It started out as a dead-simple blogging platform, and over the past 15 months, I’ve watched as the Posterous team has added more and more features. But no matter how many features they add, it’s still dead-simple to use. Who would’ve thought?

We’ll I’m done playing with Posterous, and I’m ready to get serious: my personal blog is now there, and this site remains behind as a relic of bygone days.

RSS subscribers need not do anything… the feedburner feed ports to the new location.

Created by Ben Redmond, a native of Louisville, KY, currently living in Los Angeles.

There are a lot of free resources, ranging from widgets to audio and video reports for the web, and for use on-air, graphics, special purpose RSS feeds, etc.

It’s all good stuff, but one big thing seems to be missing: a true sense of collaboration.

Together, public media’s reporting on the economy is exceptional. There’s The Newshour, NPR News and its Planet Money brand, The World, and Marketplace… and that doesn’t even get into the fine reporting from other specialty shows and a range of local stations. In the collaboration, I have a number of widgets available for my station web site, each of which displays reports from the provider, with logo lovingly attached.

If I want to add stories from Marketplace, The World, The Newshour, and NPR, I must install separate RSS feeds and widgets – one for each service. The result: a widget-infested, RSS-ey goo.

Apparently, the collaboration here is limited to the page on which all of this stuff is hosted.

Now, this collaboration implies that public media collectively has excellent economic reporting. If this is true, has it occurred to anyone to create a widget that:

• aggregates it into a single feed or widget so that it’s more usable for our audience
• makes it possible for us to have all the valuable content in one place so our web pages look more well organized
• mimics the same seamless experience our listeners have on-air, where programs from many providers live together in a way that makes sense to listeners and to us.

Actually, I think it has occurred to some and has been rejected because everyone wants only their logo on a widget. Perhaps I’m being presumptuous, but I think I’m not far off the mark. If it is true, the most charitable response is that this is short-sighted and gives up an important opportunity to offer our audience the depth and quality of what our national organizations are producing daily, in aggregate.

Click on the pic for a bigger version.

Well, I don’t feel like complaining; I feel like Piping. I built my own widget for WFPL in Yahoo Pipes. It’s an extremely simple pipe, importing specific RSS feeds from NPR News, The World, The Newshour, Marketplace, The Takeaway and the PRX blog EconomyBeat. I’ve also added PRX’s economy feed of select content from local stations around the country to throw a bit of a wild card into the mix.

The Pipes feed exports as a straight RSS, and as a javascript widget, among other options. I’m using the RSS feed on the right sidebar of The Mediavore. I’m using a javascript widget on WFPL’s Economy page. The widget isn’t perfect: I’m still thinking about that “Public Media on the Economy” title; and I now have a Yahoo Pipes logo on my web page, but it’s thankfully small, leaving the focus where it should be – on the content.

I’ve been watching the feed for the past week and I like the results a lot, although I’m open to suggestions and tweaks. If you want to use this aggregated feed for your site, go ahead. If you want to create your own feed, Pipes is very easy to use and is configurable in all kinds of ways.

But without getting strident, let me stress again that the point of this Economy project is collaboration. We can do better than we’re doing.

The Mediavore began 7 months ago as an all-volunteer shop, with two guys who already have too much to do.

But Graham Griffith and I think that there’s so much interesting public affairs, music, interviews, discussions, and documentaries on NPR, PBS, APM, PRI, BBC, CBC, TVO, and dozens of select local stations across the country, that we should share what we discover with the smartest and most curious audience there is – the millions of us who consume information voraciously and who count public media as our primary source.

An hour ago, we published our 1,001st post. We’re still an all-volunteer shop of two, communicating between Louisville and Boston via email, Google Talk and Campfire, and we’re still just as overwhelmed by all the great content that floods in every day. We have far more than we have time to post.

It’s a lot of work, but we’re still convinced that it’s important. The value of public media’s content is directly proportional to how widely it’s heard and appreciated. The technology we have today puts nearly everything that every radio and TV station produces in the hands of anyone who wants it.

Seven months ago, we wrote that there’s a real need to curate this stuff to surface the best content; and there’s room for many curators. But, oddly, there are very few. The Newshour with Jim Lehrer consistently discovers resources from radio and TV stations, helping it to cover stories better on its web site.

Then there’s NPR.org, which consistently, perhaps unintentionally, sends the message that there’s no value in offering a video discussion from The Newshour next to a related report it’s produced. NPR implies that listeners who enjoyed a great interview on Fresh Air wouldn’t appreciate watching a video of a different interaction with that same guest on Charlie Rose. NPR implies that a lively discussion about a national environmental issue on Minnesota Public Radio’s Midmorning is only important to Minnesotans.

We use NPR.org only because it’s a prominent example. PRI.org is pretty much all about PRI. MPR.org has unveiled a great new web site today, focusing on what’s important to Minnesotans, but apparently only stuff produced by MPR is important to Minnesotans.

This isn’t criminal behavior; it’s simply a failure to recognize that putting some of the pieces together makes all of it more valuable to our audience. Or maybe it’s a recognition that this is hard to do. And it is – it requires a lot of listening – not only to make basic recommendations, but to make connections that jump across shows, stations, networks.

But is the effort worth it? Yes, we know it is. We have a working model: every public radio and TV schedule in the US.

We say all this not to complain, but to point out an opportunity.

We’re spending somewhere close to $2 billion a year on public media in the US; another $1.5 billion in Canada, and around 4 billion Pounds in Britain. Are we leveraging $10 billion in impact? Couldn’t we leverage much more than that?

IMA General Session
Joaquin Alvarado
Founding Director of the Institute for Next Generation Internet at San Francisco State University

Technology doesn’t create communities; communities create technologies to stay connected.

National Public Lightpath
There is a solution to the problems of expanding broadband to more Americans
Universities are connected to next-generation networks – Regional Optical Networks
- so many of our stations are on university campuses, connected or potentially connected to these networks

People are searching for information from YouTube – it’s now the second largest search engine on the Internet.

We need to use the word “networked” rather than “digital.” We’ve had digital for 50 years, but are we ready for the network?

Is everything your doing right now ready to be modularized? Your job is not to figure out how people will use it but to make it possible for people to use it.

Stations: Start talking about 10GBps – and start talking about it right now. You want uncompressed video and a superfast network to collaborate with other stations and producers
Schools must have this kind of connectivity – we don’t have the network effect with schools

National Public Lightpath would connect public media, schools, universities
Stations should work with NPL to write an NTIA grant that connects the station, the local schools, adds vital non-profits, and then work with the city or with private contractors to build the network.

We need to get into the networked environment because others are moving very quickly in this space

The blog serves a national audience, but the appeal is also local. We want listeners to our three formats (WUOL, WFPL and WFPK) to appreciate public radio more, to discover more of the stuff they enjoy, from segments they may have missed on shows we broadcast, to shows we don’t offer.

