. “How many would pay for it if it were real easy?” More hands go up. “How many would pay if stations would stopped begging for money with fund drives?”  Many more hands go up, enthusiastically.

So the market is there. The question is how to tap it.

At ProjectVRM we propose tapping it from the customers’ side: for newspapers, from the readers side. We also propose doing it one way for all readers and all newspapers, rather than X different ways for X different papers, each designed by each paper for their own readers. In that direction lies a field of silos, all with their own scarcities, their own frictions, their own lock-ins. We need one way to do this for the same reason we need one way to do email.

Remember back when AOL, Prodigy, Lotus Notes, MCIMail and the rest all had their own ways of making you correspond? That’s what we’ll get if we leave content monetization up to the papers alone. They’ll all have their own ways of locking you in, just like retailers all have their own “loyalty” programs, each with their own cards, their own barcodes for you, their own reward systems, their own special ways of inconveniencing you for their own exclusive benefit.

EmanciPay will be simple and straightforward. It will make it easy for you to pay what you want (which may be what the papers what you to pay … or more … or less), and to do it on your terms and not just theirs. This doesn’t mean that the papers can’t have terms of their own. Maybe they have a suggested price, or a minimum they’re willing to accept. Whatever they come up with, however, will be informed by interaction out in the open marketplace, rather than their own private ones, where they make all the rules.

Think of EmanciPay as a way to unburden sellers of the need to keep trying to control markets that are beyond their control anyway. Think of it as a way that “free market”  can mean more than “your choice of captor.” Think of it as a way that “customer relationships” can be worthy of the label because both sides are carrying their ends of the relationship burden — rather than the sellers’ side carrying the whole thing (as CRM systems do today).

EmanciPay is an open source project. When it rolls out, it will be free and open to anybody.

Want to help? Let me know. (firstname at lastname dot com) I’m serious.

The only problem is that development work on EmanciPay is just getting started. (I haven’t wanted to publicize it, because I wanted it to be ready to go — or at least to vet — first.)  But that’s also an opportunity.

What matters for the papers is that there’s at least one answer to their challenge out there. And it’s free for the making.

Cross-posted here.

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#JesusitaFire postpile for 9 May

May 9, 2009 in Geology, Journalism, Life, News, Photography, Places, Travel, infrastructure, problems | 2 comments

jesusita_google_modis8

(Scroll to the bottom for my latest. Not the latest, just mine.)

The shot above looks west from the eastern flank of the Jesusita fire, above Montecito.  The overlays are MODIS (the dots and squares) and GEOMAC (the red line). I think the GEOMAC data is older, but I’m not sure. Both were downloaded at about 4:42am, Pacific time. The newest detections are red and the oldest are yellow. They are from instruments on satellites and may or may not indicate major fire activity. One during the Tea Fire suggested that the fire had spread far down into the Riviera district and toward town. When I checked the spot, it turned out to have been a fire in part of a small isolated oak tree. No fire had spread to or from there.

Still, the data do show changes in the fire’s approximate perimeter over time. Step through this photoset and you can see how the fire has gone over the past few days.

Sean Trek has a way of seeing MODIS with radiative power.

It looks to me now like the next challenge, after saving lives and homes, is keeping the fire from burning for many more days or weeks across the back country. The trick here is to let the fire take nature’s course while also keeping it away from civilization. It is a significant fact that California’s state tree (the Coast Redwood) and state flower (the California Poppy) are both adapted to fire. One might also make the case that the latter is adapted to earthquakes.

I don’t doubt that if any of the three most recent fires — Gap, Tea and Jesusita — had hit fifty years ago, much of Santa Barbara would have been cremated by this morning. Since we are among more than 30,000 current evacuees, that might  have included our house too. Firefighting and team coordination have vastly improved just since the 1990 Painted Cave Fire, when more than 600 homes were lost. Experience from that fire led to many of the improvements that saved homes this past week. (For a history of Santa Barbara’s wildfires, go to Santa Barbara Outdoors, and read the remarkable series that starts here. It covers the eight fires between 1955 and 1990.)

Life everywhere is a losing game with death. We just hope that the substantive things we do and build will outlive us. In much of California, the chance that our homes will outlive us is smaller than most other places. Some homes lost in the Tea Fire had replaced homes on the same property that had burned in 1964 Coyote Fire and again in the 1977 Sycamore Fire. Among disasters that might befall homes in California, only earthquakes are more certain to occur, and in more places. Hence the higher insurance costs.

But still the graces of living here are exceptionally high. Mild, sunny weather. Clean air. Beautiful mountains and beaches. Wonderful people. Excellent university. So we do.

And every day we should thank the heroic work required of the firefighters who keep the worst of nature at bay. Posted 5:38am, Pacfic.

Meanwhile, I’m glad to see the subtitle in Gretchen Miller’s report in the Independent, Fires Burn In Canyon Near Painted Cave: Favorable Weather Conditions Keep Fire Under Control. From around 10pm last night. 6:20am

The LA Times has a story on the fire, dated 10:28pm last night.

Last night on KCLU before going to sleep I heard that the Gane House at the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden was destroyed. This confirms it. 6:28am

A news conference is scheduled for 8am. Just heard that on KNX, which has done an excellent job covering the fire.

Okay, the press conference just ended. KCLU, KNX and KTYD (and, presumably, some or all of its four sister stations) all carried it. KCLU bailed before it was over. So did KNX, though they stuck it out a bit longer. Only KTYD stayed until the end. (Bravo for them.)

The news that matters is that the fire is “contained” along the northern border of Santa Barbara. Thus spake SB Fire Chief Andrew DeMizio (who always starts by spelling his name). He was glad to see “that black line” on the new Incident map. Contained does not mean put out. He had another word for that, but I forget what it was.

The language is interesting. A fire is an “indicent”. Police, fire, Red Cross and other personnel are “assets”. Lifting an evacuation order is “repopulation”. My kid just said, “I thought ‘repopulation’ was what you got after the first population has died”.

Inexcusable, if true: No questions about locations still apparently threatened. (Could be that somebody asked and I didn’t hear it.) Specifically, the only two communities up in the Santa Ynez Mountains, overlooking the city: Painted Cave and Flores Flat. I gathered from the Indy story mentioned above that Painted Cave was okay. But the only way I knew that Flores Flat survived was from a little human interest feature that KNX has been running over and over again: comments by a woman who gave advice about what to take and what to leave behind. She said she had resigned herself to losing her home in Flores Flat, but was surprised to find it had survived. Frankly, I’m amazed that Flores Flat is okay. I’ll bet the firefighters gave special attention to that one. Maybe one of the places where the DC-10 laid down some of its 12000+ gallons of fire retardant was between Flores Flat and the fire.

Flores Flat is far up Gibraltar Road, between Gibraltar Peak (where many of Santa Barbara’s FM stations radiate from, including KCLU and KTYD) and the site farther up the mountain face where hang gliders and paragliders launch toward the city when the winds are right.  From the looks of the map and overlays above, the fire movement was eastward away from Gibraltar, and up and over the crest of the ridge near Montecito Peak to the east and LaCumbre Peak to the west.

The Tea Fire surely created a fire break as well. It burned much of Gibraltar road, and up the face of Gibraltar Peak, where it roasted the antennas of KCLU and many of the other stations there. KTYD and its AM sister KTMS are located a few hundred feet above and behind there, so they survived.  To the west of there are some of the main power lines that supply the city. As I recall those lines are draped quite high, and I suppose survived the fire as it approached Gibraltar road this time. Other high power lines coming into the Goleta side of town were hurt in the Gap Fire last summer, knocking out power for much of the city at the time.

The weather is much better now. Cooler, and moist, with marine layer fog moving in off the Pacific Ocean to the south. Vari0us officials cautioned that this could change, and in fact it probably will. Typical late Spring and Summer weather is early morning fog, burning off as the day goes on. Whether hot “sundowner” winds return is still an open question, but various weather sources suggest that won’t happen. On the other hand, if the fire gets into Paradise Valley on the north side of the ridge, the story might be different. The climate there tends to be much hotter and dryer than on the Santa Barbara side of the mountains. 8:50am

We have friends in Worchester who were going to Santa Barbara to see Katy Perry’s last show, in her home town. That last link is from Noozhawk, which I’ve neglected to follow more closely. The reason is that Santa Barbara is being repopulated with a raft of new and improved media sources growing like a ring of redwood sprouts where a mighty tree has fallen. That tree is the Santa Barbara News-Press, a once fine newspaper that was (and remains) in a much better position to survive than papers in other cities that are owned by stressed public companies or private individuals with shallower pockets. The story of the News-Press’s meltdown is not yet the stuff of legend, only because it’s still going on. Kind of like a fallen tree with a few intact roots, staying alive, but barely. For more on that, just look up Wendy McCaw on Google. Or read Craig Smith. It’s his main beat. A sample:

A major fire in town didn’t stop the Santa Barbara News-Press from doing business as usual. In this case, “business as usual,” meant laying people off.

This time, the unlucky employee was Jued Martinez. He was a digital image technician for the paper, the “go-to-guy for Photoshop issues,” as he put it, working in the camera (pre-press) department for many 15 years.

He announced his own layoff via Twitter around 1:40 Thursday afternoon by saying, “Wow! I’m available for Design work now. Just got laid off from the SBNP. Feel a little better now, not worrying about it.”

To witness how retro and self-destructive the News-Press is, go to their Jesusita Fire Coverage page. Click on a story. Say, this one. You get one sentence. Then you’re told to long in. Subscribers only. Hell, even when we were subscribers, we couldn’t get in there. I’m sure it all disappears or scrolls behind a paywall after a few days in any case. Gone like snow on the water.

Except as a source of fodder about itself, the News-Press plays a self-minimized role in the local news ecology. For getting news on the fire, that includes:

  1. Twitter search for Jesustiafire or Jesusita (@latimesfires uses this search)
  2. Google News search for Jesusita (most recent)
  3. The Independent
  4. Edhat
  5. Noozhawk
  6. City2
  7. KNX
  8. KTYD
  9. KCLU
  10. KCSB

With the radio stations, I mean their streams, not their sites.

I’ll add others later (including stream addresses). Gotta go. Here’s a photo pool in the meantime. 9:33am

And here’s one last photo, courtesy of the only commenter so far on this post:

jesusita_google_modis9

Thanks, nathan. 10:19am

They’re “repopulating” at last. The worst is over. 10:48am

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#JesusitaFire postpile for 8 May

May 8, 2009 in Places, Travel, problems | 9 comments

jesusita_google_modis4

The shot above, a screen capture of a Google Earth view, with a .kml overlay from MODIS, shows the first fire detections (that I’ve seen at least), south of Foothill/Cathedral Oaks and west of 154. It also shows the first detections across the spine of the Santa Ynez Mountains. 3:02am. (All times Pacific.)

These detections do not mean fire spreading. During the Tea Fire, there were many detections that didn’t spread, at some distance from the fire itself. Still, this map gives a good visualization  of the growing fire perimeter. 3:03am

KEYT/3’s 3:00am video report. 3:04am

Far as I know, only KTYD is covering the fire live right now, at 3:10am. All the talk is about evacuations. Nothing about homes burning. KTYD’s four sister stations are also carrying the same audio. Click on “Listen Live” on the website. 3:13am

The latest from the Independent:

The fire is only a few hundred yards from Foothill in the San Roque area, but doesn’t appear to be burning any houses at the moment thanks to the firefighters concerted effort to hold Foothill Road.

Firefighters extinguished a small spot fire at Steven’s Park and trying to save homes at Canyon Acres off Ontare. One structure is already burning there; firefighters requested three to four extra engines to protect approximately 12 houses. 3:28am

Collected Independent coverage. 3:28am Copied from a byline: Ray Ford, Matt Kettmann, Chris Meagher, Ben Preston, Nick Welsh. These guys are doing a great job. Near as I can tell, the Indy is the only news organization with reporters working the fire around the clock. Outstanding work.

Hats off to Edhat as well. There are 328 comments so far to Ed’s latest report. 5:32am

From among the Edhat comments, this collection of GOES-10 satellite photos. Interesting to see where the smoke goes. 5:35am

John Wiley has lots of photos. 5:41am

I listened to the first three or four speakers in the 8am press conference, and then made the good chap I had an appointment with wait while we both listened to see if anybody would say what listeners most wanted to hear: what homes were lost, and what homes were most in danger. I hate to be critical of people doing heroic and much appreciated work, especially when it is quite true — as these speakers said — that many more homes were saved than lost, and at great risk and effort. I’ll just say it was frustrating not to get specifics about homes. Maybe they came around to it eventually. I don’t know. Eventually I had to turn off the radio (actually an iPhone tuned to KTYD) and get on with my meeting.

On the positive side, dig what Matt Kettmann (Contact), Sam Kornell , Ben Preston (Contact), Ethan Stewart (Contact) of the Independent wrote in Assessing What’s Burned: Damage Report, Updated Friday:

Although the task can be difficult in a wildfire zone — especially one with as many twists, turns, and long driveways as the foothills of Santa Barbara — The Independent’s reporters are trying their hardest to deliver what everyone who’s evacuated wants to know: the addresses of homes that have not survived the Jesusita Fire.

And deliver they do. First, the disclaimer:

We are fully aware that mistakes in this sort of reporting could be horrible for homeowners who get the wrong information, so we’ve strived for the utmost accuracy. Furthermore, based on responses we’ve already received during this fire and others, we believe that this public service is one of our most valuable roles as a media entity, and hope you find the information useful.

As of 1:30 p.m. on Friday, the following is what The Indy’s team of reporters has been able to put together.

Then the list, with very careful qualification. Excellent stuff. If the Indy doesn’t get an award for its fire coverage, there is no justice in Officialized Journalism.

Here is a recent Google Earth shot with a MODIS overlay of fire spottings by satellite. Note the difference between this one and the shot at the top from early this morning:

jesusita_google_modis5

The nearest red spot is above San Jose Creek in the canyon above Patterson Ave, near some orchards or vineyards. This is in or below the area burned by the Gap Fire in July of last year. Perhaps more scary is the set of new red squares advancing northwest toward Painted Cave, which is on the left edge of this shot. Here’s a better view:

painted_cave

The last big fire in Santa Barbara — and the biggest ever in terms of home loss — was the Painted Cave Fire of 1990. More than 600 homes were lost. But none in Painted Cave itself. The fire started near there, but advanced straight down toward the sea. Many of the houses you see on this picture between the 101 and 154 symbols on this shot were burned in that fire. 5:09pm

There’s a press conference going on. I’m listening on KNX/1070. Also KCLU/1340/102.3. The KCLU stream (which is what I’m now listening to, here in Boston) is here. 5:14pm.

30,500 are evacuated. (That includes us, by the way. We’re kind of extremely evacuated, staying about 3,000 miles away.) “There will be no re-population tonight.” Shelter is available. Room left at the Multi-Activities Center at UCSB. Find it off Mesa. “A supurb evacuation center.” Special needs folks should go to the Thunderdome on the campus. KCLU is summarizing now. KNX continues to carry the audio of the conference. Surprising since KNX is a Los Angeles news station that covers all of SoCal, and needs to run advertising every few minutes. So they’re eating that income. KCLU is back to its regular NPR program. 5:22pm

Inciweb has a Jesusita Fire incident page now. For earlier fires, Inciweb has been the canonical (if unofficial) source of data. KNX just directed listeners looking for non-Santa Barbara news to KFWB, its sister station in Los Angeles. KNX has a strong signal in Santa Barbara. KFWB has none and is much more local to L.A. itself. 8:27pm

They’ve been using “multiple arial assets” including a DC-10 that can deliver large payloads.5:32

Getting close to posting addresses and other “assessments”. “Confident we’re moving towards” posting those. In the next two days. Close to 2500 personnel. More than 200 fire engines. Massive mutual aid program. 5:33pm

Can somebody ask about Painted Cave? 5:34pm

Pictures from Mercury Press. 5:40pm

Ray Ford has another excellent piece in the Independent. To answer a commenter, below, Cocopah was okay. Ray names names on other streets as well. 7:31pm

Here is a view toward MODIS fire findings. I’ve added Gap and Tea Fire perimeters as well. When this thing is over, we’ll have a charred mountain face, but not a bad fire break. For a short while, anyway. 7:38p

jesusita_google_modis6

Okay, that’s enough pictures for your browser to suffer. I’m heading for bed. It’s 10:39 here and I need to be up early. 7:39pm

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Some clues for covering wildfires

May 7, 2009 in Journalism, Places, Travel, problems | 9 comments

With all due respect to the good jobs that most of the legacy media are doing, their coverage could be much, much better if they paid respect to those listening and watching online, which includes their smart phones. What they need are plain hard facts, rather than the vague, boiled-down or sensationalized stuff that was News As Usual for the duration. Here are a few clues that should help:

  1. Make your audio easy to get. If you stream audio, do it in .mp3 and link to the actual IP address or URL of your stream. Don’t force users to open a “player” in a window. Many of us are listening online with other programs or on phones with sofware tuners. I’m listening to KNX right now using WunderRadio on the iPhone. I listen to KCLU on there too. (They’re not yet on the Public Radio Tuner, alas) Also feel free to use lower bandwidths. 24Kbps or 32Kbps deliver good-enough audio and make it to listeners who aren’t on wi-fi or 3G cell signals. The online equivalent of a 50,000-watt “flamethrower” (yes, they called them that) is a low-bandwidth .mp3 stream.
  2. Remember how many people are listening on hand-helds. Over 1.6 million copies of the Public Radio Tuner alone have been downloaded so far. Cell phones are the new radios. (They’ll be the new TVs soon. Count on it.) And they are much easier for listeners to “tune” than websites that hide means for listening. Which brings me to…
  3. Uncomplicate your damn websites. Without exception, legacy media have websites that are far too complicated and jam-packed with visual noise, including promotions of junk that is highly uninteresting to visitors looking for hard facts about their homes and neighborhoods. Look at Craigslist. Its “design” fails to qualify for the noun. Yet it succeeds because it’s it’s in simple HTML that loads instantly. It also confines itself to facts, and is easy to figure out. In other words, it is 100% helpful. Not 90% promotional.
  4. If you read emails on the air, or take phone calls, put your email addresses and phone numbers in places where they can be found on your websites, and say them on the air. KTYD last night kept reading emails from people, but I couldn’t find an email address.
  5. Remember you’re not alone. Your tweet stream is not the only one, or even the main one. Neither is your audio or video stream. The people who matter most — the ones listening, reading and viewing with the most interest — aren’t just paying attention to you. They’re jumping around looking for best sources. They’ll be watching Twitter search expecially closely. They don’t need you to boil down the story, or just to show one thing and say how awful it is. Let them do the boiling, and do your best to get them the ingredients they need.
  6. If you’re running Incident Command or otherwise in charge of Official Communications, set up your own live stream for your press conferences. That’s because police and fire chiefs, plus communications directors, tend to drone on in Officialese and that causes radio stations to drop the feed, summarize and move on. In the most recent of these (the one Saturday morning, May 9), KCLU and KNX both bailed, summarized and went to their usual programming. Only KTYD stayed for the whole thing (and kudos to them). In fact, I’d suggest setting up your own blog and Twitter accounts.
  7. For TV stations with helicopters on the scene, several key points:
  • Carry a map or a GPS and use it. KSBY’s reporter and pilot (and/or cameraman) seemed to have no idea where they were. (Wouldn’t they have a GPS that could tell them?) The streets are not hard to identify. Tell us what the hell streets they are. “This is Lauro Canyon Reservoir. The fire we’re seeing is north of it on Holly.” Not just “Look at this house that’s burning out of control in the foothills.”
  • Don’t just report on the flames. Tell us more about what else is happening. Where are they dropping water and retardant? Where are the power lines down? What escape routes are being used?
  • If you’re running a live feed, remember that everything you’re saying is going out there. I don’t know if we were hearing the pilot or the cameraman, or both. But most of what they talked about was getting interesting shots, not reporting good information for viewers for whom these guys were the only source of information about what’s actually happening on the ground where they live, or where their friends and neighbors live. Several times the guy talked about one large house that appeared to be getting an unusually high level of protection, saying “That must be the mayor’s house.” Well, we know where the mayor lives, and it’s not a fancy house in the hills. The firefighters were defending that house for a good reason: because it was defensible. When they are forced to make choices, they’ll always go for the high percentage shot.