But this blog is designed to be national in scope, mining NPR, APM, PRI, CBC, BBC, independent and local shows and pieces from all stations for interesting content. As we grow, maybe you’ll come to think of us as PRX without the massive infrastructure (and royalty payments). The Louisville Public Media brand is minimal because the point is discovering and extending the value of a wealth of public radio (and public TV) content, wherever it comes from.

What do I want from you? Three things.

First, I want tips – pieces you’ve heard, shows that are excellent; particularly local shows. I’m importing every RSS feed from every station and network that I’m aware of (the amount of content we’re generating with $2 billion a year in funding is staggering) but I could benefit from your curation. As the audience for The Mediavore grows, we’ll also depend more and more on readers for suggestions.

Second, if you want to contribute a piece – a single piece, or something regularly – I’d love to talk to you about it. I don’t want to be the sole byline on the site.

Third, once you think it’s good enough, you should place The Mediavore RSS in your web site sidebar somewhere. We hope that The Mediavore will help fans of public radio and TV discover more new stuff, which in turn will deepen their appreciation of public media for the ways in which it enhances their lives.

An unexpectedly heavy workload prevented me from posting the third of my pieces on Peak Oil and public media, but I’m happy to report that I’ll be able to publish it here tomorrow.

Thanks for your patience!

I’ll be transitioning to iPhone 3G on July 11th, but not without feeling nostalgic for the way Apple’s first iPhone changed how I view phones. (Is that too Apple-centric for your delicate tastes? Well, bite it, won’t you? Perhaps if I had owned a Blackberry, I’d be just as attached to it. But such was not my fortune. I owned a Treo 700p, which was the worst device – I went through two of them trying to get one that went longer than a couple hours without a reboot – I’ve ever purchased. Your mileage may vary; that was my experience.)

But the updated iPhone is almost secondary to the announcement (expected) of Mobile Me and the new commitment to cloud computing unveiled by Apple. I’m excited about the “push” data functionality that will extend to Mail, Contacts and Calendar. But what I’m really interested to see is how this will impact my current array of “software and cloud.”

At present:

Mail: Exchange via Outlook at work; Gmail and .Mac mainly through a browser, secondarily through Mail.app. iPhone accesses Gmail and .Mac mail through IMAP; doesn’t access Exchange.

Calendar: iCal and GCal, synced using Spanning Sync. At work, Google’s sync software keeps Outlook tuned to my GCal. iPhone gets iCal data through a thin white USB cable.

Contacts: Apple Address Book; Gmail contacts are built based on an occasional import of Address Book contacts. This is highly haphazard. Syncing through Spanning Sync’s new contact sync was marginally successful; syncing through Address Book’s new port to Gmail was successful but a big mess. A messy export from Address Book gets my contacts to Outlook. iPhone gets Address Book data through a thin white USB cable.

How will a more complete syncing experience – a more cohesive experience for all my devices, delivered by Mobile Me, assuming Apple actually delivers it – mean for my setup?

One possible scenario:

Mail: beginning next month, iPhone will work with Microsoft Exchange; OS X will extend Exchange to computers when Snow Leopard is released, apparently. That covers work email; my Gmail path may remain unchanged – IMAP; my Mobile Me email will become more compelling with “push” behind it.

Calendar: Mobile Me will maintain one calendar across my computer, iPhone, Windows PC at work and any other device I connect, potentially replacing Spanning Sync, Google’s sync software, and providing a solid challenge to the relevance of GCal in my workflow. iPhone will sync without the thin white USB cable.

Contacts: Mobile Me will easily maintain one set of contacts across all devices, including Outlook at work. And if I can get syncing with Gmail’s contact database to work the way I want it to, it will take care of Gmail, too. Again, for iPhone, no white cable needed.

What I’ve wanted for myself for a long time was the ability to put all of my stuff in the cloud and have access to it seamlessly across all devices. The first piece of that is relatively easy; the second piece has been problematic. Apple seems to be serious about giving users a new experience with the cloud, and I’ll be watching for indications that this is the case.

With those features working flawlessly, plus revamped photo sharing capabilities, document capabilities, and the doubled storage capacity of Mobile Me, it’s possible the successor to .Mac will bring us closer to Merlin Mann’s cherished .Mac dream, and bind those of us who use it more tightly into the Apple orbit, with a suite of tools that will make, to quote Merlin, your entire digital world safe, fun, ubiquitous, and flawlessly integrated.

In my personal scenario, who are the losers if this strategy works? Google Calendar, potentially Google Docs (at least as far as cloud storage of docs is concerned), Spanning Sync, Google Calendar Sync. I’m hesitant to look at my own patterns and divine some greater scenario in which Google suffers because of Mobile Me; for one thing, Google is so big, does it ever suffer? Second, Apple and Google have a great relationship and I would be surprised if their futures weren’t more tightly intertwined around apps like Google Docs, etc.

Posts are thin so far (the blog is barely launched), but it looks like a great platform for reporters to share their work and talk about their experiences producing it. Frank Langfitt, for instance, talks a little about the learning curve – shooting video with an HD cam inside a car – for his piece on slugging.

I can’t embed the video, so you’ll need to go to the blog to see it.

Knights in Training is the newest addition to the “public media master feed” – a one-stop site for all posts from public media bloggers. (the rss feed is here.)

If you’re blogging about public media and want to be included, email me or @toddmundt on twitter.

I think there are a couple of things worth noting: as of this morning at least, if you check out the comments on the Riverfront Times blog, they are generally quite positive about KWMU – a prevailing theme: this is the time for us to be supportive of our public radio station, with our words and our dollars.

It reminds me of something we saw in Michigan in 2006: listeners wanted us to get the house in order and then continue to serve them at the level they’d come to expect. They supported Michigan Radio with record-setting fundraising throughout the period of difficulty. This speaks to the tremendous loyalty of our listeners and to the trust they have in us.

Second, no matter how positively some or all employees of KWMU view this change, the change itself will be turbulent and difficult. The interim manager and the next permanent manager have to be aware of this, and help staff through the catharsis and then the transition.

Reporter Gabe Bullard interviewed Louisville’s Mayor for a story he was doing; in addition to the standard audio setup for the radio piece, Gabe slapped his Flip Ultra on a tiny tripod, pointed it at the mayor and pressed the “record” button. The results are pretty good. Audio isn’t perfect; we could spend some extra time syncing the high quality audio track to the video and get even better results. But the audio is also quite acceptable for the web – this isn’t an $800,000 episode of Frontline, you know?

Cost of the camera? About $100 retail. Check out David Pogue’s review here.

In a group email exchange this weekend, Rob Paterson referred to the Flip and other cameras like it as a tipping point in outreach. We’re at the point where cheap=good in video and the potential is great, if we’re willing to explore ways to enhance and increase the content we provide our audience

Look at the quality of video that people (like Scoble, below) are getting with video and audio direct from their cell phones on qik.

Are you going to put that on TV? No, but does it work for the web? Yes. Add a heck of a tripod and Sennheiser mic like this, and you’re in business. (Thanks to Andy Carvin for this link.)