I really hope, if KSBY folks read this, that they don’t react by shutting off the live feed from their helicopter. Even though the talk was about going to the Elephant Bar and other irrelevancies, it was far more real and interesting than anything the reporter said. I’m guessing that the pilot was not an employee of the station. Even if that’s the case, it doesn’t matter. What matters is getting hard about real stuff out there. Not just a few sound and sight bites for news breaks.

On a big plus side, KSBY is set up already (at 7:13am) to carry the official news conference at 9am here. I remember listening to one of the key news conferences after the Tea Fire on KSBY while driving up to San Francisco from Santa Barbara, last November. KSBY is on Channel 6. The audio for Channel 6 is on 87.7 FM. After June 12, no TV stations will remain on lowband VHF, which include Channels 2 to 6. They will all be broadcasting digitally on other (mostly UHF) channels. Even if they’re still branded with their old channel numbers. All the more reason to recognize that we’re all just tributaries of vast digital rivers pouring the Live Web into the Static Web sea.

Follow the falling brick road

May 1, 2009 in Business, Future, Past, Places, infrastructure, problems | 5 comments

New England is full of ruins. Woods everywhere are veined with stone walls, relics of an agrarian age that ended when the industrial one began. Shipping canals, which were thick with horse-drawn cargo when the Thoreau brothers rowed past them up the Concord & Merrimack Rivers, were abandoned once railroads did the same job better. Mills along canals and rivers have long since been torn down or turned into museums, stores or condos. Bypassed by cars and trucks on highways, old railroad beds have lost their easements or turned into bike trails.

So now what happens to radio and TV — two more old industries with landmarks on landscapes? I visited the subject to some degree over in Linux Journal yesterday, with What if they gave a DTV transition and nobody came? Here I want to go farther, and look at an industry we know is going to die — and to start doing it well before the end arrives.

AM radio, which operates on such low frequencies that signals are radiated by entire broadcast towers, are built as single or multi-tower “arrays” sitting on buried conductors: “ground systems” that can take up more space in soil than their towers occupy in the air above. Most of these facilities were built between the 20s and 80s. Since then scarce land and environmental restrictions have slowed their spread. I would add that available frequencies are also scarce, but that hasn’t stopped the FCC from easing rules, over and over, turning the band at night (when signals bounce off the sky to reach hundreds of miles from their transmitters) into wall-to-wall hash.

FM radio has only been around in a serious way since the 1950s. Operating on a VHF band, where the antennas themselves don’t need to be large (as they do on AM), FM does best when radiated from altitude, meaning the tops of mountains, buildings and high towers. Some of the latter grow to the legal limit of 2000 feet.

With its VHF and UHF signals, television also requires transmission from altitude. When you see a very high tower standing on landscape, or a bristle of short towers atop mountains and skyscrapers, you’re looking at sources of TV, FM or both. A huge percentage of the world’s tallest masts (a category that includes buildings and towers) stand in the U.S., and many are the full 2000-foot height. Most were built for TV stations. (Wikipedia has a comprehensive list of these. Also of tower collapses — a remarkably long list.)

The first set of these to go the way of ship canals is low-band VHF TV. That is, channels 2-6. After June 12, no antenna broadcasting on those channels in the U.S. will continue to operate. Most high-band VHF TV channels — ones operating on channels 7-13 — will also be abandoned, though a few will continue to transmit digital signals. All stations that formerly occupied channels 2-6 will move to a UHF channel (14 to 50).

Old analog TV transmitters are mostly worthless and can’t be re-purposed. (Here’s an excellent piece on that subject, from The Current.)

What I’m wondering about are the towers. The Current’s story suggests that they’re too expensive to take down (not worth enough in scrap), and that most will be re-purposed in any case.

I don’t think so.

It might be easy enough to re-purpose a few former Channel 2 or Channel 4 towers. But what happens when AM and FM transmission is obsoleted by webcasting? This hasn’t happened yet. There are many architectural and UI challenges, plus the added legal burden of copyright restrictions, which are much tougher on music broadcast on the Web than on the air (at least in the U.S.) But the end will come. The brightest writing on the wall right now is the Public Radio Tuner, a project of CPB and several public radio organizations. Last I heard (disclosure: I’m involved in the project), downloads of the free tuner for iPhone were past 1.6 million. This and other tuners, on the iPhone and other portable devices, will account for more and more listening, especially as more cell phone data plans take the ceilings off data consumption — as AT&T has already done for the iPhone.

Some have suggested that TV and FM towers can be re-purposed for cellular use, and to some degree that’s true. But cellular coverage requires many sites at low elevations, rather than a few at high elevations. As one Cisco guy told me, “they might be able to lease out the bottom 200 feet” of a tower.

Still, ends always come, and The End is in sight for over-the-air radio as well as TV. Then what?

Bonus linkage: Scott Fybush’s amazing series of visits to broadcast towers, over many years; and a few of my own photos of transmitting sites, many shot from altitude. Also the blog and tweets of George Clark, both of which led to this digression.

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Getting real about fixing health care

April 22, 2009 in Future, Health, Science, VRM, infrastructure, problems | 15 comments

I’m listening right now to On Point*, where the topic is Pushing E-Health Records. The only case against electronic health records (EHR, aka electronic medical recordsk, or EMR) is risk of compromised privacy. Exposure goes up. The friction involved in grabbing electronic medical records is lower than that involved in grabbing paper ones, especially with the Internet connecting damn near everything.

Here’s the problem with privacy in the Internet Age (which we are now in, with no hope of ever getting out, unless we live the connectionless life): the Net is a big copy machine. It’s amazing how a fact so simple escapes attention until a first-rate metaphorist such as Kevin Kelly comes along to expound on what ought to be obvious:

The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it. In order to send a message from one corner of the internet to another, the protocols of communication demand that the whole message be copied along the way several times. IT companies make a lot of money selling equipment that facilitates this ceaseless copying. Every bit of data ever produced on any computer is copied somewhere. The digital economy is thus run on a river of copies. Unlike the mass-produced reproductions of the machine age, these copies are not just cheap, they are free.

Our digital communication network has been engineered so that copies flow with as little friction as possible. Indeed, copies flow so freely we could think of the internet as a super-distribution system, where once a copy is introduced it will continue to flow through the network forever, much like electricity in a superconductive wire. We see evidence of this in real life. Once anything that can be copied is brought into contact with internet, it will be copied, and those copies never leave. Even a dog knows you can’t erase something once it’s flowed on the internet.

We’re not going to fix that. The copying nature of the Net is a feature, not a bug. We can fight some of it with crypto between trusting parties. But until we find ways to make that easy, the exposure is there. And, as long as it is, we’re going to have people who say risk of exposure overrides other concerns, such as the fact that dozens of thousands of people in the U.S. alone die every year of bad health care record keeping and communications — in other words, of bad data.

Still, if we want good medical care, we need EHR. That much is plain. The question is, How?

The answer will not be an information silo, or a set of silos. We have too many of those already. That’s the problem we have now — both on paper and in electronic formats (as I discovered last year in one of my own medical adventures).

The patient needs to be the point of integration for his or her own data, and the point of origination about what gets done with it. Even if the patient’s primary care physician serves as a trusted originator of medical decisions, the patient needs to anchor the vector of his or her own care, for the simple reason that the patient is the one constant as he or she moves through various medical specialties and systems.

The patient needs to be the platform. Not Google, or Microsoft, or your HMO, or the VA, or some kieretsu involving Big Pharma, Big Software Companies and Big Equipment Makers.

This requires classic VRM: tools of independence and engagement. That is, tools that enable the patient to be independent of any health care provider, yet better able to engage any provider.

In other words, while the answer needs to be systematic, it does not need to be A Big System (which I fear both BigCos and BigGovs whish to provide).

The answer needs to come from geeks who know how to eliminate big problems with simple solutions. For example,

  • Consider how the Internet Protocol solved the problem of multiple networks that didn’t get along.
  • Consider how email protocols such as SMTP, POP3 and IMAP solved the problem of multiple email systems that didn’t get along.
  • Consider how the XMPP protocol solves the problem of multiple instant messaging systems that don’t get along.

We need new ways of organizing our own health care data, and communicating that data selectively to trusted health care providers through open and standard protocols (that may or may not already exist… I don’t know).

I wanted to get those thoughts down because there’s a bunch of stuff going on around health care right now (including two conferences in Boston), detailed to some degree in Health Care Relationship Management, over at the ProjectVRM blog.

* On WBUR, a Boston station I pick up here in Santa Barbara over my Public Radio Tuner.

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Evening Beer Notes

April 17, 2009 in Blogging, Business, Ideas, Journalism, Life, Photography, Travel, infrastructure, problems | 8 comments

I’m bummed that I’m drinking a beer on the deck here in Santa Barbara while Dave is in Cambridge. Would have enjoyed having coffee with him this morning. So instead I’ll raise a glass in his general direction, and post a bunch of loose notes here.

Sez Dave, Doc Searls likes to say that markets are conversations, but people are conversations too. Right. And markets are people, which is our point in this Cluetrain chapter. They are not marketing. The market in marketing is a verb. A synonym for sell, basically. (See definitions 13 to 16 here.)

Which is why I think “conversational marketing” is oxymoronic. Federated Media’s Conversational Marketing Summit, for example, came to my attention by way of a fellow Cluetrain author who attached a promotional email from Federated, adding “yep, looks like our work here is done! Off to find some good stout clothesline and a high enough limb.” Among the speakers is Comcast’s “Director of Digital Care.” Feeling cared for, Comcast customers?

Okay, that was unfair. The director in question is Frank Eliason, who has a fine blog and is running at about 16,000 followed and followers as @comcastcares on Twitter. I’m one of those thousands (on the following side, anyway).

Anyway, here’s just one paragraph from the CM Summit pitch:

CM Summit will provide key insights from some of the world’s largest brand advertisers and the web’s most successful social media properties. Don’t miss this opportunity to look under the hood of conversational marketing and find out what’s driving innovation and success for the publishers, marketers, and consumers who occupy the social Web.

Gag me with a shovel.

Gag Steven Hodson too. He says The wrong people are promoting Social Media. Specifically,

We are increasingly be told that Social Media is about being able to open lines of conversations with corporations and governments. It is supposed to be the new way for us to interact with those in more powerful positions than us. We are increasingly being marketed to about the benefits of being connected to brands – be it personal or corporate ones.

As a result people are beginning to think that social media is nothing more than a round table with corporations, marketers and public relation people deciding on what the conversation is all about. Once more we are finding ourselves being talked to even though it is carefully couched in terms of openness and transparency.

Yep. Later Steven adds,

We have only begun to taste the incredible freedom and personal power that comes with being a part of a social media world. It is this taste that companies fear because it removes them from the top down position. It brings them onto a level playing field where even the poorest person in the world can have an effect.

Social media doesn’t belong to the marketers, the public relation flacks or the corporations so desperately trying to take ownership. It belongs to the people. For the first time the media truly is made up of people for the people.

It is us who should be out there promoting Social Media – not the Facebooks, not the MySpaces, not the Twitter and especially not the marketers and corporations. The sooner we realize that the sooner we can take back our social media from the grasp of those who would bastardize it to their own means.

I’m with him in every respect other than love for the term “social media.” That’s because most people equate “social media” with Facebook, MySpace and all the other conversation containment silos.

Let’s go back to fundamentals. For that I’ll defer first to Larry Josephson, my favorite personality in the history of radio, who naturally isn’t working there any more. Larry once told me, “Radio is personal. That’s my philosophy.” The road radio traveled to hell (where its commercial corner has rotting for the last thirty years or so) was paved with jive like Federated is talking in that pitch. It’s all sell-side shit, and about as conversational as a billboard.

The Net is personal too. So is the Web. Also email, SMS, IM and the rest of it.

And before all of those, so was the telephone. Nothing could be more conversational than that. Back in the 80s, Reese Jones told me that the phone — a tech communications mode that is senior in the extreme, was both the original and the ultimate platform. And now there are close to a billion app downloads for the iPhone. One of the iPhone’s 25 thousand apps is the Public Radio Tuner, which is now passing 1.6 million downloads. That app, plus WundeRadio, have turned my iPhone into my radio. Together they get many more stations than would ever fit in a dial.

Reese’s point: conversation is personal. It’s one-with-one, not one-to-many.  It may be social in the sense that talking with another person is a social act. But it’s not a group thing. Orignally a brain researcher, Reese pointed out that none of us are capable of listening to more than one other person at a time.

In other words, talking may be social, but listening is personal.

Talk “social” and the silos show up. That’s what “social media” are. The good stuff Steven wants us to save, and advocate, are inherently personal qualities of the Net and the Web.

By the way, without Reese schooling me about phones and conversations, I doubt I would have come up with the “markets are conversations” line.

Speaking of which, in Brian Solis’ The Conversation Index, he says this:

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Communities support each other. Citizens actively help others make decisions, offer suggestions and referrals, proactively share negative experiences, and repeatedly ask question – with or without our participation.

Doc Searls calls this Vendor Relationship Management (VRM). Others refer to it as Customer Relationship Management (CRM). But, as we are quickly learning, “management” and “relationships” are as distant from each other as their intentions. Perhaps it’s better stated as Community Relations or better yet, Public Relations.

Well, VRM is not CRM. Nor is it public relations. It is nothing that the seller does. VRM is something the customer has. It comes from the customer. There will be, in the VRM world, both individuals and user-driven and customer-driven services, which I call fourth parties. More about those distinctions here.

Other stuff…

Mike Arrington’s post about The Cenralized Me and Data Portability is all about VRM, though he doesn’t mention it.

Great interview with Richard Rodriguez, one of my favorite writers and thinkers. Richard’s book Brown foreshadowed Obama’s presidency. This is outstanding, too.

Umair Hague is in high dungeon about The Geithnerconomy, which Umair considers a coup.

Long as we’re down on Obama, Tim Jones of the EFF says In Warrantless Wiretapping Case, Obama DOJ’s New Arguments Are Worse Than Bush’s. That’s on top of Jennifer Granick’s post about a proposed federal take-over of the Net. More centralization and concentration of power, anyway.

Not sure whether or not I’m creeped out by this new biz model for journals and Twitter.

To answer the question “How come you’re not posting your usual giant piles of photos on Flickr?” the answer is that I stupidly somehow signed off Flickr and can’t sign back on, because I have no idea what the hell my ID or password are. (Actually I do, but they don’t work.) I have appealed to Yahoo for help here, and its automatum has thanked me for that. They may not want to thank me for what I’ll say if “one of our knowledgeable and well trained Sign-in & Registration agents” doesn’t get back to me within the promised 24 hours. That’s by tomorrow afternoon. FWIW, I’ve always been vexed by Yahoo’s ID system. Not that it’s much different than anybody else’s but … somehow it has always been a bit of a problem.

The Failure of #amazonfail, by Clay Shirky, is a good read too. What he calls “conservation of outrage” (that is, “finding rationales for continuing to feel aggrieved, should the initial rationale disappeared”) is exactly why I am always slow to get worked about stuff that get crowds excited. In fact, VRM is in part a way not to get outraged at vendors, but rather to engage them constructively. (But we don’t have those ways yet, so go ahead and get outraged anyway.)

Here’s a nice rationale for PayChoice. (Which needs a different name, by the way.)

Okay, beer done. Later, folks. I’m heading in.

Saving the Globe From its World of Hurt

April 9, 2009 in Berkman, Blogging, Business, Future, Ideas, Journalism, Life, News, VRM, infrastructure, music, problems | 21 comments

One of the geeks here at the Berkman Center walked into a room recently and started poking his index finger down on a newspaper that was laying on the table, as if expecting it to do something electronic. “This isn’t working,” he said.

So true, in so many ways.

Take for example the Boston Globe, New England’s landmark newspaper, and one to which we have subscribed since we got here in 2007. Like nearly all newspapers, the Globe is in Big Trouble. Here’s the opening paragraph from today’s bad news story:

The New York Times Co., which has threatened to shutter The Boston Globe, is seeking deep concessions from the Globe’s largest union that could include pay cuts of up to 20 percent, the elimination of seniority rules and lifetime job guarantees, and millions of dollars in cuts in company contributions to retirement and healthcare plans.

The Times may own the Globe in a legal sense, but in a much broader way the Globe also belongs to the people of Boston and New England. Everybody in New England benefits from the Globe, even if they don’t read or subscribe to it. It was in this sense that Scott Lehigh’s column yesterday was titled, Readers, have a say in saving your paper. Here’s the long gist:

We’re suffering from a double whammy: A bad recession and a self-defeating business model. Troubled times have sent advertising revenues plummeting. Meanwhile, we’re selling the paper with one hand and giving it away on Boston.com with the other. That’s never made any sense – the more so since website ads aren’t anywhere near the revenue-generator that print ads are.

…I also doubt we’ll be able to maintain the kind of quality newspaper and website readers expect unless we start charging online visitors who don’t subscribe to the paper.

Newspapers, eyeing several earlier failed experiments, including one by the New York Times, are skittish. That approach has worked for the Wall Street Journal, however. And as someone long wary about giving away our product on the Web even as we sell it in print, I think it’s time to try.

So back to my question: What does the Globe mean to you?

Would you pay to read the paper online? Seven-day home delivery currently costs $9.25 a week in the Boston area. Would it be worth $10 or $12 a month to read Globe content on Boston.com? Another idea under discussion in the news industry is micropayments. You’d give a credit card number once, and then be charged a small amount – a nickel, say – for each story you clicked on. Which would you prefer, a subscription or micropayments?

Some think charging for Web content will only deter readers, while keeping links to our website from appearing on other sites. Any payment system must be voluntary, they say. I’m dubious. But tell me, if we nagged you incessantly – ah, make that, politely prompted you at frequent intervals – would you make a voluntary payment of some sort?

Finally, can you think of better ways to have online readers pay for Globe offerings?

Yes, I can. It’s the fifth item in the series of posts below:

  1. Newspapers 2.0 (October 5, 2006)
  2. Still at Newspapers 1.x (August 15, 2007)
  3. Toward a new ecology of journalism (September 12, 2007)
  4. Earth to Newspapers: Abandon Fort Business. (September 19, 2007)
  5. PayChoice: a new business model for newspapers (February 5, 2009)

PayChoice will be an easy way for listeners to pay stations for public radio programming. It is in the early stages of development, aimed toward appearing later this year in the Public Radio Tuner on iPhones. At last report, downloads of the tuner were moving past 1.5 million, so far.

We could do PayChoice for newspapers as well.

Informing PayChoice on the Public Radio Tuner will be a Listen Log, which is one form of Media Logging. We can do a Read Log as well, at least for the electronic versions of newspapers. Among the many things I’d like the log to perform is what I call ascribenation. That is, the ability to ascribe credit to sources — and to pay them as well. Among other things, this addresses the Associated Press’ concerns about ‘misappropriation’ of its role as the first source for many stories for which it goes uncredited.

Jon Garfunkel also has a good idea worth considering. It’s called PaperTrust.

The bottom line here is that a lot of good people are working on solutions. These solutions are not the same old stuff in new wrappers. They’re original ideas, some of which the papers will have no control over.

But they can help. They can tune in to tech development efforts like the ones I descibe here, and welcome their geeks’ participation in them. They can write and post linky text. (The Globe is better than some in this respect, but still link-averse on the whole.) They can finish following the other recommendations they’ll find here (the first of which isn’t too far from what Scott would like to do).

And, it might still be impossible to save the paper.

The question comes down to living without advertising. Can it be done? If so, how? I guarantee that the answer to those questions will come from the outside. From geeks, mostly.

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After the advertising bubble bursts

March 23, 2009 in Berkman, Business, Ideas, VRM, problems | 78 comments

Thesis #74 of The Cluetrain Manifesto says, “We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.” We wrote that in 1999, when everybody thought that advertising was going to be THE model for businesses on the Internet. The crash came less than a year later.

Then the next bubble came, and this time everybody thought (surprise!) that advertising was going to be THE model for businesses on the Internet. This time they were right, because Google made it so. In fact, Google makes billions with advertising, not just for itself, but for millions of other sites, including countless blogs. Google does it by making advertising accountable, and by moving the wasteful side of guesswork. They take it off ink, paper, airwaves and billboards, and shift it to server cycles, pixels, rods and cones.

Still, most advertising is still wasted. The difference now is that advertising is accountable while it wastes less costly things. This is fine as far as it goes, which is pretty far, even in the current crash.

But advertising is still a bubble, and has been since it was invented more than a century ago. I’ve been saying this for many years, including last month right here.

In fact, last May I reported how Mike Arrington of TechCrunch was “outraged” by my suggestion that advertising was a bubble (or something to that effect… it’s in this podcast somewhere… maybe one of ya’ll can hunt down the quote). [Later... Dave Wallace found a clip.]

Now comes Why Advertising Is Failing On The Internet, by Eric Clemons, Professor of Operations and Information Management at Wharton, writing in TechCrunch, no less. When I read it the thought balloon over my head said “Yess!” and “Amen, brother!” over and over. For example:

Pushing a message at a potential customer when it has not been requested and when the consumer is in the midst of something else on the net, will fail as a major revenue source for most internet sites.  This is particularly true when the consumer knows that the sponsor of the ad has paid to have this information, which was verified by no one, thrust at him.

Exactly what we said in Cluetrain, and what most people say when they look for havens from advertising, which they find with TiVo and many ad-free places on the Web.

Clemons follows that with this:

The net will find monetization models and these will be different from the advertising models used by mass media, just as the models used by mass media were different from the monetization models of theater and sporting events before them.  Indeed, there has to be some way to create websites that do other than provide free access to content, some of it proprietary, some of it licensed, and some of it stolen, and funded by advertising.

At ProjectVRM we have been working on one, called PayChoice. Since most of you don’t follow links, I’ll drop the first two sections in right here:

Overview

PayChoice is a new business model for media: one by which readers, listeners and viewers can quickly and easily pay for the goods they use — on their own terms, and not just those of suppliers’ arcane systems.

The idea is to build a new marketplace for media — one where supply and demand can relate, converse and transact business on mutually beneficial terms, rather than only on terms provided by thousands of different silo’d systems, each serving to hold the customer captive.

PayChoice is a breed of VRM, or Vendor Relationship Management. VRM is the reciprocal of CRM or Customer Relationship Management. VRM provides customers with tools for engaging with vendors in ways that work for both parties. PayChoice is one of those tools. Or a set of them.

Background

We now live in a media environment where goods previously sold directly or paid for by advertising are freely available and shared widely over the Internet. A number of factors contribute to a business and social conundrum for suppliers of those goods:

  • Easy copying and sharing makes the goods freely available at growing ease and convenience.
  • Copying and sharing is so widespread and common that punishment for copyright and other usage violations touches only a small minority of offenders, and has proven to be a losing proposition.

What the marketplace requires are new business and social contracts that ease payment and stigmatize non-payment for media goods. The friction involved in voluntary payment is still high, even on the Web, where one must go through complex forms even to make simple payments. There is no common and easy way either to keep track of what media (free or otherwise) we consume (see Media Logging), to determine what it might be worth, and to pay for it easily and in standard ways — to many different suppliers. (Again, each supplier has its own system for accepting payments.)

PayChoice will create a “buy button”-simple payment system to allow readers, listeners and viewers to pay whatever they like, at their discretion, for whatever media products they use. For too many media the traditional business models — subscriptions, newsstand sales, advertising and underwriting — are not sufficient. (Especially in the current economic environment, which is akin to an earthquake that won’t stop.) Nor do they support full participation and involvement with their users.

PayChoice differs from other payment models (subscriptions, newsstand, tip jars) by allowing the customer to pay any amount they please, when they please, with minimum friction — and with full choice about what they disclose about themselves. PayChoice will also support credit for referrals, requests for service, feedback and other relationship support mechanisms, all at the control of the user. For example, PayChoice can provide quick and easy ways for listeners to pay for public radio broadcasts or podcasts, for readers to pay for otherwise “free” papers or blogs, and paid request for stories or programs to be expressed and aggregated, without requiring the customer to disclose unnecessary private information, to become a “member”. This will scaffold real relationships between buyers and sellers, and for supporting journalists covering what Jake Shapiro calls “microbeats.” It will also give deeper meaning to “membership” in non-profits. (Under the current system, “membership” means putting one’s name on a pitch list for future contributions, and not much more than that.)

PayChoice will also connect the sellers’ CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems with customers’ VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) systems, supporting rich and participatory two-way relationships. In fact, PayChoice will by definition be a VRM system.

Micro-accounting

The idea of “micro-payments” for goods on the Net has been around for a long time, and has recently been revitalized as a potential business model for journalism by an article by Walter Isaacson in Time Magazine. What ProjectVRM suggests instead is something we don’t yet have, but very much need: micro-accounting for actual uses. These including reading, listening and watching.

Most of what we now call “content” is both free for the taking and worth more than $zero. How much more? We need to be able to say.

So, as currently planned, PayChoice would -

  1. Provide a single and easy way that consumers of “content” can become customers of it. In the current system — which isn’t one — every artist, every musical group, every public radio and TV station, has his, her or its own way of taking in contributions from those who appreciate the work. This can be arduous and time-consuming for everybody involved. What PayChoice proposes, however, is not a replacement for existing systems, but a new system that can supplement existing fund-raising systems — one that can soak up much of today’s MLOTT: Money Left On The Table.
  2. Provide ways for individuals to look back through their media usage histories, inform themselves about what they have been enjoying, and to determine how much it is worth to them. The Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP), and later the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB), both came up with “rates and terms that would have been negotiated in the marketplace between a willing buyer and a willing seller” — language that first appeared in the 1995 Digital Performance Royalty Act (DPRA), and tweaked in 1998 by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), under which both the CARP and the CRB operated. The rates they came up with peaked at $.0001 per “performance” (a song or recording), per listener. PayChoice creates the “willing buyer” that the DRPA thought wouldn’t exist.
  3. Stigmatize non-payment for worthwhile media goods. This is where “social” will finally come to be something more than yet another tech buzzmodifier.

All these require micro-accounting, not micro-payments. In fact micro-accounting can inform ordinary payments that can be made in clever new ways that should satisfy everybody with an interest in seeing artists compensated fairly for their work. An individual listener, for example, can say “I want to pay 1¢ for every song I hear on the radio,” and “I’ll send SoundExchange a lump sum of all the pennies wish to pay for songs I hear over the course of a year, along with an accounting of what artists and songs I’ve listened to” — and leave dispersal of those totaled pennies up to the kind of agency that likes, and can be trusted, to do that kind of thing.

Similar systems can also be put in place for readers of newspapers, blogs and other journals.

What’s important is that the control is in the hands of the individual, and that the accounting and dispersal systems work the same way for everybody.

No, we don’t have it yet, but we do plan to put it in the Public Radio Tuner in due time. It will help that well over a million of those tuners have been downloaded so far for iPhones.

Back to Eric Clemons’ piece:

The internet is the most liberating of all mass media developed to date.  It is participatory, like swapping stories around a campfire or attending a renaissance fair.  It is not meant solely to push content, in one direction, to a captive audience, the way movies or traditional network television did.  It provides the greatest array of entertainment and information, on any subject, with any degree of formality, on demand.  And it is the best and the most trusted source of commercial product information on cost, selection, availability, and suitability, using community content, professional reviews and peer reviews.

My basic premise is that the internet is not replacing advertising but shattering it, and all the king’s horses, all the king’s men, and all the creative talent of Madison Avenue cannot put it together again.

This is exactly where we were going in Cluetrain. Back then, and still today, people tend to think of the Net as yet another one-way producer-to-consumer “medium” for “delivering messages” along with goods that “consumers” pay for. But the Net was and remains a place that serves demand at least as well as it serves supply. The demand side just hasn’t been fully equipped yet. That’s what the VRM movement (which includes but is not limited to ProjectVRM) is all about providing. When we (and others) succeed, we won’t just be consumers anymore. We’ll be customers in full standing.

Eric Clemons goes on to explain many reasons why advertising is a bubble. I agree with all of them, though I am not as pessimistic about Google, for the main reasons Jeff Jarvis visits in What Would Google Do? The fact remains that Google, more than any other large company operating on the Web, gets the fundamentals of abundance: that you make money because of it rather than with it. They know the vulnerability of advertising as a model, and I expect them to work no less hard disrupting the model than they have at building it out. (Perhaps in their secret labs they are already at work on this. I don’t know. But if they’re smart, which they are, they’re on the case.) Clemons closes with this:

The internet is about freedom, and I suspect that a truly free population will not be held captive and forced to watch ads.  We always knew that freedom comes at a price; perhaps the price of internet freedom and the failure of ads will be paying a fair price for the content and the experience and the recommendations that we value.

Among the other tools we need are pricing guns for customers. We haven’t had that since before Industry won the Industrial Revolution. But we’ll get them. PayChoice is one example of them. There will be more. And they’ll work because not paying will be increasingly stigmatized.

Right now, for example, most music is available for free. Never mind that some of us call downloading it “theft” or “piracy”. The other price is 99¢, which millions pay in iTunes and through other online stores. Those two price points are not enough. We need ones we can set on our own.

For years Congress and its regulatory arbitrators (first the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel and later the Copyright Royalty Board) have been saying there is no “willing buyer” to match the “willing seller” in the online radio, or streaming, business. That is, Internet radio. So, in the absence of that buyer, these panels have handed the pricing gun to the sellers (the RIAA and its collection agency, SoundExchange), but set the prices first. Last I heard, the royalty rate was set to peak at $.0019 per recording, per listener, in 2010.

If you pay 99¢ per song, you’d have to listen to it, what, 521 times to equal the same rate? If you use iTunes, check and see how many times you listen to any song.

So I’m thinking, hey, I’d be glad to pay a penny a recording for what I hear on the radio. These days you have a huge choice of radio stations on the Net. Most play music. All could carry data about that music. I’d be glad to account for that listening, and pay accordingly. And I’d like right now to set that price at a defaulted penny a song. I’d be glad to aggregate my listen-logging with others, with a pledge or an escrow account containing a sum of money for dispersal to artists at that rate. And see what happens.

In fact, that’s what I want to do with PayChoice after we work out the kinks by providing a supplementary business model for public media. Stay tuned.

Oh, and this topic will be among the many I’ll talk about at lunch tomorrow at the Berkman Center. More here.

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Right on

February 27, 2009 in News, problems | 7 comments

John Derbyshire in The American Conservative: Limbaugh and company certainly entertain. But a steady diet of ideological comfort food is no substitute for hearty intellectual fare.

More:

  Taking the conservative project as a whole — limited government, fiscal prudence, equality under law, personal liberty, patriotism, realism abroad — has talk radio helped or hurt? All those good things are plainly off the table for the next four years at least, a prospect that conservatives can only view with anguish. Did the Limbaughs, Hannitys, Savages, and Ingrahams lead us to this sorry state of affairs?

  They surely did. At the very least, by yoking themselves to the clueless George W. Bush and his free-spending administration, they helped create the great debt bubble that has now burst so spectacularly. The big names, too, were all uncritical of the decade-long (at least) efforts to “build democracy” in no-account nations with politically primitive populations.

I was raised by, and as, a Republican. I moved left of the whole Democratic party in college (’65-’69, during the Vietnam war, which I opposed absolutely), and stayed there for another decade or more. When I moved to California in 1985 I realized that I had become an Independent, and I’ve registered that way ever since. Voted that way too.

But I never lost my interest in the well-being of the Republican party. What Derbyshire outlines as the “conservative project” sounds right to me. Not fighting abortion and immigration. Not bringing religion into government. Not meddling in people’s lives. Not spending out the wazoo. Not military adventures abroad. Not hating “Liberals” as if they were a disease.

Anyway, good piece. Hope it helps.

PBS should become the NPR of TV

February 21, 2009 in Business, Journalism, News, Places | 18 comments

I’m sitting at #ima09, at one of the last panels: “Future of Public Media News: A Vision and A Plan.” Leonard Witt is speaking right now, and has a killer proposal: turn PBS into a “news powerhouse.” His case is brief and right-on.

Newspapers aren’t the only news organizations that are faltering, he says. Local TV news is crapping out too. As with newspapers, advertising is drying up: going away or moving elsewhere. Nobody talks about it much, but your evening news has been brought to you for many years by car dealers, spending co-op money from Chevy, Toyota and the rest of them. Bottom line: the advertising model is failing too.

Meanwhile, public broadcasting is sitting on — or next to — lots of news gathering and sharing organizations, including local and regional public radio stations, and allied listeners and viewers out the wazoo. Lots of those folks are blogging and tweeting. There is a natural sybiosis between these affiliated individuals (whether or not we call them “members”) and stations. Leonard is talking about how even small staffs — one reporter per TV station, for example — can add up. And (this is critical) without the high overhead of newspapers and other commercial media.