We’re going after grants to get an HD camera (good HD cameras are cheaper than SD these days) and the associated gear to pursue more high-end projects, but we also just bought another Flip for our reporters to use. At this price point, it’s hard to beat.

I’ve already written about John’s excellent question: where are the female public media bloggers? This gets to the wider question of who is blogging about public media. A few of us are working on a couple of ways for you to tap into the stream of thinking in our industry.

Here’s one way to do that – I call it the “Robert Scoble Turn on the Firehose” method. I’ve created a master feed of public media bloggers. The feed shows every post from every blogger in the feed. You can step into the stream at any time and see what your colleagues are thinking about.

• Click here to see it.
• Click here to subscribe to it.

Do you blog about public media? Are you an active user of del.icio.us with a publicmedia or similar tag? Let me know and I’ll add you to the master feed.

• email me: toddmundt [at] gmail
• or use twitter: @toddmundt

Guys (and I mean that in a gender-specific way),

I was exchanging e-mail with a public media colleague of the older persuasion and mentioned the names of the various bloggers / thinkers that I follow — and each of you was mentioned — and he asked me, “Where are all the women bloggers? Is this just a guy thing?”

I know there are women out there in pubmedia that are on Twitter, as I follow some of them there, but are there active female bloggers in public media? I don’t know I know of any off-hand (although I’m sure I’m missing some).

So two questions come to mind:

1. Who are some public media female bloggers out there?

2. (assuming #1 is a short list…) Why is it predominantly men blogging about public media?

Good questions. The admittedly lean blogroll of public media bloggers on my site doesn’t include any women (although I have some in my feed reader), and that’s my loss.

I don’t know if there’s a gender-specific way of looking at public media (hey, maybe there is), but I do know that any list of the most influential people in public media includes a lot of women.

So… are you a blogger? Are you in public media? Are you female? You’re reading me – at least at this moment… and I should be reading you. Add your name and URL in the comments. Heck, if you’re male, and you’re in public media, then I should be reading you, too.

Do you blog about social media? plain vanilla public media? fundraising? audience? pubmedia news and gossip? There’s a lot of knowledge floating around that more of us can tap into.

Andy Carvin seeded a massive list of public media twitter folks; maybe we should draft him to come up with a similar list for bloggers. There’s all kinds of knowledge out here that we can tap into.

WFPL News went live on twitter about a month ago, after some brief conversations here in the building about experimenting with the channel. The foundation of our service is a rolling feed of news we’re publishing to our site, delivered automatically via rss. But we’ve also tried a few different things: very low key promotion, giving listeners a heads up about local pieces we’re going to broadcast on Morning Edition or All Things Considered; asking questions of our users (on Primary day, “tell us about your voting experience”); and responding to listeners who direct questions to us.

All of these approaches have worked well, from our perspective. We’ve tried hard not to treat the channel as simply another megaphone to reach the masses. We’ve also tried to avoid the trivial.

Our goal has been to speak to our “audience” on twitter with the same voice we use on-air – a voice that’s personal, approachable, authoritative, thoughtful, sometimes humorous. As I’ve noted before, the vast majority of our followers on twitter are from Louisville; they’re already our listeners and many are big fans. Our interaction with them on-air and on twitter changes slightly with the platform, even though the core values remain the same.

So, we’re ready to expand our experiment a little. Up to now, I’ve been the sole “tweeter” for WFPL News, besides the mouse on the wheel in the RSS engine. In the next few days, we’ll expand to three individuals, each of whom will spend a small amount of time each day with twitter.

Our strategy? Glad you asked.

• The auto-feed of news stories continues via rss
• Promotion of local content continues – local features during newsmagazines, promotion of topics on local shows. (by promotion, I mean one mention within an hour before broadcast, not multiple hits)
• Promotion of new web features like Budget Hero.
• We’ll look for 1-2 opportunities each week, initially, to “survey” our audience. We’ll take what I call a “public insight” approach, asking people questions where they can be the expert: what was your experience when you went to vote today? or what’s the price you paid when you last filled the gas tank? as opposed to why have Kentucky graduation rates risen this year? The questions we ask will have a purpose, providing either direct or anecdotal information to our reporters or producers.
• We’ll add a brief update on stories we’re covering for the day each morning.
• We’ll continue to respond to every person who asks a question or makes a comment; we’ll monitor the entire twitter stream regularly, too, so we can see any other conversations about us. (Summize is killer for this; you should go there right after you read this and enter your organization’s name in the box to see what people are saying about you.)
• Develop 1-2 new experiments to test on the channel.

And that, for now, is our strategy. It takes the elements that worked in our first experiment, and makes them standard, more intentional.

Why not more? Because in our “budget” of time and staff, that’s what we can afford at present. Right now, we have about 65 “listeners” on twitter; we can scale up our presence as our audience grows and as staffing allows.

How does this twitter plan fit our Media Strategy? It advances a couple of our goals: increasing interaction with our audience, and increasing the transparency of our organization.

How will we know if it’s working? We’ll look for the following easily measured results: more local followers on twitter; more followers talking directly to us, answering our questions, but also asking us about other stuff (for instance, when will we get the first customer service question on twitter? the first “I gave you money, where’s my coffee mug?”); and growth in visits to our main web sites.

How often will we evaluate and potentially adjust our plan? Weekly. We aren’t going to try this for a year and then produce a Powerpoint.

In summary, our approach to a social media opportunity is not that much different from anything else we do. It involves a plan, an accounting of costs and benefits, goals and regular review.

I don’t know a lot about Adam; we’ve been fellow Brightkite “friends” for a few weeks. But seeing his pictures brings the damage home. I’m guessing this is his parents’ place, since family members were the only ones allowed in yesterday.

Brightkite is new and relatively untested. I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what it can do for me (Steve Rubel checked it out and said “eh”)… the same question I asked about twitter when I joined in January 2007.

Regardless of Brightkite’s future, it’s another chance to see how services like twitter and Brightkite can take us right to where things are happening. This stuff doesn’t replace traditional journalism (the gathering of random bits of information to find a coherent story), but enhances it, adds texture and depth, giving people who are directly affected by an event the tools with which to make their own statement about it.

Best wishes to Adam, his family, the folks in Parkersburg, and all others in my home state who suffered in this weekend’s storms.

Cindy has announced her decision to leave Iowa Public Radio at the end of June. She’ll return to Minnesota to spend time with her family and manage a health condition.

I’ll say two things: first, it’s amazing to see a change consultant truly living the principles she advocates, once she has the opportunity to run the show; second, I’ve had the pleasure of working for some of the best managers in public media, but I have never encountered someone with the grace, fortitude, spirit, patience, and farsightedness, of Cindy Browne.

UPDATE: Iowa Public Radio has now posted the press release.

But the first piece is more general and broad – a statement of principles, if you will. I’m publishing my second draft here for your thoughts and comments. Some of you are in public media and have been thinking about this, or you’ve developed your own plans. I’d love your input.

We’ll be talking with our board about it this week.

LOUISVILLE PUBLIC MEDIA
Transformation

Radio is likely to continue to play an important role as an entertainment and information medium for some time to come, but in the past decade, the Internet has also become an important source of news, information, opinion, and outlet for personal expression for our listeners. And the younger listeners who are entering the public media demographic view the Internet is a primary source of information, entertainment and engagement; their media habits include little traditional radio listening, even though they consume a lot of audio and video, including content produced by public media, on the Internet.

Louisville Public Media’s response to this transformation is to transform itself. Our commitment to producing excellent content designed for our radio audience is stronger than ever. But we’ll thoughtfully and prudently invest in new technologies and platforms that help us to further our overall goal of serving our audience and making a significant contribution to the community.

The Fundamentals

Service to our audience comes first; technology second.
Our primary business has never been technology – the transmission of radio waves, the ownership of towers; it is service to the community. Radio is and has been the best means for us to offer our quality content to a mass audience. As new technologies become available, public media is presented with an array of new tools to serve its current audience better; those tools can also expand the available audience for public media, increasing our service to the community and our impact.

As we expand to new platforms, relationship-building and community-building remain our core values.
“Old” media or “New,” it’s all Social Media. Radio began life in the center of the living room and family listening, and even now, although many in our audience listen to us privately, through headphones or in their cars, there is a wealth of conversation that takes place at cafes, workplaces, dinner tables, as people talk about what they “heard on NPR.” New technologies open new pathways 1) for us to engage with our audience more directly than ever before, and 2) for our listeners to interact with people who share their concerns and values all over the world.

Building bridges that connect our listeners to each other, and allow them to exchange ideas and opinions, is part of the mandate of this public media organization.

Strategy

1) Use new and emerging platforms to reach our audience with compelling content that represents the diversity of the community.

We will carefully consider technological developments and new platforms to discover opportunities that align most thoroughly with our mission and values. We will prudently invest in technologies and platforms that meet the test, and rigorously assess their performance.

We create a wealth of news, music and other cultural content every day. We will take advantage of new platforms of distribution to reach a larger portion of our addressable audience with this content. We’ll also create low-cost, high-impact content designed to make the most advantageous use of chosen platforms, including, perhaps, content which will allow us to improve service to specific segments of our audience.

2) Use new technologies to increase the quality and depth of interaction our audience has with us.

We need to make sure we’re always listening to our community – whether someone is responding to a story, suggesting a song or an artist or offering criticism. Everyone in our organization needs to be listening… from Membership to our talk show producers, on-air hosts, management, and the News department. This feedback may come directly to us, but often it won’t. We need to “listen” to what our audience says about us on twitter, Facebook, in the newspaper, or word-of-mouth in the community, so we can respond appropriately, and most important, so we can learn. In the same fashion, we should use new technologies like twitter and Facebook to communicate with our audience, in a manner consistent with our Core Values.

3) Use new technologies to make our journalism more transparent to our audience, and to welcome audience participation in the creative of authorative journalism.

In an era when trust in institutions of journalism is at an all-time low, trust in public media is strong. But we’re not entirely immune to the discontent that is causing some citizens to give up on traditional media. We’ll continue to build trust as we accurately report the news; but we’ll also build trust by being as transparent as we can about our reporting and editorial decisionmaking. Tools like blogs allow us to explain more thoroughly our processes to those who are interested; the web is a great place to offer access to the source materials our journalists use as they work on their stories, from documents to unedited interviews. We should “open” our news process to our audience, to the extent that this is possible.

We should explore citizen journalism and forms of audience participation in journalism. Some in our audience will want to contribute stories, too. We should experiment with ways to encourage this form of expression. It may not have the same authority as professional journalism, but this shouldn’t prevent us from exploring ways in which our audience can contribute content, and the appropriate venues for that content.

We must tap into the knowledge reservoir of our audience. American Public Media’s Public Insight Network harnesses this knowledge to improve the quality of professional journalism. It’s a social media approach to professional journalism that preserves (and enhances) the quality of the product our audience has come to expect, while welcoming useful contributions from the audience. This should be a top priority.

4) We must develop appropriate metrics to measure our impact on the community and to guide our investment decisions.

Just as certain technologies won’t advance our goals of increased service, quality interaction and greater transparency, some opportunities will meet these goals and not yet not be sustainable. And in many cases, we don’t have enough information to measure the impact of our services on new platforms. We’ll work with others in our industry to develop benchmarks for our new initiatives.

Result: we’re driving our car less than 400 miles a month. Gas prices are high, but our consumption has dropped to one tank of gas a month.

This makes me feel pretty good, as far as my pocketbook and my eco-values are concerned. But when we’re driving that little, the total cost of car ownership (or leaser-ship, to coin a term) starts to look out-of-whack.

Monthly car-related costs:

• Lease: $263
• Lease downpayment: $61 ($2200 divided by 36 months)
• Insurance: $82
• Gas: $60 (@ $4/gallon)
• Subsidized parking at work: $35

Total: $501 a month to use a car that we drive less than 400 miles a month.

Getting into the minutiae of owning vs. leasing is beside the point. On a theoretical level, neither makes sense for someone driving less than 5,000 miles a year.

But life is complicated: I leave for work at 4:15am. Bus service doesn’t begin in my neighborhood until about 5am. I could walk to work in about 40 minutes, but I’m not excited about pushing back my wake-up time so I can get out the door at 3:50am.

Here’s a Wacky Plan: I could buy a monthly bus pass for $30 and use the bus to get home from work every day. And I could take a cab to work every morning for a little less than $15 a day. Total cost of Wacky Plan: $360 a month (assuming 22 working days a month).

Not sure what I’ll do about this, if anything. I have another year to figure it out.

All along, I’ve been reading posts from the likes of Louis Gray and Robert Scoble about the value of friendfeed, as well as the robust discussion about their points. But I’ve not really understood how to make ff valuable to me.

So this morning, I posted to twitter asking for input on ways to make friendfeed personally useful. Nothing happened on twitter, but my twitter stream ports to ff, and people started jumping in immediately with ideas and suggestions. In the past hour: 21 interesting and useful comments.

OK, so now I get it. Friendfeed can be your static lifestream application, but it can be so much more, too. You can comment on items in the stream, hit the “Like” button for stuff you find useful, the “Hide” button for things you don’t want to see. The deeper customizations aren’t immediately apparent, but click on “Like” or “Hide,” for instance, and you’ll see a list of options that let you carefully tune the feed to get what you want from it.

So what advice did I get from other friendfeed users? Some highlights:

Robert Scoble
1. Click on the “Hide” link early and often.
2. Only follow smart people.
3. Hide data types that you don’t get value out of (for instance, if you hate watching videos, why are you letting them come into your view here?)
4. Learn to use the search feature here, especially “advanced search.”