Another thing. PBS — and public television in general — desperately needs to move beyond its good but dull and old-hat stuff. The Discovery Channels (there are six), the National Geographic Channel, the History Channel and lots of other cable channels are eating away at PBS’s viewing shares. PBS, once one of the four major TV networks, now just holds down a few notches on a “dial” that isn’t anymore, and has hundreds of other channels. And this doesn’t even count the Net, which will continue to widen in bandwidth. At some point anybody will be able to stream anything to anybody in reasonably high definintion. When that happens, all that will remain of TV “networks”, “stations” and “channels” will be their antique names. These will matter as “brands”, but their content will matter far more. People will watch what they find interesting, relevant, familiar and reliable. And, in the case of news, sometimes necessary.

So here’s an interesting and opportune coincidence: as commercial TV news continues to tank, PBS and its affiliates can leverage their standing strength in news — one substantiated by their colleagues over on the public radio dial.

PBS’ news work can expand beyond the News Hour, Frontline and Bill Moyers. PBS stations can also go into the news business and appeal to the same people who currently spend a buck or more per day on newspapers — and can spend on other news sources.

We’ve seen what’s happened already with public radio. Stations like WNYC, KPCC, WBUR, KQED and WUNC all jacked up their ratings and income by moving from eclectic to “information” programming, built around morning and evening news programs from NPR. Public radio had advantages — a “dial” of finite width, for example (with one wide end  — 88-92Mhz) carved out just for noncommercial use, plus the homogenization and downscaling of commercial competition. So, while PBS was having its lunch eaten by commercial competition, NPR was eating the lunches of its commercial competitors. (The stations listed above are at or near the top in their local markets’ ratings.)

Can PBS and its affiliates get news teeth? I think they have to. Fortunately, commercial TV news has a very soft underbelly.

Now Susanna Capelbuto from Georgia Public Broadcasting is talking about GPB Radio’s Georgia Gazette. The show does video too (on the Net). How big a stretch is it for the network, or its stations, to do that on TV too — especially since ditital TV stations can now transmit up to four program streams (each called a “station”) at the same time. Yes, the costs of production can be high, but so are the benefits.

I’m sure there will be plenty of resistance, but it’s a damn fine idea. Leonard, during the Q&A, addressing the public TV broadcasters: “You have the gravitas, you have the reputation, you have the name. You have everything you need except the will to do it.” Perhaps not quite verbatim, but close enough. That was right after telling them that the idea is too good, and too opportune, to pass up. If public television does pass it up, commercial broadcasters will get the clues. CNN is already on the case.

[later...] Nice follow-up no the whole event, including endorsement of the above, from Robert Paterson.

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In the likely event of a water landing

January 18, 2009 in Art, Blogroll, News, Past, Science, Travel | 9 comments

Good, tight story of what happened on . In the International Herald Tribune.

By the way, somewhere in this weekend’s Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor sings a delightful tribute to the crew of flight 1549. Heard it live yesterday. The show is running again today on many public stations. Public Radio Fan has times and stations. If you have an iPhone, catch it on your free Public Radio Tuner.

Speaking of which, our first planned VRM feature for the tuner is a “listen log”, to answer “What was that?” questions and to provide fun data that’s yours (not anybody else’s) to do with what you wish.

If you have other features you’d like, on this tuner or on future ones (not just on the iPhone — that’s just where you’ll see it first), let us know.

Tune in, Turn on, Say nice things

January 8, 2009 in Art, Berkman, Fun, Future, Gear, Ideas, Science, infrastructure | 8 comments

So now my dream app is ready on the iPhone. It’s just the beginning of What It Will Be, but it’s highly useful. If you have an iPhone, go there and check it out. It’s free.

As you see here, I’m involved, through the Berkman Center, which is collaborating with , which is working under a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (). Major props go to the PRX developers, who have been working very very hard on this thing. Some of the most diligent heads-down programming I’ve seen.

An interesting thing. In the old days, when an app came out, in any form, on nearly any platform, there was this assumption that it was a Done Thing, and should be critiqued on those grounds. Not the case here. This is a work in progress, and the process is open. In the long run, we should see much more opened up as well.

Paranthetically, I think right now we’re looking at some cognitive dissonance between the Static Web and the Live Web, when the latter seems to look like the former. You have a website, or an app. These seem to be static things, even when they’re live. An app like the Public Radio Tuner is more of a live than a static thing. But it’s easy, as a user, to relate to it as a static thing. Because at any one time it does have more static qualities than live ones. Imagine a house you can remodel easily and often, and at low cost and inconvenience. That’s kind of what we have here. A cross between product and process — that looks the former even when it’s doing the latter. Anyway…

Though this grant is for an iTunes app, work is sure to go on to other platforms as well — such as Android. So, rather than criticize this app for coming out first on the iPhone, please provide feedback and guidance for next steps beyond this first effort (and join me in giving the developers a high five for delivering a functional app in a remarkably short time). And in the reviews section at iTunes, provide honest and constructive reviews. At this stage I’m sure they’ll be good. (Some of the bad reviews were on the very first version released, which has since been replaced.)

To VRM followers and community members, VRM is very much on the agenda, and we’re thinking and working hard on what the VRM pieces of this will be, and how they’ll work. This may be the first piece of work where VRM components appear, and we want to do them right. Also bear in mind that this is the first step on a long, interesting and fruitful path. Or many paths. Interest and guidance is welcome there too.

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Op-ed vs. Ed

January 3, 2009 in Blogging, Journalism, News, problems | 10 comments

The first I heard about Mike Connell and his plane crash was in a tweet that pointed to Rove’s IT Guru Warned of Sabotage Before Fatal Plane Crash; Was Set to Testify, by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, in Truthout. The original is here at Alternet.

So I went looking for more at Google News. All I got were more blogs. Nearly every item currently on top in a Google News search for “Mike Connell” crash is a blog source. And all of it has a political axe to grind. The Facts are buried in there, but to find them you have to get past writers’ talk radio biases.

Why aren’t newspapers listed? Two reasons, near as I can guess. One is that the papers’ stories don’t get many inbound links, and fail at PageRank (which I presume plays a role at Google News). The other is that the stories are no longer there for the linking.

The crash happened near Akron. It also appears from an archive search that the Akron Beacon Journal had some plain-facts coverage of Connell’s plane crash,; but those are archived behind a paywall now. Not helpful. Searching the Cleveland Plain Dealer isn’t any help either.

Newspaper folks have a legitimate gripe against blogging: that it’s much more of a partisan op-ed practice than a reportorial one. (Hell, I’m op-eding right now.) But papers aren’t doing themselves any favors by continuing to hide one of their best weapons in the war against reader attrition: archives. Also called “morgues”, most of these deep and helpful resources are still “monetized” only by direct payment, and invisible to Google and other search engines.

Newspaper Archives/Indexes/Morgues is the Library of Congress’ listing of deep newspaper resources. The top item, U.S. News Archives on the Web, is maintained by the excellent Ibiblio.org, and details a depressing picture. Many papers are listed. “Cost” is a column heading, and many have entries such as “Searching is available to all for free, but only registered subscribers can retrieve articles” or “$2.95 per article with multiple-article pricing options available, articles published within the last seven days are available through the site’s search engine for free”. Many also say “free” (or the likes of “free registration is required to access the free archives”). But most still require registration, or are just plain lame.

But you can find some stuff. Here’s a first report on the Connell crash in the Kentucky Post. Cincinnati.com has this. There I found that Connell ran NewMedia Communications. Its index page (that last link) is now a memorial.

I’m not going to keep digging, because I have too much else to do. But my long-standing recommendation to papers still stands: open the archives. Stop giving away the news and charging for the olds. Leave bad money on the table and go for depth and relevance. Those are aces in your hand. And hell, sell advertising in the archives too. You’ll make far more money that way than by shaking down readers for $2.95 per item: a price that prevents far more demand than it satisfies.

Bonus link, just because Sheila’s first-rate as both a journalist and a blogger.

The Splinternet

December 16, 2008 in Art, Blogging, Business, Life, News, Places, Politics, Travel, infrastructure, problems | 14 comments

Stephen Lewis has made a decades-long study of both the charms and absurdities of national and ethnic legacies. His most recent essay on the matter, Apple’s iTunes, NPR, Barriers to Giving, and the “Appliancing” of National Boundaries, unpacks the growing distance between the ideals of the Internet and the realities of dysfunctional nationalisms, and the failures of the former to transcend the latter.
He begins by describing his frustrations at trying to obtain podcasts of This American Life while overseas:

As it does with its iPhone, Apple “appliances” its services to geopolitical strictures inherited from the pre-Internet age and to a jingoistic concept of national identity quite contrary to the expansive spirit of This American Life and to the “worldwide” as in Worldwide Web. Podcasts of This American Life are available for purchase and download via iTunes only from IP addresses within the boundaries of the United States. Also, even within the US, Apple does not accept for payment credit cards issued by overseas banks. Last, even when listeners from within the US attempts a purchase a credit card issued by a US bank, Apple will not sell them podcasts if their iTunes Stores accounts were originally registered from abroad.

By jigsawing its services to fit national boundaries, Apple fragments the efficacy and global scope of the internet and denies NPR broader listenership, international impact, and potential revenues. By outsourcing exclusive sales of podcasts of the This American Life to Apple’s iTunes Store, NPR denies the benefits and insights of listenership and the pleasure of contributing to the support of Public Radio to Americans living and working abroad, not to mention citizens of all other countries.

Meanwhile, you can hear This American Life for free over the Net on hundreds of streams from the U.S. based public radio stations to which NPR wholesales the program for the stations to sell to listeners (who contribute on a voluntary basis), making the restrictions even more strange. Steve continues:

The Internet — in its role as prime infrastructure for the formation of community and conveyance of the information, entertainment, knowledge and transactions — is intangible and without physical location.  However, the infrastructure that supports it is quite physical, an ad hoc non-purpose-built amalgam of fiber, copper, and wireless  strung together, enabled, and animated by protocols.  By resting on a “borrowed” infrastructure, the Internet has inherited the “gatekeepers” that own and control, charge for, and regulate these legacy elements – telecom operators and service providers, cable TV companies, governmental authorities, etc.).  Such organizations still carve up the world according geopolitical entities and borders defined between the late-eighteenth century and the mid-twentieth and gerrymander services and access accordingly.  Apparently, so does Apple.  Apple’s method of “appliancing” country-by-country reinforces anachronistic borders and undermines the potential of the internet to transcend past divisions.

Steve also spends a lot of time in Turkey, a country where his own blog (the one I’m quoting here) gets blocked along with every other blog bearing the .wordpress domain name. Lately YouTube and Blogger have also been blocked. (For more on who blocks what, visit the Open Internet Initiative.)

These sites and services are easy for governments to block because they’re clustered and silo’d. Yet on the Internet these clusters and silos, once big enough, take on the character of countries. In this New York Times piece, Tim Wu says. “To love Google, you have to be a little bit of a monarchist, you have to have faith in the way people traditionally felt about the king”. Talk about retro.

Steve continues,

This has turned Google, a private company with no accountability to any constituency, into a negotiating partner of national governments whose laws or policies do not  reflect or respect the ethical stance claimed in Google’s own slogan.  Thus, Google now functions on a diplomatic level with the ability and clout to forge country-by-country compromises affecting internet activity and the free flow of information and opinion, Turkey’s YouTube and Blogger ban not least among them.

Well, Google does have accountability to its customers, most of which are advertisers. Which makes the whole thing even more complicated.

Meanwhile the promise of the Net continues to be undermined not only by wacky forms of counterproductive protectionism, but by our own faith in “clouds” that can often act more like solids than gasses.

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Liberating the Net from the FCC

December 7, 2008 in Ideas, Politics, infrastructure, problems | 2 comments

In The Office of Connectivity Advocacy, Bob Frankston argues for something we’ve needed a long time: prying the Net from the regulatory grips of telecom and cablecom, both of which are inside the FCC and part of a regulatory mess that traces back past the 1996 and 1934 telecoms acts, all the way to the railroad thinking and legislation that modeled those acts.

What we need, Bob says, is to re-frame the Net outside of telecom (which includes cablecom as well). The Net needs to be more than just the third act in a “Triple Play” sold by phone and cable companies. It needs to be more — and other — than just a “service” we get from monopolists operating in an old regulatory habitat.

Inside our homes we do not negotiate with, or pay, a “printing service” to use our printers. Nor are our phone and cable companies required to hook our computers and other appliances together inside our homes. As a result, there is no issue of speed, no need for “broadband”, because we enjoy much limitless network speeds without a “service provider” in the middle.

Some specifics:

We need a “Connectivity Strategy” with a champion; a “Connectivity Advocate” who is outside the FCC and is thus can focus on a positive agenda. “Internet Connectivity” is not a telecommunications service but something new. It is based on the idea that we can create our own solutions out of imperfect resources. And it has proven to be an exceptionally powerful idea.

It has allowed us to create new solutions by focusing on the end points of relationships rather than all the myriad points between. We’ve seen a similar dynamic with the interstate (defense) highway system that has been credited with adding trillions of dollars to the economy. The Internet-connectivity has the potential to do far more because it doesn’t have the limits of the roads and demand creates supply.

The challenge is to overcome the artifacts that we confuse with the powerful idea. We happened to have repurposed existing telecommunications infrastructure and thus the idea has become captive of the incumbents whose business of charging for transporting bits as a service is threatened. To add to this confusion we can easily spoof existing telecommunications services ourselves but still act as if only a carrier can provide the services.

Instead of spending so much time and effort forcing connectivity into a service framing we need to be able to focus on connectivity from first principles. After all, the Internet (as connectivity) and Telecom have no intrinsic relationship beyond their common use of electromagnetism to transport bits.

By having an Office of Connectivity Advocacy (I’m open to a better title) outside the FCC we can have a positive and proactive strategy. We have abundant existing resources that are lying fallow either because we don’t recognize what we have or are forbidden from competing with those who control are very means of communicating and the vital information paths we use for commerce.

So look at it this way. What we have inside the free spaces of our own homes is connectivity. What we have outside of our homes, through telco and cable systems, is broadband. The latter may seem desirable, but only in the absence of free (as in liberty, not price) alternatives.

Bob sees the Internet less as a physical infrastructure of CFR (copper, fiber and radios) than as a “bit commons” to which we all contribute. It’s an ocean rather than canals across a desert. Its nature is one of abundance, not scarcity. One can only make it scarce, which is what phone and cable companies do, even as they increase our broadband speeds to larger fractions of what we have at home for free.

Bob has specific recommendations for what an Office of Connectivity Advocacy would do. Read them and give Bob (and the Transition Team) constructive feedback. Here’s part of his post:

Initially the OCA would be charged with:

  • Empowering communities and individuals to create their own solutions using common facilities – the bit commons.
  • Education and research focused on achieving and taking advantage of end-to-end connectivity.
    • Educating Congress to understand the meaning and value of connectivity. Ideally it would play the role of providing a first-principles reality check rather than just checking for conformance to regulations. For example, a call is completed when the message gets through, not when a phone rings.
    • Assist the government in its own use of technology both for its own use and as an example for others. It could encourage technologies that have wide market appeal rather than just those that can conform to government RFPs.
    • Developing enlightened investment strategies which don’t try to capture all of the value.
    • Supporting research in using networking rather than the networks themselves.
    • Supporting research in how to get more out of existing physical facilities as well as encouraging new technologies.
    • Developing decentralized protocols for connectivity rather than today’s provider-centric IP
    • Working to simplify building applications using public connectivity (the bit commons). This could be mundane telemedicine, community information or …
  • Acting as an advocate for a transition from a telecom framing to a connectivity framing:
    • Evaluating existing assets and business practice afresh without the century old technical and policy presumptions.
    • Working towards a bit commons or common infrastructure including removing the artificial distinctions between wired and unwired bits.
    • Assisting in transitioning the existing telecommunications industry to industries supporting and taking advantage of connectivity.

At first glance the idea of the OCA may seem fanciful but it’s far easier to start afresh than trying to struggle out of the mire of the existing Regulatorium. We didn’t build the automobile by modifying stage coaches – we just used our understanding of wheeled vehicles to start afresh.

Starting afresh is essential to the telcos and cablecos as well. They need to see the Internet as something more, and other, than just a “service” they provide. Their existing phone and cable TV business models are in trouble. Charging for Net access is no gold mine, either. They need to start looking for ways of making money because of the Net and not merely with it. This is what Google and Amazon have done with “cloud” services. (Many of Google’s are in this list here. Amazon’s are here.) The only thing keeping the phone and cable companies from being in similar or allied businesses is a lack of imagination. Also a lack of appreciation for advantages of incumbency other than the ability to charge folks for broadband alone. These companies have waterfront property on the Net’s ocean. They also have direct relationships with customers. Those relationships can be used for much more than billing and essential services alone.

It would be much easier for these guys to start thinking outside their boxes if the Net were split off from the phone and cable regulatoria. And that Nick Carr’s Big Switch would happen a lot faster. (By the way, for thinking outside the box, it’s fun to read Nick’s post on Microsof’ts “trailer park” based cloud infrastructure.)

I wrote here,

Phone and cable companies today are in a lousy position to run the Internet business. Telephony and Cable TV are railroads and steamships. They “carry” the Net as a “service”, but the Net isn’t essentially a service. It’s just a way to connect things. Connectivity is what matters. Not “broadband”, much as it appeals within the context of phone and cable companies’ limited offerings and imaginations. Who will imagine what can be done when connectivity is freed up? Phone and cable companies? I’d rather bet on the people leaving those companies.

If phone and cable companies want to attract rather than lose its most original engineers, they it would help if they got out of the old regulatory frame and into a new one that separates the Net from their legacy monopolies.

More about Bob.

Bonus link: Beyond Telecom: Bob Frankston on the Future We Make for Ourselves. It’s is an interveiw I did with Bob earlier this year, for Linux Journal.