Ian Betteridge
You know you can hide all the content from one source unless it has a comment or like, don’t you? I hide all Twitters except those that have a like/comment, which means I don’t see everything that I’ve already seen in Twitter anyway. Very useful feature! Oh, and I just noticed: when you set it to filter like that, it doesn’t affect the “Everyone” tab, only your friends. So if you want to get a massive, noisy stream and select goodies to like, you can still look at “everyone”. That’s the thing I like about FF – hidden depth.

So, yeah, I’m tweaking my feed to get what I want. And what’s the different between reading all this stuff in ff, as opposed to all the separate applications?

• It’s the next-level filtering that’s occurring, especially if you’re connecting to smart people.
• And it’s the comments and discussions that are taking place around the content. To paraphrase a point Jeremiah Owyang made on Wednesday: the readers of any blog are collectively smarter than any author.

It’s exciting seeing the community think and breathe, real time. I’m hooked.

Brightkite thumbnail: you share your current location (to a level of accuracy that you control) with friends and others; you can create notes, ala twitter, and you can upload photos from your computer or phone. It might be a fun way to find out where your friends are (remember Dodgeball?) so you can meet up with them. More about how it works here.

I do know one thing: it’s fun on a Friday or Saturday night.

Last Friday night, we got home from early dinner around 8:30pm. I opened Brightkite and clicked on the Brightkite Universe tab. That opens the spigot so you can see everything flowing through the system. What’s happening at 8:30pm on a Friday night? In the eastern and central time zones, people are out having drinks with friends and eating food. I spent several minutes thumbing through pictures of food from restaurants around the country, taken moments before and uploaded by Brightkite.

Yes, only a foodie could find that interesting. But there was also something intangibly enjoyable about being able to look in the fun others were having at that very moment, from late night clubbing in Europe to happy hour on the west coast. I saw restaurants where we’d eaten, and city scenes we’d experienced first-hand. It was tremendous fun. And I had contributed my pictures, too.

I can’t be in San Francisco or Montreal every weekend, but the vicarious experience filled a little of that void. It’s like subscribing to a Flickr tag for a city you enjoy and watching life there from day to day; Brightkite makes it an almost real-time experience. (In my experience, photos I email from my iPhone on-the-go hit the site within 1-2 minutes. Kind of like peering over Robert Scoble’s shoulder and watching the live tweets from thousands of people fly by in real time.

There’s nothing that particularly Save the World special about that, but that’s just fine.

A few caveats: we’re not a household that spends 4 hours a day in front of the TV. We’re not big consumers of the current hit series, with a couple exceptions. We don’t watch much live sports or live news. So keeping that in mind, let’s look at what’s available.

TV… Meet the Mouse

This little saga began with a new house, a difficult satellite install that led us to settle for cable, and our general dissatisfaction with the results. In March, we hauled Chuck’s old Mac G5 out of the closet and hooked it up to the TV. Yes, we can now write emails in a font large enough that passersby can read. We don’t do that, though. We watch the web. Most of that stuff out there in the cloud scales nicely to full-screen with a click of the mouse and a lot of it looks great. And connecting the computer to the TV opens up a whole range of viewing possibilities. So much so, that cable and satellite are superfluous.

Local Digital Television

We plugged in the Eye TV Hybrid USB tuner I bought last year, installed the software, hooked up a small indoor antenna (we live near the tall towers), and we have access to our local SD and HD signals. Elgato’s software uses your computer as a PVR, so I set up a few shows for the software to capture (Charlie Rose, NOVA). Done.

I want to stop for a minute and think about the enormity of this single change. It’s big for me, at least, because, since 1980 (the year my parents got cable), I’ve lived in a world where video was delivered over coax and not over-the-air. There are still large numbers of viewers who watch OTA TV, but if you had told me 5 years ago that I’d be buying an antenna for broadcast TV, I would have thought you were crazy. What changed all that? Digital encoding, first of all: as long as you can get a usable signal, it looks great; there’s no in-between. Second, cable’s truly awful compression of of video, including HD, as companies have tried to add more and more channels on finite bandwidth. (I think satellite-delivered HD – also compressed – looks better, but I couldn’t care less about that debate.)

OK, so now we have the networks, as well as the local PBS multicast (four channels in Kentucky.)

Hulu.com

The content platform from NBCU and Fox now includes lots of other providers, and as much as I didn’t want to like it at first, we spend a couple hours a week now, watching current and archive episodes of The Simpsons, Arrested Development, Top Chef and some classic TV shows on Hulu. It’s a go-to place for currently available network content. So are ABC, CBS, CW etc., all of which offer some full-length episodes. Hulu (and most other network platforms) insert commercials, which you can’t easily avoid, but in the case of Hulu, each break generally lasts 30-seconds or less. I think I’ll survive. The streaming service is reliable, and looks great when it’s fullscreen on a 32-inch LCD.

iTunes Music Store: TV Shows

There’s a lot of stuff here from a variety of networks – shows that might be harder to find elsewhere, at least before they reach DVD – from sources like History Channel and BBC America. One Saturday night a few weeks ago, we bought a couple episodes of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations series from the Travel Channel. For $4, we got 90 minutes of entertainment. We thought it was a good exchange. You can also subscribe to a season from many series and get automatic delivery of new episodes. (Hulu has just added this feature, although it’s an addition of the episodes to a queue, not delivery, since Hulu is a streaming service.)

iTunes Music Store + The Internets: Video Podcasts

Video podcasts are taking off, but file size and download speeds, as well as viewing habits, generally dictate that these podcasts are on the short side. Still there’s great stuff to match your interests. We watch Winelibrary TV nearly every day, for instance. Automatically downloaded (like any other podcast), the video looks just fine on a 32 inch LCD. I subscribe to ScobelizerTV and a few other techie podcasts, too. I used to watch on my notebook or iPhone, but I’ve transferred these subscriptions to the TV. More video podcasts are also switching to HD.

Joost

I use this platform sometimes on my notebook, but the Mac version is limited to Intel Macs – our TV-connected G5 is a PowerPC model. Were it not for that, we’d watch more video on Joost.

Netflix

Whether you’re streaming movies and docs from Netflix or getting them in the mail, I count them as networked video because of their speedy delivery and large selection.

Personal Public Television

I named this category for what I think would be the perfect Me-PBS. Of course, no one would ever watch it but me, but you can make you own personal PBS or CSPAN, too, with stuff you find fascinating.

• Fora.tv, which features all kinds of smart television, from seminars at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to the Long Now Foundation. I import feeds from some providers directly into iTunes, and I’ve created some custom feeds for specific topics.
• iTunesU, part of the Music Store, has a wealth of lectures and college courses from around the country. There’s a lot of audio, but you’ll find a growing library of video, too, produced by universities, KQED, LinkTV and the New York Public Library, among others.
• Google Tech Talks. Google brings some of the smartest people around to its campuses to speak to staff, and Google shares nearly all of it free. The tech talks are probably the most well known, but if you search, you’ll find a range of guest speakers. I’ve grabbed the Tech Talks feed and iTunes takes care of the rest.
• Beet.tv. I wouldn’t call myself a heavy viewer of Beet.tv, but I have the feed in iTunes, and regularly find interesting short-form, technology-related content there.
• CBC and Radio-Canada: We watch The National from CBC occasionally, as well as CBC Montreal’s evening news. We’re glad to have it, but CBC doesn’t offer a full-screen viewing option. Such an omission was acceptable in 2005. It isn’t now. Radio-Canada’s 24-hour French news network, RDI, streams most of the time and we watch that, too.
• ABC Australia: a few shows are available for download, including The Cook and the Chef – personal favorite. (ABC has a history of good cooking shows – Kylie Kwong and Surfing the Menu among them. Kwong made it to the US on Discovery Home; I don’t think Surfing has.)
• One of the best sites to discover new content for your Me-PBS channel is Open Culture.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. If you’re still going around telling that old joke that the only video on the Internet is stupid cat tricks, you should really have a look around.