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Back to real conservatism

October 28, 2008 in Ideas, News | 17 comments

Somewhere between Barry Goldwater and Sarah Palin, conservatism changed from a philosophical anchor — what Goldwater called a “conscience” — into a pure partisanship, defined at least as much by what and who it’s against (Liberals, Democrats, Hillary, Obama) as by what it’s for. The latter now includes a list of causes (opposition to abortion and gay marriage, religiously-defined “family values”) that bear no resemblance to Goldwater’s essentially Libertarian philosophy.

I was raised by Republicans who voted enthusiastically for Goldwater (who lost resoundingly to Lyndon Johnson) in 1964. I read The Conscience of a Conservative (which was published in 1960) as a teenager and felt its influence even as I became an active opponent of the Vietnam War in college (I was in the Class of ‘69) and became a hard-core Democrat through my 20s and 30s.

In the first chapter, of Conscience, Goldwater writes, “for the American Conservative, there is no difficulty in identifying the day’s overriding political challenge: it is to preserve and extend freedom. As he surveys the various attitudes and institutions and laws that currently prevail in America, many questions will occur to him, but the Conservative’s first concern will always be: Are we maximizing freedom?“

Is that what conservatism is about today? Hard to tell. It’s certainly not from what I hear and see from Rush, Fox News, Dobson, Hewitt and most of Republican broadcasting’s amen corner.

For those who care to separate the partisan wheat from the philosophical chaff, David Frum’s latest is required reading. In it he points to this Stanley Greenberg poll, which shows how isolated Republican partisanship has become, and how far it has drifted from the mainstream of the American electorate’s sensibilities — the same electorate that gave us Reagan, both Bushes and Bill Clinton (who offended the Right’s moral sensibilities even while he governed as a centrist making plenty of rightward decisions — especially in respect to social welfare and the economy).

Right after the 1994 “Republican Revolution”, I found myself at a party in San Diego, talking to Milton Friedman. This wasn’t the famous economist, but rather a former speechwriter for Gerald Ford and other notables. He told me that this revolution was doomed to fail in the long run, because it brought together two value systems — one economic and the other religious — that were in conflict.

What held them together so long was pure partisanship.

That’s coming to an end. The split has opened. Rush, Hannity and Dobson are proving to be a branch, not a trunk. The roots in Goldwater and William F. Buckley still hold, and the branch is breaking away. For more about that, read Christopher Buckley’s How Limbaugh tried (and failed) to replace my dad. Pretty much nails it.

I have no idea if I’ll ever vote for a Republican again. Haven’t for a long time. Haven’t voted for all that many Democrats, either. Many of my votes have been for None of the Above, which has often been the Libertarian. (For what it’s worth, I voted for Gore and Kerry, because I thought we needed not to elect George W. Bush. I don’t believe I voted for Clinton either time, but I don’t remember. And I’ll vote for Obama this time, not just for the candidate but to oppose McCain, and especially .) But I’ll be watching to see if the Grand Old Party rediscovers its roots — in personal freedom, minimal government, responsible economic policies and other solid sensibilities.

Hope it does. After Obama gets elected, we’ll need those people to hold him in check. Not the nyah-sayers on Fox News and AM radio.

Smoke screening

September 19, 2008 in Future, News, Past | 3 comments

Sitting in a bar raised above the gambling floor at the MGM Grand, killing some fizzy water on ice while clearing time for my room to be cleaned. The bar is comfortable, with thick carpeting and heavy drapes pulled back to view rows of machines where patrons pour coins into slots. I haven’t heard the sound of coins pouring into trays yet. Do they still have that? I wouldn’t know. I hate to gamble on anything that’s not only stacked against me, but where I don’t control at least some of the odds. And I don’t get the thrill either. But hey, that’s me.

I also don’t get the appeal of cigarette smoke. I grew up at a time when smoking was standard. My father was a heavy smoker, and I’m sure our house and car stank of it, but I don’t remember. I do remember hating it, and vowing that I would never take up the habit. (And I never did.) Meanwhile I lived with it, as do all people in cultures such as this casino, where smoking is the rule rather than the exception. Back home in Boston and California, I live and work in places where smoking is exceptional, exiled to the outdoors or to “designated smoking areas”. That’s why I picked out my own little “designated nonsmoking area” in a corner of this bar, as far as I can get from other patrons, about half of which are either smoking or have packs and lighters parked next to their drinks.

I think in the long run smoking will become a fringe practice. Even in Europe and Asia, where smoking is still standard, the percentages of people who smoke will come down, both for the obvious reasons and because in the long run rationalizations tend to fail. Think of smoking as a bubble that will eventually burst and crash.

We’re only beginning to face the problems exposed by the failures of giant financial institutions such FreddieMac, FannieMae, Bear Stearns and AIG — and government bail-outs backed by the continuing ability to borrow from China and other creditor nations. Of which we used to be the biggest. Quite the opposite now.

If you’re looking for a far-sighted bubble-burster, Kevin Phillips is your man. He launched his career as a Senior Strategist for Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign. There he led Nixon’s successful “southern strategy” and followed that with The Emerging Republican Majority in 1969. In that book he not only predicted forty years of future, but named the Sun Belt as well. His latest book is Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism, which Tim Rutten in the LA Times calls “a rhetorical shot across the bow of the current presidential campaign, which Phillips convincingly argues is failing to address the causes and implications of our current distress”.

Here he is on Chris Lydon’s Open Source program, on May 8 of this year:

  There’s a growing sense in the United States that the Imperial Era is over almost before it started. We’re seeing the weakness that is the United States allowing the financial sector to take over the private economy. That is now the largest portion: 21-22% of the GDP is finance, pushing manufacturing way down. I don’t think that the financial sector is responsible enough, safe enough, broad-minded enough to fill that position. I think what you’ll see happen to the United States is over-financialization: too much debt, too much over expansion and a degree of an implosion that will involve everything from too much debt and collapsing home prices to rising oil prices and the declining dollar. It’s all converging. It’s all trouble. It doesn’t spell the end of the United States, but it does spell the end of the United States as the Total Big Cheeze in the world. And we are going to lose some of the yardsticks that everybody enjoyed for a long time.

About “financialization”, he says,

  You’re looking at the transformation of the American economy from one that produced things to one that moves money around. But it didn’t happen overnight. One of the major relationships is between the rise of debt and the rise of the debt culture. The debt culture meant rising deficits and “spend now and play and pay later”, the public’s debt tolerance to an extraordinary degree, and this general lackidasicalness of putting a framework around your culture and your economy — they’ve all sort of gone to seed together. And I think that the net outcome of this is a country that is in every way living beyond its means. We used to be the leading world creditor, the leading world manufacturer and the leading world producer of oil. Now we’re the world’s leading debtor, the largest inporter of manufatures and the world’s leading importer of oil. It’s a disastrous transformation. The only part of the economy that has profited is the financial sector, because an awful lot of the transition is toward more debt, more credit, more living on things you can’t afford, more keeping up pretenses, and more ambition around the world with less to back it up. And the consequenses of this in many ways is the George W. Bush administration.

Not that Phillips thinks the Democrats are any better. About Paul Krugman, for example, he says,

  There is a good reason for Paul and the Democrats in general to be upbeat here. Maybe to an extent if things were a lot further advanced in the decay process, you could just flip a leaf and say all of a sudden that we are ferociously concerned about this decay. But they think that liberal policies and the Democratic approach can turn it around. Frankly, I don’t… The Democratic magic is more of the old razmatazz, and government will step in and there’s going to be a Green Deal as well as a New Deal, and we’re going to have five million new jobs for things relating to the Greening of America… The Democrats don’t want to admit that what they di8d for the most part in the two Clinton administrations was for the most part a continuation of the Reagan and first Bush administration — and then was continued and built upon by the second Bush administration. You had a lot of financial deregulation under the Clinton administrations. They repealed Glass-Stiegel, they deregulated credit cards, lots of stuff. They stepped on the gas in terms of private debt. The increase is extraordinary. So I can’t separate out the Clinton years from what preceded them and what came after them. And of course the Democrats need to be able to tell America in this election that … they have the answer. I understand that. But I don’t agree with it.

As for Obama, he says “I don’t think he’s raised enough of these issues to have a mandate… They’re not acting now like people who understand that there’s a problem.”

He also adds, “That clearly goes for the Republicans. It’s hard to believe McCain. His economic program is almost a non-program.” That’s on top of George W. Bush: “I don’t want to do another number on George W. after American Dynasty, but he’s the wrong person at the wrong time andin the wrong place — and unqualified essentially for having been president of the United States during these eight years.

I could go on, but a bunch of smokers just parked at the tables on either side of me, and I’m sure my room is done now. Meanwhile, go check out that podcast.

Time to exhale

September 17, 2008 in News | 4 comments

Yesterday Calvin Dodge said,

  I look forward to seeing your posts on your disappointment with the Obama campaign’s ads, as well as his attempts to silence people who are reporting on his associations with the radical Left. But I won’t hold my breath waiting for those posts.

… later mentioning how the “…Obama campaign has urged people to swamp WGN’s switchboard when guests on the Milt Rosenberg show…”

Looked that one up, and sure enough, here’s Andrew Sullivan — a conservative Obama supporter — telling his man to Leave Fredosso Alone, pointing for sourceage to this piece in Reason about David Fredosso, author of “the lone decent anti-Obama book”, and a scheduled guest on WGN. The Chicago Tribune takes it from there:

  Chicago radio station WGN-AM is again coming under attack from the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama for offering airtime to a controversial author. It is the second time in recent weeks the station has been the target of an “Obama Action Wire” alert to supporters of the Illinois Democrat.

  Monday night’s target was David Freddoso, who the campaign said was scheduled to be on the station from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. Chicago time.

  “The author of the latest anti-Barack hit book is appearing on WGN Radio in the Chicagoland market tonight, and your help is urgently needed to make sure his baseless lies don’t gain credibility,” an e-mail sent Monday evening to Obama supporters reads.

  “David Freddoso has made a career off dishonest, extreme hate mongering,” the message said. “And WGN apparently thinks this card-carrying member of the right-wing smear machine needs a bigger platform for his lies and smears about Barack Obama — on the public airwaves.”

I’m not familiar with Fredosso. (Look him up if you like.) But there’s a difference between responding to critics and choking them.

Radio now

August 14, 2008 in Ideas, Past, Photography | 4 comments

I listen to a lot of WBUR in my car. ‘BUR is Boston’s main NPR station, and where I’m I do most of my public radio listening. While weather isn’t the main thing on ‘BUR, it’s a frequent thing, and what makes me feel at home when I listen. Lately the report has been what we’ve heard most of this summer: more rain. Flash flood watch, even.

Still, as I looked around here, it’s sunny and clear and perfect in the same way that Boston weather this summer has been sucky. That’s because I’m listening in Santa Barbara. At home I use our Sonos system, and in the car I use the Tuner app on my new iPhone. Tuner costs money and is missing some pieces (just like the iPhone), but it’s a great way to listen to radio.

I got an iTrip AutoPilot to go with it. The design is good, but its FM signal is way too weak. Not sure if I’ll take it back, but I’ve abandoned it while jacking the iPhone into one of those fake tape cassettes on a wire, which I shove into the car’s cassette player. (The car is a ‘95 Infiniti.) ‘BUR is easy on the cell system because its stream is just 24kbps. I’ve also done a lot of listening to faster streams, all the way up to 128kbps, and I gotta say those work pretty well too, over the 3G system. My fave at the top rate is , which is just an awesome music station.

The main result for me is a new set of prelminary conclusions about the final stage of radio.

1) Live still matters. I have lots of stored music and podcasts on my iPhone. They’re great to have, but there’s no substitute. Stored and live are not the same. Both have their virtues, and now both can be maximized.

2) Human still matters. When I listen to WBUR in the morning, I expect to hear Bob Oakes, even if what he’s saying could be said by anybody.

3) The primary medium for radio, as with every other form of digital communication, is now the Net. Over-the-air (OTA) will still matter for a long time, but it will be become secondary rather than primary.

4) The cell phone system will become a data system that carries telephony, rather than the vice versa we have now. The same goes for the Net at home as well. What we still have in both cases is dial-up: data piggy-backing on telephony or cable TV. In terms of provider priorities, that’s the way it’s been for awhile, but the flip is going to come, and the sooner we make that happen, the better.

5) The iPhone is less a phone than a platform for mobile Internet applications that start with telephony. Voice will always be the primary personal mobile communications activity; but it will be one application, or set of applications, among many. Radio is another of those applications.

6) iPhones and other MIDs (mobile internet devices) will become bags of tools for doing all kinds of highly personal and engaged stuff. Today I’m in Toronto blue-sky-ing at PlanetEye (I’m on their board), thinking about all this. Long ago Larry Josephson told me “Radio is personal. That’s it.” But when all you had were transmitters and non-interactive receivers, there was a limit to how personal it could be. Not any more.

I’ll add more, but I gotta go.

NPR gets Mashable

July 16, 2008 in Journalism, News, Past | No comments

National Public Radio has announced a new API. The gist:

  …almost everything that you can find on NPR.org that we have the rights to redistribute is available through the API. This includes audio, images, full text, etc. That said, there are elements, series and programs that we could not offer due to rights restrictions.

Archives go back to ‘95. Hat tip to Andy Carvin.

Gap Fire growing

July 3, 2008 in Events, Life, News, Photography, Places, problems | 5 comments

Inciweb’s latest on the Gap Fire (tag: sbgapfire. Hashtag: #sbgapfire) is 10 hours old, it says (as of 12:17am Thursday morning). Most of KEYT’s 11pm newscast was devoted to the fire. Currently they’re reporting 1200 acres burned, 5% containment. The winds are not Santa Ana grade, but do come down from the NNW, flowing SSE over the Santa Ynez mountains (where the fire burns, above Santa Barbara and Goleta), directly toward town (and also in to the path of areas already burned by backfires, one hopes). KEYT also reported 10-13mph winds, with possible gusts up to 35. But the reporter on site said winds below, where houses are threatened, were calm.

Meanwhile ash is falling and the smell of smoke is strong. It’s stuffy, but we have all our windows shut here.

We also had a power outage. KEYT reported that nearly all of Santa Barbara and Goleta were knocked out by smoke affecting the main power lines into town, which come over the mountains from the North. (The other main power lines come over the mountains near Gibraltar Peak.) We came back on, but around 70,000 homes are still without power. The County of Santa Barbara has more on the front page of its website (that last link), but no direct link to any single report.

I’ll put up some pictures shortly, taken from our neighborhood close to the center of Santa Barbara itself, about 10 miles by air from the fire center. [Later: It wasn't easy, since the Net's speed has been way down... no doubt Cox is affected by this... but I got at least one picture up: the one above.]

Tuning around the radio dial, I only hear fire news right now on KCSB/91.9 from UCSB, alternating between English and Spanish. The station’s many Web streams are here.

More from The Independent (also on its fire page), Noozhawk, Edhat…

Here is a very deep history of wildfires around Santa Barbara. Scary and important. And here is my post about them, from the last time a fire threatened. I also had some ideas last year about public radio filling the hole left by departed news and “full service” commercial stations (all of which are gone from Santa Barbara). It was on my old blog here, but seems to be gone right now.

[Later...] The Net from Cox, our cable Internet provider, is down. The borrowed Sprint EvDO card, however, works perfectly. I even managed to upload the rest of my fire smoke photo set to Flickr.

Blogging that matters

July 1, 2008 in Blogging, Ideas, Journalism, News | 1 comment

In The right to blog: freedom’s next frontier , Evgeny Morozov came away from Global Voices Online’s Citizens Media Summit in Budapest with a perspective on blogging that is refreshingly free of U.S.-centric tech and political preoccupations, and grounded in truly serious social and political concerns elsewhere. Some excerpts:

  …these idealistic people did not talk much about gadgets, fashion, or campaign-financing; nor rush to praise or scorn Barack Obama or John McCain; nor fret over the latest celebrity-hunt or political trick in the style of Gawker or the Huffington Post. Instead, they got into heated discussions (often in heavily accented English) over a different set of topics: internet filtering, human-rights violations, and the future of freedom of expression.

  This, then, was a different kind of blogger and a different order of reality. The background of many of the participants told the story: for in their countries of origin many at the Budapest gathering sustain their blogs in face of the threat or reality of arrest, intimidation and beating from the authorities. Their enemies are real, not imaginary. Their blogs are exercises in courage.

  …Even in places with low internet penetration, blogs can still have a significant impact in creating channels to voice dissent and influence wider media networks. Kenyan bloggers, for example, have built synergistic relationships with the country’s radio journalists, who have come to rely on blogs for materials for their programmes, thus making blogs accessible (albeit indirectly) to virtually anyone in the country.

  …The Budapest experience suggests that the movement slowly emerging on the margins of the blogosphere shares much in common with an older generation of those who sought to “speak truth to power”.

  …The ubiquity of the internet – accessible via computers or mobile-phones in almost any corner of the planet – is being matched by the growth in explicit and implicit restrictions on free speech.

  …The long-term balance of forces in this contest is poised. If not all governments have the time, money, or patience for systematic censorship, they may resort to an easier and cheaper way to collect a person’s email password: imprisonment and, eventually, torture. Today, the greatest threat to freedom of expression online is not web censorship but mistreatment of bloggers.

And finally,

  The Citizen Media Summit raised the idea that the equivalent of the Reporters without Borders group – a “Bloggers without Borders” – might be created to lobby for bloggers’ release from jail and right to speak freely. But would bloggers get the same protection as journalists and political prisoners; could traditional groups expand their role and make such a new organisation unnecessary? Such are the questions that western governments and many traditional human-rights organisations – as well as bloggers themselves – must answer as soon as possible.