Most of the content I’ve listed above downloads to your computer; having a fast connection isn’t required. But for Hulu and other streaming services like ABC.com and Joost, you’ll need a decent broadband service. (We have 20Mbps at home, but even a basic 1.5Mbps DSL or cable modem service should work well, depending on what else you’re doing online.)

What will we miss by cutting the coax? A few things, I suppose. A number of shows aren’t available online. I like a few Food network shows, but Food is pretty much a non-player online, unless you count the small video effort on its own site. I’d like to see all of the Scripps networks get on board with iTunes, Hulu or Joost. There’s also very little HD online yet; programs like Discovery Atlas look good on iTunes but they’re breathtaking on DiscoveryHD.

But, after years of paying more and more to get access to hundreds of channels that I don’t watch, plus the small number that I do, I think we’re just about at the point where we can let it go, and in return, discover a wealth of stuff we can enjoy.

UPDATE: Lest, I create confusion, I’m canceling my cable subscription, but not my cable broadband service. So I’ll still have a black cable coming out of the wall. Where I live, cable provides the fastest Internet service and I want speed. For the bean-counters, my monthly Internet charge will rise (because of the cable company bundling strategy), but I’ll still be paying around $50/month less without cable.

Achatz has been battling late-stage cancer of the tongue, and as Max notes, not only does he appear to have won the battle through a still-controversial therapy of radiation and chemo (as opposed to surgical removal of part of his tongue), his sense of taste is returning.

The most fascinating part of this piece is Max’s description of how Achatz’s sense of taste is returning – one taste at a time – sweet first, then salt, then bitter – and how Achatz is using his new discoveries about how these tastes relate to each other to inform what he creates in the kitchen.

Like any great New Yorker profile, you get deeper insight into the individual profiled, and you also run across many gems of knowledge along the path.

We went to Alinea in May 2007 with a couple of close friends, and the nearly six hour meal of 25 courses (and 23 wines) was one of the most amazing culinary experiences of my life. My boyfriend, Chuck thought about the meal for months before writing about the oxalis course on his blog. He has a photographic memory when it comes to food and wine.

You can watch Grant Achatz in action here – an episode from Gourmet’s Diary of a Foodie, the best culinary series on public TV or any TV (produced with WGBH).

AND… you can listen to Michael Nagrant’s in-depth podcast interview with Grant Achatz here.

What’s happened since? EMC acquired Mozy; that gives instant credibility to this online storage service, something Omnidrive users would probably love to have right now. Second, Mozy has updated its software for Mac, and it’s now more user-friendly than before, more invisible than before, and more easily configurable than before. Setup of the Mac software reminds me of .Mac: you can choose specific category types to backup (your Address Book, iCal, Documents Folder, etc.) and Mozy takes care of the rest; or you can specifically choose the files you want to back up.

I’m a backup freak. I use .Mac and Amazon’s S3 service for my documents, as well as calendar, address book and keychain backups. (At home, I regularly backup my entire hard drive to an outboard unit, and I use Leopard’s Time Machine.) Mozy’s free account gives me 2 GB, which is more than enough for docs and those other critical files.

But I have a large music library, currently about 60 GB, and it’s preserved on one outboard hard drive (plus Time Machine) at home, which isn’t exactly what I’d call a foolproof plan. I’ve hesitated to add an offsite backup of the contents, simply because there’s so much music and even with the reasonably fast upload speeds I have at home, it will take a very long time to transport all that stuff to the servers. But now may be the time to bite the bullet.

Amazon S3 offers competitive storage and transfer rates and you pay only for what you use (I pay less than 30 cents a month for about 2 GB of space currently), and Mozy offers unlimited storage for $4.95 a month, with discounts if you buy one or two years at a time. “Buying” around 70 GB of space from Mozy is cheaper than procuring it from S3 – you can do the math to figure out the point where Mozy gets the cost advantage. And while catastrophic things can happen to big companies, too, somehow the EMC name makes me more comfortable entrusting it with such a huge chunk of my life.

I’ll wait, though. A few weeks of using the new Mozy backup will give me a better handle on how it’s working; then I’ll decide where in the cloud I’ll store that giant mass of digital bits I own.

Listening to this week’s MacBreak Weekly, I’m reminded of an excellent at-home option: Drobo, the little black box that intelligently backs up your content and mirrors it across multiple drives. Backups at home should never be the single element of your backup strategy, but it’s not a bad idea to keep at least one copy of your stuff close by.

I offer no judgments here about Comcast, the quality of its service, etc. This post is about Frank Eliason, Comcast’s Rep who tracks twitter every day and responds to customer questions, and the role of social media tools like twitter in fostering a closer engagement with their “audience.” (Yes, these companies are also thinking about brand management, but aren’t all of us in public media?)

1) How did Comcast’s use of Twitter come about? Was it your idea? Was it difficult to get company buy-in?

We started reaching out on the internet about 6 months ago. We did this through blogs and other websites that were discussing Comcast. It started off slowly, but we continued to build steam. As you can imagine it was very successful. Based on the success we worked to expand our efforts. About 3 months ago, Scott Westerman (@wscottw3) pointed us in the direction of Twitter. We started watching Twitter at the time, but we only reached out through blog posts. Then one Sunday, Michael Arrington came across an RSS feed, so we reached out. He wrote a blog post.

Two interesting points to the blog post. First people started to say that it was only because it was Michael Arrington, but then others started to chime in that we helped them too. The other interesting point was because it was now known that we were on Twitter we decided to get more involved. This led to the rewarding experience we are now seeing.

2) How do you do it – how do you discover conversations about Comcast that are taking place, and then “insert yourself” for lack of a better term, into the conversation?

We use Tweetscan and Summize, as well as RSS feeds of Tweets mentioning Comcast. We respond to many of those tweets.

3) What is the benefit to Comcast that comes from engaging customers through twitter, since twitter is still a tiny segment of the online community?

The biggest benefit is the speed in which you know something is going on. People share everything there, so if they are having trouble in one area, they mention in Twitter. This is sometimes before they even call.

4) Does Comcast use any metric to gauge the effectiveness of twitter or other social media tools?

At this time we mainly use online tools, but we are looking into tools that will assist [us.]