Blogs are journals (as I’ve said many times). As we saw at this summit, blogs in many places are about as serious as journals can get — and among the most essential of emerging institutions in civic life. So, rather than start a new borderless organization just for bloggers, how about expanding Reporters Without Borders to include bloggers as well? I’d say more about it, but I can’t get the Reporters Without Borders site  rsf.org, for reporters sans frontieres) to load. Here’s the Wikipedia page. That’s where I discover that to some degree it’s already happening. Reporters sans frontières – Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents is an RSF publication with sections contributed by Dan Gillmor, Jay Rosen and Ethan Zuckerman, a co-founder of Global Voices Online.

In any case, blogging matters for the same reason journalism has always mattered. Discussions at the Citizen Media Summit highlight that fact.

Obama as Reagan 2.0

June 24, 2008 in Journalism, News, Politics | 7 comments

Caught a bit of Michael Krasny’s Forum yesterday on KQED, and heard that George Lakoff will be on the second hour today: 10-11am, Pacific time.  Michael is among the most intellectual and probing of interviewers, and I look forward to hearing how he does with George. If you miss that, get the podcast.

What you’ll hear from George about politics, and especially about the appeal of Barack Obama, is unlike anything you’ll hear anywhere else. And perhaps more important as well, because George’s work has had a deep influence on the Obama campaign, and especially the candidate’s speechwriting.

This first post-primary TV ad by the Obama campaign. Listen to Lakoff and you’ll see exactly how it appeals to deep unconscious meanings of shared values across political divides. Reagan did it in 1980, and by the time the next decade was over the Republicans were the party of traditional American values while the Democrats were the party of tax’n’spend Liberals, fading unions and collections of minority interest groups. Blame talk radio and Fox News for that, if you like (or the Democrats themselves, who certainly deserve it); but it was Reagan’s work. And it was genius. George Lakoff has studied that genius. So has Barack Obama.

In the primaries Obama beat the Clinton machine with a much more modern and functional one, geared to a wider, deeper appeal: one targeted across political divides.

Ignore policy statements for a minute. Ignore “issues”. Ignore race, voting records and the bullshit that gasses up TV news. Look at how Obama appeals. Ask What are the deeper sensibilities he is appealing to? Then look back at what Reagan did in 1980, and through the presidency that followed. Then look at how well Obama is raising money and weakening the oppositional resolve of conservatives like George Will.

The best competitors learn from both their own mistakes and their opponents successes. The Obama Campaign has been doing that for the Democratic party from the start.

In November, the best Reagan will win.

Clues vs. Trains, cont’d

May 31, 2008 in Business, VRM, problems | 3 comments

For some reason this blog has failed to post the comment that I just wrote in response to Simon Edhouse’s latest comment in response to the Clues vs. Trains post. It’s within a good dialog that involves Simon’s post here, which makes some subtle but important points about the degree to which the client-server nature of commercial activity on the Web contributes to normative acceptance of the many silos there. I’m trying to convince Simon that we’re on his side in opposition to that. Anyway, here’s what I just tried to post:

  Simon,
  We need the invention that mothers the necessity. One “bite” I hope will hold is the relbutton on iPhones and other mobile devices, giving listeners a way to interact with, and pay for, otherwise free online radio streams and podcasts. I haven’t said too much publicly about this yet because we have a lot of details to work out. But on the “sell” side we already have the interest of (and participation by) Forces That Be in public broadcasting, just for starters.
  Q: “It’s going to need vendor buy-in to actually work?”
  Not at first. But we have a data type escrowed on the buyer’s side called MLOTT, for Money Left On The Table. That should help.
  Q: “You can’t shame them into action”
  Not the plan.
  Q: “or count on enlightening them”
  Not the plan either. Some of “them” are among “us” to begin with anyway.
  Q: Vendors are not going to volunteer to be ‘managed’
  Carrot before stick. It has to be attractive. That’s the plan.
  Q: “… the name of the meme itself, almost jinxes it, for non-adoption by traditional product/service suppliers in the value-chain.”
  It’s a big world. There are lots of vendors, some more traditional than others. We don’t need to boil the ocean here. We just need to get a few lagoons heated up first. That’s why starting with public media will help.

By the way, after I failed to post that on this blog, I tried posting a comment on Simon’s blog, which is on Blogger. There I was given three choices for identifying myself: Google/Blogger, OpenID and URL. Sxipper, which is normally helpful, got in the way of the first and wouldn’t let me get it to work. I forgot all of my OpenID IDs, and Blogger told me I had “illegal characters” in http://doc.searls.com.

I’ll tell ya, if all we ever do with VRM is eliminate that kind of gauntlet, I’ll be happy. Oh, by the way, I don’t think any current identity system by itself will cut it — worthy as each may be. When an individual shows up at a site, or otherwise interacts with an entity or a service in the networked world (and not just on the Web), we need to know if a relationship is already in place, and then skip consciousness-required-identification (hell, let’s call that CRI) of ourselves. And no vendor alone is going to give that to us. We need to make the user the point of integration and origination. We have to make the individual the driver, and not just the center of vendor-side “attention” or whatever. Code has to be present on our side that says to the other side that a relationship already exists, or could exist (on our terms and not just theirs), and then let computation take care of the rest.

An open radio for anybody’s streams

May 8, 2008 in Ideas, VRM | 6 comments

PaidContent.org reviews the announcement by CBS of “a new media player desktop app that brings together song personalization and recommendation for users, with a broad, contexual canvas for marketers to reach listeners.”

It goes on,

  The new media player, called Play.It, groups all stations in the CBS Radio network together, providing a wide choice of formats for users and advertisers. The player features large space for contextual ads that displays marketers’ slides, along with banner ads that are synched with the content coming out of the player.

Imagine a car radio that only played one owner’s stations and nobody else’s. (Oh, we already have those. They’re called Sirius and XM.)

Then there’s this:

  The deal that CBS and AOL Radio announced last month is key to CBS Radio achieving its goal of being the “number one internet radio station.” Goodman claimed that will be the case when the unified AOL/CBS network launches next month. That led into further promises of the much talked about integration with Last.fm, which CBS bought last May for $280 million. Lastly, Goodman previewed a new internet radio ad program Called the i5 – with a logo designed like an official Interstate Highway sign – that promises seamless cross-network, cross-platform deals.

Fred Wilson unpacks this a bit. A sample:

  As my friend David Goodman explained, when the next Eliot Spitzer moment happens, you can go from the wonderful WNEW stream to 1010 WINS to get the news and then go back, all in a single state of the art flash player.

He also tweets “These guys have nailed it”.

No, they haven’t. It’s a closed system from a closed-minded company. As of today WNEW doesn’t have an open live stream, via .mp3 or anything else. They have their own live player you can only use on their site. WINS has no live stream at all, near as I can tell (correction: it has one just like WNEW, that’s a player that runs only in a browser window), though it does have podcasts.

Here’s an exercise. If you have iTunes (which most of you probably do), click on Radio under Library. Count how many live streams they have there. “Alternative” has 146. “Public” has 94. “College radio” has 37. And you can add whatever you like with the “open stream” command. Go to a station like KRCL and you’ll find a bunch of choices that in many browsers will automatically open iTunes or the player of your choice. Chances are most or all of them don’t bother you with ads.

All the stations in the iTunes directory, and countless more, already comprise a wide-open radio dial controlled by no one company.

I don’t care how pretty CBS/AOL make the UI, or how big the back-end deals are. If it’s just another silo’d sluice for advertising and mass-appeal “content” from a single source and its partners, it’s not radio. And it’s not fulfilling the promise of the Web, which is direct interaction between any two parties, where anybody can produce, consume or both.

A real open market supports transaction, conversation and relationship between anybody and everybody, on terms any party can assert and any party can accept or reject. It’s not “your choice of silo” alone. It has business models other than just advertising. And at is base are open standards for interaction.

There will be far more business in an open world with many kinds of radios, from many sources, playing anything by anybody for anybody, than there will be in yet another closed system by yet another bunch of big boys trying to turn the Web into a 1980s-style online service with a Web 2.0 paint job and all the advertising you can stand.

This CBS thing is a silo. Sez Fred,

  And that flash player can be launched whenever you visit a CBS radio station’s website, whenever you play an AOL radio station, and whenever you play a custom station you or your friends create using the new CBS digital radio network

We can do better.

In fact, we will do exactly that. Stay tuned.

Story vs. Reality

May 5, 2008 in Blogging, Ideas, Journalism, Past | 14 comments

Bill Moyers on Rev. Wright (via Dave):

  Behold the double standard: John McCain sought out the endorsement of John Hagee, the war-mongering Catholic-bashing Texas preacher who said the people of New Orleans got what they deserved for their sins. But no one suggests McCain shares Hagee’s delusions, or thinks AIDS is God’s punishment for homosexuality. Pat Robertson called for the assassination of a foreign head of state and asked God to remove Supreme Court justices, yet he remains a force in the Republican religious right. After 9/11 Jerry Falwell said the attack was God’s judgment on America for having been driven out of our schools and the public square, but when McCain goes after the endorsement of the preacher he once condemned as an agent of intolerance, the press gives him a pass.

  Jon Stewart recently played a tape from the Nixon White House in which Billy Graham talks in the oval office about how he has friends who are Jewish, but he knows in his heart that they are undermining America. This is crazy; this is wrong — white preachers are given leeway in politics that others aren’t.

  Which means it is all about race, isn’t it? Wright’s offensive opinions and inflammatory appearances are judged differently. He doesn’t fire a shot in anger, put a noose around anyone’s neck, call for insurrection, or plant a bomb in a church with children in Sunday school. What he does is to speak his mind in a language and style that unsettle some people, and says some things so outlandish and ill-advised that he finally leaves Obama no choice but to end their friendship. We are often exposed us to the corroding acid of the politics of personal destruction, but I’ve never seen anything like this ? this wrenching break between pastor and parishioner before our very eyes. Both men no doubt will carry the grief to their graves. All the rest of us should hang our heads in shame for letting it come to this in America, where the gluttony of the non-stop media grinder consumes us all and prevents an honest conversation on race. It is the price we are paying for failing to heed the great historian Jacob Burckhardt, who said “beware the terrible simplifiers”.

Well, there were stories at their times about Fallwell, Robertson and McCain & Hagee. They weren’t as big as Obama and Wright, but they were still stories.

Indeed, we need honest conversation sabout race. I thought Barack Obama’s speech on the subject right after the Wright mess first broke was an excellent opener for lots of conversations, many of which are still going on.

We need honest conversations about gender too. A couple days ago my wife caught an interview on NPR with a voter in North Carolina who regretted that the choice among democratic presidential candidates had come down to a black man and a woman — and that he’d prefer the former over the latter. Of course, that was just one voter, but still: what does that say? Other things being equal, is sexism a bigger handicap to a female candidate than race is to a black candidate? Before I heard that, I hadn’t considered the possibility. Nor the possibility that voters in the U.S. might be less favoring of women candidates than voters in Israel, the U.K., Germany and India, all of which have elected women as heads of state. Something more to think and talk about, if we can possibly get past the personalities at hand.

The Wright-Obama story, however, isn’t just about race. It’s about stories. It’s about the reason we need to “beware the terrible simplifiers”. Because simplification is what journalists do.

Even the best reporters don’t just communicate facts. They organize those facts into stories. That’s what they’re assigned to write, or to show on TV, or report on the radio, and that’s what they do. And they do it because stories are by nature interesting. They are, I believe, the base format of human interest. Here’s how I described that format in an earlier post:

  To understand journalism, you need to know the nature of The Story. Every story has three elements: 1) a character, 2) a problem, and 3) movement toward resolution. The character could be a person, a cause, a ball club — doesn’t matter, as long as the reader (or the viewer, or the listener) can identify with it (or him, or her, or them). The problem is what keeps us reading forward, turning the pages, or staying tuned in. It’s what keeps things interesting. And the motion has to vector toward resolution, even if the conclusion is far off in the future.

In the Wall Street Journal, columnist Daniel Henninger asks, Where are Obama’s Friends? The story, in Henninger’s words: “supporters who let Barack Obama hang out to dry”. (He doesn’t mention Bill Moyers, who certainly qualifies now.)

We need to remember that all stories are simplifications. Sometimes they are terrible, and sometimes not. But still, they always veer toward the simple, because that’s what’s most interesting.

Back on December 11, 2005 — long before there were blogs, but not long after I learned to write in HTML — I posted Microsoft + Netscape: Why the Press Needs to Snap Out of its War-Coverage Trance. (It was one of the many articles I failed to sell to a magazine, but still managed to post on the Web.) The bottom lines:

  The Web is a product of relationships, not of victors and victims. Not one dime Netscape makes is at Microsoft’s expense. And Netscape won’t bleed to death if Microsoft produces a worthy browser. The Web as we know it won’t be the same in six weeks, much less six months or six years. As a “breed of life,” it is original, crazy and already immense. It is not like anything. To describe it with cheap-shot war and sports metaphors is worse than wrong — it is bad journalism.

Actually, it’s typical journalism. More than a dozen years later, it’s a lesson I’m still learning.

BitTransmitters

March 26, 2008 in Ideas, Journalism, Places, problems | 7 comments

More than a year ago I suggested to folks from Frontline that they put out their shows on BitTorrent, serving as the Alpha Seed. I’m pretty sure Dave Winer (at the same conference) said the same thing. Maybe I got the idea (like so many others) from Dave.

I also remember thinking, if not saying, that BitTorrent distro was inevitable. The economics of transmission map nicely to the sociology of the show. The market is a conversation among seeds. This is radically different from the transmitter-based system we have now.

So now comes news from Michael O’Connor Clarke that the CBC is quietly releasing one of their most popular shows on BitTorrent. And that it’s DRM free. As it ought to be.

Read the whole post. Follow the links. There lies the future.

Here in the U.S. the new challenge is for the entities we call stations to find roles and relevancies other than distribution of network shows.

The only answer, I believe, is the “One Fond Hope” I appended to the Ten Prophesies I uttered on a public media panel (and in this post at Linux Journal) exactly one year after delivering the BitTorrent distro advice to the Frontline folks (and to the rest of public media folks attending my closing talk there).

The idea is outlined here.

CBC can go with BitTorrent because they’re not defined as just a collection of stations. That is, they have stations, and they produce and distribute; but they are not tied to any one band or medium for distribution. When AM radio became too retro, they went about dumping it (including CBL/740, on which I used to listen to stories late at night when I was a kid growing up in New Jersey).

It’s different here in the U.S., where stations run the show. Literally. They still can, but they’ll have to become far more involved with their local and regional communities — which need no longer be defined by the reach of signals from transmitters. Because the new transmitters, in many cases, will be the listeners and viewers.

Bonus link.

Another.

Another.

The future accellerates

March 14, 2008 in Journalism | 3 comments

I’ll be on a podcast later today with Dennis Haarsager, who was already a blogger before he was suddenly told last week to fill the CEO shoes that had just been vacated at .

As it happens Dennis and I were both on the “Technology and Trends: What’s Around the Bend” session at IMA 2008 several weeks ago.

Here are the slides from my brief talk at that panel. Here’s Dennis’ latest post, going over his new job and the challenges facing public broadcasting. His money paragraph:

  So this isn’t a battle between the content layer and the emerging media part of the distribution layer any more than it’s a battle between the content layer and transmitters. People now have and are making a wide variety of choices in how they get programming. We must make it easy for them to access it. If we make it a contest between layers, our users will lose and ultimately so will we.

Agreed. Earlier Dennis says online distribution is coming on much faster than broadcasting did in its developing years. That’s key. Today BitTorrent is a transmitter. An iTouch is a radio. In most urban and suburban locaitons, your favorite programs and stations will both be easier to tune on a hand-held with a wi-fi or a cell connection than on a car radio with a tuner. Producers and listeners will be closer than ever, and stations will face steeper challenges than ever to remain relevant participants in local and regional culture, and not remain distributors of national programming.

Lots of comments below that post, by the way. Check ‘em out.

Unpacking some digressions

March 9, 2008 in Journalism | 7 comments

Here’s an interview with B.L. Ochman, in which she asks me how (roughly speaking) I drink from the Niagra of information in which all online writers stand. Reading it this morning, I see it gives the impression that 1) I have some kind of formal or routinized approach, and 2) that I no longer look at RSS search engines and feed readers. Neither is true.

Much of the time I’m reactive. Such as this morning. A few minutes ago I got up, walked up to the attic where my “office” is, sat down at the laptop, and decided to start by closing some of the too-many tabs that are open in Firefox. I got to the one with B.L.’s interview and decided to post this pointer. Now, being my digressive self, I’m writing something more about it.

The tab was opened in the first place by my feed reader, when I clicked on the feed I’ve had for years of a keyword search for my name. I look at that feed once every few days or weeks. There are also feeds of searches for Linux, Linux Journal, VRM, tiddlywiki, Berkman, Berkman Center, Bob Frankston, net neutrality, public radio and public media. At the moment. These change, depending on what I’m writing about. The older feeds are from Technorati, and the newer ones are from either s.technorati.com or from . Even though I still consider Google Blogsearch inferior to Technorati in the sum of stuff it finds — and even though GB lacks some of the useful stuff Technorati provides, such as the trend graph and the ability to search for tags — it’s simple, has no diaplay advertising to slow it down, and let’s me create an RSS feed in one click. Same with s.technorati.com.

Anyway, I just weeded my reader. I do that every month or two. I also added a Cluetrain search feed, because there seems to have been more commentary going on about Cluetrain these last few months. Perhaps oddly, I don’t think I’ve ever subscribed to a Cluetrain search before.

I also react to email, which is still a torrent, even though nearly all my spam problem has been cleared up by running mail to my Searls.com address through the Gmail laundry. So far this morning I’ve avoided it. Same goes for IM, or IMs. I have three of those: Jabber, AIM and Skype, and dozens of contacts combined. If I fire it up, I’ll be hearing from somebody by one of them in a matter of seconds, so I leave it off more than I used to. Not good, because often there are people (co-workers, family members) who need to get in touch with me right now.

For that, of course, there is still the phone. My not-very-trusty old Treo 700p still serves that purpose, until the Verizon contract runs out this summer and I get something that works on GSM, so I can take it overseas as well. (I also have a GSM mobile I use only overseas, but would rather have one phone than two.) I’ve also lately become appreciative of SMS texting. I call this my “bat phone” mode. Works great except in the subway. Hard to tell somebody downtown that you’re going to be late when there’s no signal.

Anyway, my actual work is mostly proactive. In that mode I use Google so much that I don’t even think about it. I also use Google’s and Yahoo’s image search engines. It’s weird that Google’s seems systematically to exclude Flickr images, while Yahoo’s promotes them. Example, searches for “chilterns” in Google’s and Yahoo’s image search engines. Be nice to combine both somehow.

Anyway, time to go back downstairs, make coffee, have breakfast and otherwise enjoy a mostly-offline Sunday with the family.

Frames that prevent a neutral Net

February 27, 2008 in Ideas, News, Science, problems | 8 comments

We’d hardly yearn for Net Neutrality laws if Comcast and other carriers truly understood that the Net is more than an interactive TV channel with troublesome users.

Unfortunately there are technical as well as busines and political reasons why they fail to grok the Net. A big one is DOCSIS, which is the standard framework inside which cable companies funnel Net traffic. DOCSIS all but requires that they think of the Net as just another TV channel. Because that’s how DOCSIS frames the Net. It’s something delivered over analog channels inside a coaxial cable. Carriers can “bond” channels to widen the bandwidth, but they’re still dealing with radio waves going down a coaxial pipe on one or more channels and back up on others. Asymmetry is built in, simply because the return upstream path is, by design, on lower frequency channels with less carrying capacity. It’s also useless to debate with a cable comapny the need (or lack of it) for QoS (Quality of Service), because QoS has been part of DOCSIS since 1999.

Fiber deployments have different capabilities and restrictions, although most of those are modeled on cable TV, for good business reasons. Verizon’s fiber (FiOS) system, for example, is not designed primarily for Internet users, but for couch potatoes. Those tubers are abundant and low-hanging (or ground-dwelling) fruit.

One can’t blame carriers for going after easy pickings; but one can blame them for wearing blinders toward the massive opportunities that appear when they deliver wide-open bandwidth on which nearly anything can run… and to discover their first-mover advantages there.

But, thanks to these ancient frames, the Net is seen by the carriers (and the FCC) as tertiary to their primary and secondary services: telephony and television, or vice versa. That’s why it’s still just gravy on your phone or cable bill.

Bonus link.

Can KRCL be saved?

February 20, 2008 in News | 3 comments

I discovered in January of last year when I was driving from Salt Lake City to Las Vegas. It was a Sunday morning, and the music was some kind of Native American fusion mix that I couldn’t turn off. I love radio like that: radio that surprises me, radio that’s unlike anything anywhere else except in the sense that it’s good, radio produced by real people sharing original work that challenges and engages listeners.

I was amazed that KRCL existed, and in Salt Lake City of all places, and with a big signal too: as big as any other in that part of the West. It was the kind of station I expected to find in artsy-liberal enclaves such as Santa Cruz or Austin or Madison. But here it was, serving up fun and challenging stuff for one of the most Republican states in the nation.

I have KRCL’s stream programmed into our Sonos system at our home in Santa Barbara, where I listen from time to time. But since we spend most of our time around Cambridge these days, and our lives are full of Other Stuff, I haven’t listened much in awhile.

So now here I am at the Public Media Conference in Los Angeles, where I just heard that KRCL is going through big changes. Specifically, I was pointed to Dead Air: KRCL is getting a corporate makeover. Is community radio done for? by Ted McDonough in the SL Weekly, which has a follow-up story in KRCL Update [Focus Group Hell] — Get Ready for Baby Boom Radio. Of course, what’s happened is that KRCL isn’t making its fundraising goals, and has a shrinking measured audience. Between focus groups, consultants and other deliberations, a decision has been made to make KRCL into, well, something else. Here’s how Ted McDonough puts it:

  The station started 28 years ago by anti-war protesters, hippies and counterculture activists was now replacing all of its weekday volunteer DJs with three paid radio professionals.
  The change, to take place in two months, appears to be part of a plan hatched by managers and directors to turn KRCL into the best music station in Utah. But then, many think it already is the state’s best music station. And the planned changes raise a larger question:
  If DJs are paid professionals; if they are told what to play; if programming is the result of consultants, market surveys and focus groups of listeners watched from behind one-way glass—is it still community radio?
  “The station as we know it is going away,” says Alison Einerson, a KRCL drive-time volunteer who will soon be off the air.

Now, it could be that KRCL is simply dealing with a fact of life that will become a fact of death for many stations everywhere: listeners have many more choices of (what we now generically call) content, including goods they store and produce for themselves — or for listeners of their own. Certainly that’s involved.

But we still live in a world where all new and old cars come with AM/FM radios, and radio listening on the whole is still strong, and where the flywheels of habit and technology maintain the relevance of advantages stations like KRCL still have — such as a core of listeners, volunteers, relationships and a powerful mountaintop transmitter.

The thing that consultants and focus groups are unlikely to tell you, and that in fact cannot be changed, is where something comes from. In the case of KRCL, that something is hippies and war protesters and music mavens. There’s nothing wrong with KRCL making moves to better serve its community, or from doing what it does better. But there is something wrong with changing what the station is. According to the second SLWeekly story, that’s exactly the plan:

  The consultant’s bottom line: KRCL should play a mix of “heritage rock” and “modern adult contemporary.” In the future, the difference between KRCL and the oldies station will be that KRCL will play the B sides.
  Dominowski said the sound would be like (all together now) WXPN in Philadelphia. That just happens to be the direction station management was hinting at more than one year before the consultant ever set foot in Salt Lake City.

I don’t know where things stand now. The Salt Lake Tribune ran Listeners give KRCL managers an earful for cutting volunteers on February 10. That story makes clear at least two of the problems:

  Although the Salt Lake Valley’s population has grown by nearly half a million people over the past decade, KRCL’s listenership – roughly 35,000 people – declined slightly over the same period, said Roberts, the board chairman. Roberts blames recent technology, such as Internet and satellite radio, that makes it easier for today’s listeners to find the fringe music heard on KRCL.
  The station may have been able to weather the loss of the CPB funds, Maldonado said. But the CPB also negotiates complex music-licensing agreements for KRCL – an invaluable service for a noncommercial station with seven full-time staffers, she said. So last year the station applied for and received an additional $195,000 grant from the CPB. Under the conditions of the grant, KRCL agreed to hire the three DJs, including a music director.

The first thing is, “fringe music” isn’t just a pile of stuff on hard drives. It’s stuff that grows and spreads when connoisseurs share it with others. KRCL should face that challenge by doing a better job, not by abandoning the mission.

The second thing is, the deal with the CPB is turning out to be a bad one (that I suspect is bad even from the CPB’s perspective) — for the simple reason that compliance with the CPB’s requirements are killing the station.

Or maybe not. The Trib piece closes with this:

  Although some listeners are skeptical, Ryan Tronier, KRCL’s program director, believes the station’s musical palette won’t sound much different from how it does now.
  “We’re still going to be playing music you’re not hearing on the commercial end of the dial. It’ll be more than just putting your iPod on ‘random.’ It’ll be a cohesive mix of many genres,” he said. “We’re still going to be the best radio station in town – we’re just going to have more people listening.”

Here’s my own closing thought about that: If I wrote this blog for the largest possible audience, you wouldn’t be reading this right now.

On toiling in Marketing Communications mines

February 15, 2008 in Art, Past | 1 comment

My old friend Steve Lewis and I fell out of touch for almost a quarter century after college, leading almost entirely different lives in different parts of the world. We diverged on graduation in 1969, after having both been philosophy majors. I went on to careers in journalism, retailing, frozen produce wholesaling, ice cream truck driving and radio, among too many others to mention. Steve stayed on an academic track, leveraging Fulbright scholarships and other graces into research and work that had him become fluent in a number of languages and rich in knowledge and experience about countless arcane aspects of history and cuture in the far corners of Europe.

But one thing we had in common: we both also labored in the fields of marketing communications when we weren’t doing other things we enjoyed more.

In his latest Hak Pak Sak blog post, Steve revisits a number of remarkable texts, including a Flemish novel whose lead protagonist’s work recalls some of our own. He describes it this way:

  The Journal, Boorman boasts, has print runs in the millions despite its paid circulation of zero and a full-time staff of nobody. In fact, the publication is an archetypal promotional magazine. Customers can place glowing written and visual portraits of their companies and products in the journal merely by committing themselves to purchasing tens or hundreds of thousands or even millions of copies of off-prints which they pay for in cash or in kind.

An interesting commentary on what’s a little too true about way too much of what at least two of us have had to do for a living.

Obamarama

February 5, 2008 in News | 17 comments

I’m a registered Independent, which means I can’t vote in today’s primary in California. Other states allow Independents to vote in party primaries, but alas, not my state.*

For what it’s worth, I’ve mostly been a none-of-the-above voter for a long time. I’ve voted for Green, Libertarian and other third party candidates in various contests. Mostly that’s because, after being raised Republican and voting mostly Democratic in the 60s and 70s, I got fed up with politics-as-sports (with just two teams) by the 1980s.

I don’t think I ever voted for Bill Clinton, or for his Republican opponents. My votes for Gore and Kerry were not for either of those men, but against George W. Bush, for what are now obvious reasons. Though I’ve always been attracted to outsiders, rebels and underdogs, I never would have voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, and not just because he was a spoiler (and a huge one, it turned out). While I loved Ralph’s early work as a consumer advocate, his ceaselessly one-sided rap got on my nerves by the time he ran for president.

And it’s still one-sidedness that gets to me. That’s why I like Barack Obama. I believe him when he says he wants to get past the politics of division and destruction. He is, by all accounts, a good and smart man who wants to return politics to dialog rather than the partisan yelling that comprises too much of TV commentary and talk radio.

And there’s something more. To many in my generation, Obama reminds us of what we liked best about John and Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King. They gave us hope. (And got themselves killed for it, which raises the same worries about Mr. Obama.)

He is, significantly, the first Democrat running for president that I hear some Republicans actually liking. Maybe that’s because he’s the first candidate of either party whose politics transcends the partisan hatred that’s been with us ever since the Vietnam war.

Zephyr Teachout put it this way in Huffington Post:

  I support Obama — proudly — because he has that difficult to describe, but not difficult to discern, quality of character. He showed it when he persistently pushed through legislation requiring videotaped confessions in Illinois — his graceful, non-triumphalist response to legislative success has then allowed Illinois cops to be evangelists for the process elsewhere. He showed it when, as the guest of the Kenyan government two years ago, he publicly urged his hosts to grapple with corruption and ethnic division.

  Flowing from this strength, his demands on us, as citizens, are genuine demands, not genuflections. When Clinton says that its “all about you,” she means that she will work tirelessly to take care of us (which I believe she would, or pursue what she believed was the best path). When Obama says its “all about you,” he means that unless we find that 5% of citizen leadership in our own communities, unless we organize to oppose kleptocratic and ogopolistic and environmentally ruinous behavior, we cannot transform this country, and, moreover, we cannot hold our heads high as true, self-governing, citizens.

Meanwhile, on the right, Andrew Sullivan puts it this way in The Atlantic:

  …the fundamental point of his candidacy is that it is happening now. In politics, timing matters. And the most persuasive case for Obama has less to do with him than with the moment he is meeting. The moment has been a long time coming, and it is the result of a confluence of events, from one traumatizing war in Southeast Asia to another in the most fractious country in the Middle East. The legacy is a cultural climate that stultifies our politics and corrupts our discourse.

  Obama’s candidacy in this sense is a potentially transformational one. Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America — finally — past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us…

  At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war — not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a momentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade — but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war — and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama — and Obama alone — offers the possibility of a truce.…

  At a time when America’s estrangement from the world risks tipping into dangerous imbalance, when a country at war with lethal enemies is also increasingly at war with itself, when humankind’s spiritual yearnings veer between an excess of certainty and an inability to believe anything at all, and when sectarian and racial divides seem as intractable as ever, a man who is a bridge between these worlds may be indispensable.

  We may in fact have finally found that bridge to the 21st century that Bill Clinton told us about. Its name is Obama.

I agree.

Bonus link from Steve Lewis, who also likes Louis Jordan.

* Apparently, there are workarounds. I didn’t find out about these until it was too late. I have to vote by absentee ballot from Massachusetts, and my form here doesn’t give me that option. But if you’re an independent voter going to a polling place in California, you just have to request a party ballot when you go in.

Public Media in a Zero-Distance World

January 27, 2008 in Future, Journalism, Past, problems | 3 comments

Public Broadcasters Opt for CC is the encouraging title for an informative and linky post by Michelle Thorne at icommons.org.

By subsuming all electronic media, and by placing every recording and playback device at zero functional distance from each other, the Net makes radio and TV transmitters obsolete the moment high-enough-bandwidth wireless connectivity becomes ubiquitous.

We’re one good UI away from the cell phone becoming a radio. (Thanks to the iPhone, it already serves as a TV.) And we’re one smart cell company away from radio- and TV-as-we-know-it from being replaced entirely — or from moving up the next step of the evolutionary ladder.

Public broadcasters know that. That’s one reason they now call themselves “public media”, a move that separates the category from its transport methods. It’s also why they’re thinking hard and long about the role their online transmissions and archives play in a world without physical borders. That’s what Michelle’s article is about.

After visiting positive moves made by a number of institutions, Michelle’s final paragraph makes clear that the challenge is only beginning to be met:

  However, despite many positive strides, creators working for public broadcasters still often find themselves at odds with their institutions’ more traditional copyright policies. In-house legal departments can be reluctant to embrace user-generated content, remixes, downloads, and third-party material, and at times, they may endorse restrictive DRM while resisting new and open media formats. As more and more publicly-funded content goes online, it is important enable and empower users, rather than leaving enriching material to digitally decay.

She could easily have put depressing links behind every one of those “howevers”. If I had more time, I’d do it myself.

Still, it’s good to see movement in a positive direction. I’ll be looking to see more when I attend the IMA’s Public Media 08 conference in Los Angeles next month.

Change the label, not the goods

January 25, 2008 in Art, VRM, problems | 3 comments

Change is in the air at WUMB is a story ran ran in the Boston Globe yesterday, about trouble the U Mass Boston radio station is having with the label for most of its programming: folk. And perhaps the programming itself. It begins:

  Money changes everything, at least for WUMB-FM (91.9). Thanks in part to a recent grant that allowed it to evaluate its mission, the public station may well drop wide-ranging music programs “Mountain Stage” and “Afropop Worldwide” by March 1. The station may even end up dumping its identification as “folk radio.”

  But in exchange, say those in charge, listeners will be getting a station that is more responsive to the community’s needs.

  The impetus for these changes is a station-renewal grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. One of five awarded in July to stations across the country, the grant of approximately $500,000 has allowed WUMB, which is based at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, to poll listeners and conduct focus groups about what the station should be as it finishes its first 25 years on air.

Hey, WUMB: poll me. I like the station. I don’t have a problem with “folk radio” — although the label does call to mind an old Martin Mull line: “Remember the Folk Music Scare of the Sixties? That fiddle and banjo crap almost caught on.”

WUMB’s music isn’t even close to “all fiddle and banjo”. It’s an artfully eclectic mix of what might better be called “traditional” or “americana”. But how do you draw a categorical line around the Subdudes, David Lindley, Shawn Colvin, Goeff Muldaur, JJ Cale, Dolly Parton, Sleepy John… except to say you can’t. You’ve gotta listen to tell.

I started listening on line (in Santa Barbara) before I got to town, and on the radio ever since I moved here in September. My car radio has a button on WUMB, and my Webio runs its streams.

Hope they don’t give me a reason to change that.

[Later...] Actually, the station’s main problem is really its signal. The transmitter puts out only 660 watts at a height of just 207 feet above average terrain. It also doesn’t come from the campus on the shores of Dorchester Bay, but rather from the corner of a golf course in Quincy, a few miles southeast of town. Its signal to the northwest (say, Cambridge and beyond) is too weak to stop “scan” on a car radio. At my house I need the hands of a safecracker to tune it in on our kitchen radio dial.

As an old radio engineering type, I know the dial is too packed with existing signals to offer much if any elbow room for moving the transmitter or raising the power or antenna height; but I’d suggest putting some of that new money toward, say, a booster transmitter on one of the downtown buildings currently shadowing the signal. Or toward buying one or more other stations around the edge of the market. I’ll bet that some of the AMs would come for a bargain. And with “HD” radio coming, some of those signals could carry music at sound qualities that are higher than the current legacy technology allows. In any case, it’s worth some study (if that isn’t happening already).

To its credit, WUMB has a bunch of other signals (actually, stations), two others of which are also on 91.9. That helps. But with money perhaps more could be done.

As for “the community”, I have some other thoughts about that, which I’ll link to here after I put them up.

[Later still...] This morning’s Guest Set features bassist John Troy, providing faves from the Pousette-Dart Band, Little Feat, NRBQ, Tower of Power, Chris Smither, Sal Baglio… Wow. Great, great radio.

Back to the Globe article…

  “There is a definite call to replace some of the syndicated programs with live shows,” says Pat Monteith, general manager of the station, which also broadcasts at 91.7 FM in Newburyport and 1170 AM in Orleans. “Some shows,” she learned, “people want more of.”

  Perhaps most startling, she said, was the reaction to the station’s ID. “Several people [said], ‘I hadn’t listened before, because I really don’t like “folk” music, but when I listen to your station I like it,’ ” Monteith explained. “Even our heaviest listeners find the word ‘folk’ very challenging.”