5) Do you have any thoughts about ways public radio stations could use twitter to engage with their listeners?

Stations have a lot of unique programming. Sometimes small stations have great programming that can be lost with everything on the net. This is a great audience to share it. I also think that Twitter is a great place for engaging conversations, so after certain shows, participate in a Twitter conversation on the same topic. Not only can listeners participate, but it will bring in a whole new audience.

Social Media Insider profiles Frank Eliason here.

UPDATE: Troy Rutter posts two more examples of companies who understand how to use twitter.

In last week’s PRPD Webinar about Social Media on a Budget, Bruce Warren talked briefly about video. He told participants it was easy to get started, and the cost was low.

If you’re looking for examples, here’s one from Poynter Institute’s Al Thompkins. His kit is versatile and reasonably low-cost. Check out his video below.

Thanks to Dan Misener for blogging this!

That Flip camera is pretty cool – it takes apparently great video and is dirt cheap. The New York Times’ David Pogue put it through the paces a few weeks ago. Watch his review here.

Want a great example of public radio doing video well? (This is just one of a few good examples) Check out WXPN’s Radio Video.

By the way, PRPD Members can now download Bruce Warren’s Powerpoint from his excellent webinar presentation “Building your Social Media Community on a Shoestring Budget.”

Andy Carvin has composed an excellent essay that’s well worth your time, arguing for engagement and authenticity on twitter: more live (or semi-live) conversation, less automated publishing.

WFPL News went live this morning with its twitter feed. The core of our service will include some automation: newsroom stories are getting pumped to twitter as they get published on the site. But when I vetted our plan with Andy this morning, he pointed out the #5 priority on my list (“directly engage the audience on twitter”) and encouraged me to move it up closer to #1 (that automated feed).

Twitter is about conversation. I’ve been in the twitter community since January 2007; it began as a presence app, designed so you could update your status for your friends. But that broadcast model was very quickly challenged, especially once twitter took off. People started talking to each other – not private chats (although those are possible with twitter) but public conversations.

I’ve always compared it to shouting across a crowded bar to a friend: what you’re saying is for your friend, but you don’t mind others hearing it. And perhaps a couple other friends, or total strangers, will chime in. That’s twitter. It’s conversations… or as Marshall Kirkpatrick said (on twitter) last night, “… rapid, short, synchronous and public conversations.”

Alright, so using twitter is all about conversation and engagement. If you need more convincing, read Carvin’s post again.

It’s also about authenticity, transparency – the most basic concepts that should govern how we engage with our audience on any platform, web, on-air, whatever. And on this subject of authenticity, one of the keys to success here is getting the “voice” right.

Program directors think about this all the time in the context of their on-air sound; it’s part of the core values of our services. Well, if you’re a program director, your job is getting bigger; you are now (or should be) program director of the web, of the podcasts, of the extra streams, of the HD multicast, etc. What are the qualities of heart, mind and craft of your station? How do they translate to every facet of your outreach? And how does each service bearing your brand reflect and build upon those core values?

At Louisville Public Media (as is the case at most public stations), we try to answer every email, letter and phone call we get. We’re gracious when praised; concerned and ready to learn when we get criticism. We tell our audience that every listener is important and we try to live that.

How do we live it on twitter? Map the principles to the new platform. Every user who “follows” us gets followed back. Everyone who sends a direct message to us via twitter will get a response. Everyone who “shouts across the bar to us” will get a response. Since we respect the intelligence of our audience and value their input, we’ll develop ways to encourage input from our twitter audience. And we’ll speak to them in much the same tone we use on the air – an intelligent, thoughtful, sometimes humorous voice.

We have to, not because we’ve swallowed a pill that makes us all sweaty whenever someone brings up branding. It’s much simpler than that: so far, nearly every non-public media person who has followed us is from Louisville. These people aren’t like our listeners. They are our listeners.

We’ll go slow. I expect I’ll engage this little online community in much the same way that I try to engage them when I’m on air or at a public event, and I expect we’ll expand the experiment to include other on-air personalities who want to get in on the fun.

If anything interesting happens, I’ll let you know.

We saw the power of KPBS News during the California wildfires, in the effective ways they used a variety of new tools, including Twitter… but what do you do when your city of license isn’t on fire?

Ken George at WBUR has turned the lights back on at WBUR’s twitter account and wrote yesterday (thanks, acarvin, for pointing me to it) about what the station twitter account should be.

I remain uncertain — to the point of apprehension — about what I should “Tweet” about. Do you want WBUR news updates? Irreverent musings? Programming information? Personal trivia? Shout-outs to my peeps? A running chronology of my day?

Early comments indicate people want a combination of all of the above.

I flipped the switch on WFPL’s twitter account today, and when I suggested to Andy Carvin that I’d emphasize the newsfeed over (but not to the exclusion of) the interactive element, he suggested I re-think that. And he’s right – twitter is more about conversation and engagement and less marketing, promotion and station bullhorn.

Anyway, I’ll write more about our plan for twitter later.

Disclosure: I’m on the PRPD Board of Directors, but if I thought this webinar was crappy I wouldn’t be writing about it, would I? PRPD has introduced a new series of regular webinars for PRPD members to have access to thinking across a number of disciplines, from traditional radio programming, to fundraising, to online, etc

Bruce covered a lot of ground in the 75 minutes, from the basic esoterica (what is Web2.0 and social media?) to some basic ways for stations to be more social. Bruce recommended blogs as one of the easiest ways to get into a new kind of interaction with your audience. He also talked about forums and the rising use of video, including examples of a number of stations which are experimenting with video.

Other subjects included ways to measure the effectiveness of social media initiatives – and this question of metrics is causing a lot of conversation right now., inside and outside public media.

PRPD will post Bruce’s presentation online, for members only, sometime in the next few days.

Several sites are now featuring these new popups next to the OpenID option. I think it’s great. Let’s face it – OpenID is one of these easy ideas that gets a little complicated when you decide you want to get into it.

This box can’t clear it all up, but there’s now a link for help, and an opportunity for visitors to understand that there’s probably a service they already use that can serve as their OpenID.

Steps forward…

UPDATE: Brian Kissel of IDSelector.com has commented, giving me not only the source of this cool selector popup, but also links to add OpenID to my site (or yours). Thanks!

Fred Wilson, of Union Square Ventures, writes in his blog that he worked hard to recruit Maria for the Etsy job.

Looking good, Maria… best of luck!

What is Twine? There’s a good explanation from TechCrunch:

[excerpt] On the surface, Twine is a place to organize information you find or create on the Web—bookmarks, notes, videos, photos,contacts, tasks. (A Web browser plug-in makes it easy to save stuff to your Twine wherever you may find it on the Web). You can also share that information with a private group or publicly. Once you ingest in all the information you want to organize, Twine applies a semantic analysis to it that creates tags for each document or video or photo. The tags match up to concepts that Twine’s algorithms associate with each piece of content, regardless of whether that concept is specifically mentioned in the Web page or other content being tagged.