Hence the headline above.

Toward a VRM system for paying artists

December 30, 2007 in Ideas, Uncategorized, VRM | 6 comments

In The RIAA is Right, Robert Scoble offers a tongue-in-cheek take on the RIAA’s insane idea that ripping one’s own CDs is illegal.* Among other things he says,

  5. This behavior will make sure people buy (or steal) music directly from bands. See how Radiohead did it. By doing that the price for music will go down thanks to fewer intermediaries. RIAA is just helping us get rid of them, which is good for everyone who loves music. See, they are on our side! I’m looking for a site that lets us do Vendor Relationship Management with bands. Doc Searls taught me about VRM. What is that? When we can get the company to do what WE want. Radiohead put the power of setting the price in OUR hands. Brilliant.

Robert is right about all but one thing. Because VRM is about independence as well as engagement, it can’t come from “a site”. Or from anybody other than ourselves. It’s something that lives on the buyer’s side, allowing him or her to relate independently with many suppliers, on terms that are mutually agreeable.

I unpack some of this in a comment under Robert’s post.

A few months ago I also proposed a VRM system that would extend the RadioHead model to any artist.

* According to this post, that’s not really what the RIAA is doing, but they’re “still kinda being jerks about it”.

Knight Knews

October 15, 2007 in Berkman, Ideas, VRM | No comments

I always thought that both WNEW and KNEW (radio stations in New York and San Francisco, respectively) should have been, given their call letters, news stations. Anyway, that thought came to mind again when I wrote the headline above for the news below…

It’s the last day to apply for a Knight News Grant. I put in an application yesterday for what I called Project PayChoice, which would be an effort devoted to making it easy for anybody to pay for any news at all, any time. In other words, to make the consumers of news into its customers. This would be part of at the Berkman Center, and advance on conversations we’ve already been having, toward a supplementary funding model for public radio — one that would equip listeners to much more easily and quickly pay whatever they please for whatever they like on the air or in podcasts (still supporting the station-based membership system that’s long been in place). It’s a long shot, but we’ll see how it goes.

Book it

September 29, 2007 in Blogging, Future, Journalism, News, Past, problems | 1 comment

The Santa Barbara Book & Author Festival started last night with an award presentation to local author T. Coraghessan Boyle, and continues tomorrow with, among other things, a panel titled What’s Next for Newspapers. On the panel will be: Jeramy Gordon, editor and publisher of of the Santa Barbara Daily Sound; Matt Kettman, senior editor of The Independent; Jerry Roberts, author of Never Let Them See You Cry and former managing and executive editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and the Santa Barbara News Press, respectively; Peter Sklar, publisher of Edhat; and Craig Smith, columnist, law professor and author of Craig Smith’s Blog. I’m the moderator.

A few questions running through my mind…

  Will all newspapers eventually be free?

  How can papers, which have a daily or weekly heartbeat, keep up with the hummingbird-heart pulse rate of Web-based journalism?

  Do you see the newspaper becoming Web publications with print versions, or (as they mostly are now) vice versa?

  Is there enough advertising for all of you?

  Will advertising survive as a business model? What will be the mix of advertising and other sources of revenue?

  How do you see the emerging ecosystem that includes bloggers and expert locals who are in good positions to participate in the larger journalistic process?

  What will be the complementary or competitive roles of radio and TV stations in the future local journalistic ecosystem? Bear in mind that analog TV will be a dead chicken in early 2009.

  Is it possible, really, to replace a once-great institution such as the News-Press?

  How do you see each of your roles playing out in the event of an emergency such as an earthquake, a wildfire, a tsunami?

  What do you see as Santa Barbara’s role in the journalistic world? Are we leaders? Followers? Both? Neither?

Be interesting to see how it goes. Hope to see some of ya’ll there.

Toward a new ecology of journalism

September 12, 2007 in Art, Berkman, Blogging, Future, Ideas, Journalism, News, Past, Photography, problems | 28 comments

I managed to irk pretty much everybody with my post Citizen journal breaks a heroic story. Shelley Powers and David Kearns both took issue with the “citizen journalism” concept. Shelley said it doesn’t work, and David pleaded “for the demise of that horrible ‘citizen journalist’ meme”. Liz Straus, who pointed me to the story in the first place, said “Aw Doc, why the focus on citizen journalism and not the focus — as David point’s out — on the oral history that’s been happening since time began?” More than one comment gave David Armano a hard time for apparently preferring to report via Twitter and blog, rather than through mainstream news media. David himself weighed in with good answers to his critics, and added, “This isn’t real journalism and I don’t think anyone would claim it to be (I wouldn’t). It just demonstrates that the average person can tell a story from there perspective. I was there, I saw what I saw and told that story. That’s all.”

But is it?

“Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”, Linus’s Law says. But we have to do better than just de-bugging posts like David Armano’s and mine. The mainstream media never had enough eyeballs, or time, to do a job that was even close to ideal. And now, as advertising money and eyeballs both flood over the banks of mainstream media and out through the surrounding jungle of blogs, twitters, cell calls, text messages and countless other outlets for information, we clearly need to think afresh about re-institutionalizing the means by which we get trustworthy news to each other, and how we then debug and interpret it along the way.

We’ve not only hardly started to build the new (or renewed) institutions we require; we barely have a common understanding for what we’re doing in the meantime. “Citizen journalism” sounds right to some, “horrible” to others. Blogs are journals in the literal sense, but few carry the same breed of responsibility long ferried by major newspapers and magazines. (Although fate may put bloggers in that position from time to time.) While we debate whether or not new media authors practice “real journalism”, the need to report What’s Going On not only persists, but has more means than ever.

This is why I’ve lamented the dying not only of local newspapers, but of full-service local radio in most smaller U.S. cities, and the failure thus far of everybody (bloggers, public radio, you name it) to fill the void. Old acts are failing and new acts are not fully together.

Earlier this year Dan Gillmor and JD Lasica put together five basic Principles of Citizen Journalism (accuracy, thoroughness, transparency, fairness, independence) that should refresh veteran journalists while educating rookie ones. We also need new institutions where these kinds of principles can be practiced. And new practices where these principles can be institutionalized.

If you’re looking for a good cross-section of possibilities here, check out JLab and the Knight-Batten awards, which are given to worthy efforts in constructive journalistic directions.

While all these are good, the larger trend to watch over time is the inevitable decline in advertising support for journalistic work, and the growing need to find means for replacing that funding — or to face the fact that journalism will become largely an amateur calling, and to make the most of it.

This trend is hard to see. While rivers of advertising money flow away from old media and toward new ones, both the old and the new media crowds continue to assume that advertising money will flow forever. This is a mistake. Advertising remains an extremely inefficient and wasteful way for sellers to find buyers. I’m not saying advertising isn’t effective, by the way; just that massive inefficiency and waste have always been involved, and that this fact constitutes a problem we’ve long been waiting to solve, whether we know it or not.

Google has radically improved the advertising process, first by making advertising accountable (you pay only for click-throughs) and second by shifting advertising waste from ink and air time to pixels and server cycles. Yet even this success does not diminish the fact that advertising itself remains inefficient, wasteful and speculative. Even with advanced targeting and pay-per-click accountability, the ratio of “impressions” to click-throughs still runs at lottery-odds levels.

The holy grail for advertisers isn’t advertising at all, because it’s not about sellers hunting down buyers. In fact it’s the reverse: buyers hunting for sellers. It’s also for customers who remain customers because they enjoy meaningful and productive relationships with sellers — on customers’ terms and not just on vendors’ alone. This is VRM: Vendor Relationship Management. It not only relieves many sellers of the need to advertise — or to advertise heavily — but also allows CRM (Customer Relatinship Management) to actually relate, and not just to capture and control.

As VRM grows, advertising will shrink to the the perimeters defined by “no other way”. It’s hard to say how large those perimeters will be, or how much journalism will continue to thrive inside of them; but the sum will likely be less than advertising supports today.

The result will be a combination of two things: 1) a new business model for much of journalism; or 2) no business model at all, because much of it will be done gratis, as its creators look for because effects — building reputations and making money because of one’s work, rather than with one’s work. Some bloggers, for example, have already experienced this. Today I have fellowships at two major universities, plus consulting and speaking work, all of which I enjoy because of blogging. The money involved far exceeds what I might have made from advertising on my blogs. (For what it’s worth, I have never made a dime of advertising money by blogging, nor have I sought any.)

On the with effects side — money made with journalism, rather than because of it — perhaps the new institutions of journalism will become more accountable as journalism’s consumers pay its producers directly. I don’t know how we’ll get to that, but it will necessarily involve VRM, and I would love to help build it.

One sure thing: a primary building material for the future institutions of journalism will be the work of amateurs sort, the best of which will honor that adjective’s original meaning: one who loves a subject, but does not require payment for obsessing constructively about it. Again, the old system does not go away, but grows to include both the old and the new.

Just don’t expect advertising to fund the new institutions in the way it funded the old.

Grounds for talking radio

August 30, 2007 in Future, News, Past, Places, Science, Travel | 4 comments

Between our Sirius satellite radio receiver, the MP3 player, breaks for public radio and talking to each other, I didn’t have much time to indulge my interest in exploring the high soil conductivities that make AM radio so anomalously advantaged in the plains states. But I did notice that KOA/850 from Denver carried halfway across Kansas by day, and WNAX was audible across all of Kansas, from one end to the other — from Colby to Kansas City and beyond that well into Missouri — with just 5000 watts on 570am from Yankton, South Dakota. (The max power on U.S. and Canadian AM stations is 50000 watts.)

Long disatance AM is no big deal at night, when stations bounce off the ionosphere. But in the day AM stations need to carry along the ground. In most places the ground conductivity is low. In the entire East, much of the midwest, and nearly all mountainous areas, ground conductivity is very low. The lowest of the low are around Atlanta and in Long Island. But in some prairie regions, parts of Texas and Oklahoma, and in flat places near San Franciso and California’s Central Valley, the ground conductivity is remarkably high. For that reason a 5000-watt station at the bottom of the dial (like WNAX/570 and KFYR/550 in Bismark) can go hundreds of miles along the ground. My mother grew up listening to both WNAX and KFYR in Napoleon, North Dakota, which was near neither station. WNAX is helped also by having a full half-wave antenna, which on 570KHz is around 900 feet high. So it’s using an unusually efficient radiator. Most stations at that end of the dial use shorter towers. Signals at those frequencies carry so well that going for the full antenna length would bring diminishing returns. (On AM, the whole tower is the antenna.) And by now they’re all grandfathered with whatever facilities they put up way back when. AM stations require a lot of real estate, so the costs are now, in most cases, prohibitive.

Still, while listening to these effectively huge stations, while driving across the plains, I realized why talk radio — especially the right wing sort — sank roots here. Though I gotta say it was great that WNAX was highly focused (at least when I listened) on “the markets” for agricultural commodities. Made me think the country’s agricultural base was somehow still intact.

The fire(s) last time

August 14, 2007 in Future, News, Past, Places, problems | 1 comment

The Santa Barbara County Fire Department has put out a Red Flag Alert:

As of 2:00 pm, August 13, 2007, the Santa Barbara County Fire Department, in conjunction with other fire agencies in the county, has declared a county-wide “RED FLAG ALERT”. This alert will be in effect until 9:00 pm on August 15th, 2007, when it will be reassessed. This “RED FLAG ALERT” is being declared based on the change in weather conditions towards a warmer period coupled with low relative humidities and predicted Sundowner winds in the South coast Area.

Inciweb says the alert is “a reminder to local residents to be fire safe”.

Well, the main problem for the whole South Coast is actually the high degree of fire safety that has actually been sustained for a record length of time. Our last big wild fire was Painted Cave, in 1990 — seventeen years ago. Going back in time, fires were five, six, two, six, five, one and nine years earlier.

That means we’ve been lulled into a degree of lassitude about the likelihood of wildfires. Yes, fire prevention, fighting and supresion have all improved. but the fact remains that Santa Barbara is sandwiched between the sea and mountains, literally, of what firefighters call “fuel”. If a fire comes down the mountain, pushed by “sundowner” or Santa Ana winds, we’re going to see dozens, hundreds or thousands of homes burned within hours.

I was witness to the Oakland fire of 1990, which killed 26 people and burned over 3000 homes in a matter of hours. At one point houses were exploding at a rate of one every four seconds. We had friends who lost both homes and neighbots there. I also toured the area not long afterward as a board member of a local Red Cross chapter. It was a life-changing experience. I saw cars melted to metal puddles. Home sites where even chimneys were gone, their bricks and rocks exploded by heat exceeding that of steel mill blast furnaces.

To help us understand what all of us face but relatively few of us have experienced, I’ll point to an excellent series on Santa Barbara Wildfires at Santa Barbara Outdoors. Here’s the list, with links to each:

SANTA BARBARA WILDFIRES

I said here that we need a full-service public radio station to do what our existing public and commercial stations do not appear to be in a position to do, should an Oakland-grade fire come down the mountains and into town.

That will take awhile to make happen. Meanwhile, what will we do to inform ourselves if a fire like that comes next week, next month or even next year?

I have some thoughts about that, which I’ve been getting ready to publish in a post at Linux Journal. Look for that on Thursday, after I’m back in town. (I’ve been in Boston and Baltimore for the past several weeks.)

Tags: , , .

Zaca fire continues

August 7, 2007 in Uncategorized | 6 comments

Ray Ford has an excellent piece in the Independent on the .

The good news:

  With today’s morning fog — almost a misty drizzle — Paradise, Rosario Park and Camino Cielo residents can rest assured that the danger is over for them.

The bad news:

  By day’s end the fire had crossed almost the entire length of Buckhorn Road from Little Pine to Big Pine Mountain — more than a ten-mile section — causing the fire to expand dramatically into the Dick Smith Wilderness and, more ominously, towards Santa Barbara. What had been a relatively narrow fire confined to the deep interior of the backcountry now has more than twenty miles of uncontrolled fire line that now has multiple heads, with each posing its own threat.

  The Zaca Fire has not only moved into an entirely new phase, there is a potential for major fire growth, loss of huge chunks of habitat and a serious threat to the South Coast.

This map from the NewsPress shows the expanded fire perimeter. Not sure how it matches up with the Independent’s report. The official maps are at InciWeb, which is down as I write this.

It’s frustrating to follow this from the other side of the country. I’m listening right now to “The Baron” Ron Herron on AM 1290, the News-Press station. There’s a link to the stream on the NewsPress home page. Even live coverage is locked behind a subscriber paywall, however. And the station itself has no webpage, which is inexcusable for a news station.

KTMS is back to being “AM 990″. I guess they’re still also on 1490 and have decided not to sell off the 990 signal. But there’s nothing live on the site. No streams. Dennis Miller (yes, that one) is on right now. He’s actually a good morning man. You can subscribe to the show for $49.95/year. Podcasts are free, it appears. Dennis lives in Montecito, the thoroughly wooded town that comprises the East End of Santa Barbara.

Now The Barron is reading news from this morning’s paper. This has been the routine since AM 1290 went on the air a couple years ago. The news station itself has no apparent news staff. The station just ran CNN news, and is now running BBC World Service. Not exactly Local Stuff.

It’s going on a month since I wrote Lighting a fire for public radio in Santa Barbara. Nothing much has changed since then, other than the urgency.

I won’t be back in town until after the 15th. If we still have a house, and a town, it would be good to meet and talk about the possibilities. A number of people have written me with support for getting the ball rolling. If you want to add to that number, say so in the comments below, or send an email to (my first hame)@(my last name).com.

About

August 1, 2007 in Uncategorized | 57 comments

It would be nice if I had one career role. But I don’t. That would be too normal. So here’s what I play:

  • Senior editor for Linux Journal, the original (and still the leading) Linux publication.
  • Fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. There I head ProjectVRM. I am also working on a book titled The Intention Economy: What Happens When Customers Get Real Power.
  • Research Fellow at the Center for Information Technology & Society at UC Santa Barbara. There my current focus is on work toward a book titled The Giant Zero.
  • One of the four authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, the iconoclastic web site that became the best-selling book in 2000 and still sells around the world in many languages. A 10th anniversary edition is due out in June 2009.
  • A radio veteran from way back (that’s where the “Doc” nickname came from). I sublimate that now by taking part in podcasts by others, including Steve Gillmor’s Gillmor Gang.
  • A marketing, PR and advertising veteran. Most notably I co-founded Hodskins Simone & Searls, which was born in North Carolina in the late ’70s and grew in the late ’80s and early ’90s to become one of Silicon Valley’s top advertising and public relations agencies. (HS&S was absorbed by Publicis Technology in 1998.)
  • A lifelong writer whose byline has appeared in OMNI, Wired, PC Magazine, The Standard, The Sun, Upside, The Globe & Mail, Release 1.0 and lots of other places, including (of course) Linux Journal. Some archives are collected at Reality 2.0, which is at my personal portal, Searls.com, which is also home to my consultancy, The Searls Group.
  • A frequent speaker on any and all the above subjects. Here is my profile (now getting real old and in need of updating) at the agency that handles my gigs, Leading Authorities.

In 2005 I received the Google/O’Reilly Open Source Award for Best Communicator.

In 2007 I was named one of the 100 Most Influential People in IT by eWeek.

Since I’m always working on too many things, and will only stop when I’m dead, I want my epitaph to read, “He was almost finished.”

I can be reached by email through =doc. That’s my “i-name”. Using it keeps spammers from grabbing my email address. If that’s too complicated for you, just send an email to [my first name] @ [my last name] .com.

Disclosures: I consult, or am on the advisory boards of Ping Identity Corp., British Telecom, Socialtext, SpikeSource, B5 Media, PlanetEye and Technorati. Some involve equity. My other (pathetically small) stock holdings are in funds.

Copyright 2009 The Doc Searls Weblog

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