I’ve joined, and a few other public media types are already members, too. I’ve also created a twine devoted to collecting research and presentations, blog posts, etc., related to either public media or new media or convergence, or whatever. I’m looking for other public media people to join Twine and contribute content to this new collection. And then we’ll see what happens.

Yes, it’s all semantic web, all web3.0. Confused? Intrigued? Feeling a little freaked out about it? Excited? Well, if you want to check out the beta, email me at my gmail address (you can find it on the site or just take a wild guess at it) and I’ll send you an invite.

If the Public Media Twine gets interesting, great. If it dies, well, it was a fun experiment. Jump in if you want… the water’s fine.

Shouts to Nathan Wright, who is fighting the good fight in Des Moines.

You can see the main graphic element here.

Lambie Nairn, which has been responsible for much of the BBC’s branding, developed the new identity, and the “BBC News” brand now covers all of the Corporation’s news output, including the domestic 24 hour news channel, News 24, renamed BBC News Channel this morning. BBC World, which you can see internationally, in Canada, and on a tiny number of cable systems in the US, is now BBC World News. David Lowe composed the now iconic theme for BBC in 1999; he’s varied the theme through several iterations since then.

The BBC blogs the change, giving its rationale for the change, as well as a few interesting tidbits: viewers apparently associate the color red with BBC News. Red was introduced in 1999, but became the primary color for the BBC’s graphics and sets in the early 2000′s.

If you’re like me, you’ll enjoy this look at BBC News presentation over the past 50 years.

UPDATE: My good friend David, otherwise known as DJDeedle, has just created a mix based on David Lowe’s great title themes for BBC News, with a little BBC history thrown in for good measure. You can listen here.

I started reading Teamakers during the 2005 lockout because 1) it was written by a CBC manager who was working inside while everyone else was out on the street, and 2) it was pretty damn funny.

Public media in Canada is a different beast altogether from the US variation, but there are enough similarities that I felt this blog also had something to say to those of us south of the border. What “Ouimet” saw was sometimes a smart organization, often a hydra-headed bureaucracy of managers managing paper… and not often enough an organization focused on serving the Canadian people.

It’s one thing to have those opinions and offer them to your friends; it’s another entirely to say them publicly, even anonymously, when you’re in management.

This isn’t about denigrating the CBC, although that’s probably what many thought. If you love something, you want to make it better… whether you’re a manager who wants to overcome stifling bureaucracy, a new media person who wants to convince radio people to embrace new opportunities, or a fundraising consultant who wants stations to jettison bad practices and prosper.

We’re all in it, together.

There’s been buzz about this in the blogosphere for several days now, and it’s worth watching.

Check it out!

This week’s Convergence conference in San Jose was a terrific gathering of broadcasters and their partners who feel radio’s best days might very well lay ahead. No sticks in the mud, these. Rather, folks with brains and vision and a plan, or at least the hopes of developing one.

This was no place for spin doctors and conventional wisdom. So I was not surprised when Kurt Hanson spoke on radio’s future with an emphasis on radio’s inevitable future on the Internet.

Nor was I surprised when Kurt veered left to discuss – and dismiss – HD Radio.

What fascinated me was the reaction.

Any room full of broadcasters is full of HD radio doubters, nowadays. But the vibe in this room was remarkable for the eye-rolling and audible snickering that greeted virtually any mention of HD.

Kurt disassembled HD’s premise by dividing the total number of radios now in circulation by the markets in which those radios live and other relevant assumptions (I did something like this a while back myself). He arrived at the conclusion that the average HD radio advertiser in any given market could reach more prospects by standing at the bottom of their driveway and handing out flyers.

I don’t think this needs any elaboration. Ramsey says it all right there. (But do check out his full post.)

UPDATE: I just remembered that I was cranky about HD Radio once before around these parts.

This follows news last month that Jurgen Gothe is giving up his weekday slot on Radio 2 for a new weekend program. (part of the final phase of the re-design of Radio 2)

Last month, CBC announced that Eric Friesen would be leaving “Studio Sparks” by the end of the summer, and the corporation by the end of the year. Eric, of course, came south of the parallel to American Public Radio (the PRI precursor) and Minnesota Public Radio for a few years.

That’s three major host changes in a month. (Is Jay Kernis up there?)

Radio 2 is making another significant cutback in classical music. Even in the most recent phase of the redesign, morning drive is mainly classical, and afternoon’s venerable DiscDrive is…. well, it’s somewhat classical, or classical/jazz/folk/world, or “whatever Jurgen Gothe wants to play.” Both drivetime shows will now have much less classical music. Middays have been solidly classical and it looks as though it will remain so, even though the daytime schedule will shift – Eric Friesen is leaving in August.

CBC is, however, planning a major online initiative, launching three 24-hour internet radio services – classical, jazz, and singer-songwriter. This is the biggest move CBC (the English-speaking variant) has made in internet radio since launching Radio 3, a service that’s now also available in North America on Sirius. On a number of levels, this is a significant expansion of all three genres, even though they’re getting less air time on FM radio.

And now, pardon this half-assed analysis of an American: the changes at Radio 2 follow, by several years, a similar shift at CBC’s French cultural network, which transformed to Espace musique. Espace musique encompasses a very wide variety of music – classical, jazz, world music, emerging artists, chansons, even hip-hop, punk, ska, and electronica on weekends. Espace musique has also launched eight online music channels focusing on the principle genres of the service – Bande à part. (There’s a flavor of Bande à part on Sirius, too.)

CBC’s French services have traditionally been successful with listeners – CBC has tremendous strength in the production of French audio and video content. But at least part of the CBC’s success in French-speaking Canada is because of its widely understood role in preserving Francophone cultural distinctiveness and cohesiveness. CBC English radio has long been committed to preserving Canadian culture, but the changes on Radio 2 now represent an extremely broad view of the Canadian musical culture the corporation wants to embrace and extend – certainly more broad than most public radio programmers in the US would be willing to consider for a single service.

What I think will be interesting to watch is the long-term impact of this extensive change on listeners to Radio 2… if the audience grows, or not… and how its demographic shifts.

• #1 What if they leave negative comments on my site/blog/forum? Owyang’s view: people are going to say things about you online, positive and negative. It’s better to know what they’re saying, and use the opportunity to engage people when they’re pleased or peeved.
• #2 What does it mean to be authentic, transparent or human? Among other things, Owyang says it’s about being more open about your strengths and weaknesses as an organization; and (this is important) realizing your brand is partially owned by your community.
• #3 How do I measure ROI? This gets to impact, and Owyang says you begin with the goals you set that led to the social media engagement, and measuring them against such attributes as authority, velocity and sentiment.
• UPDATE: #4 is now available: How do I launch my social media program? Owyang writes about the options, including tapping into existing social networks.
• UPDATE: #5: How do I talk to my executives about social media?

Five pieces so far, an excellent primer if you’re thinking about how your public media organization can and should engage more directly with your audience online. And for those of us who are already experimenting, it tries to get at this difficult piece of measuring the “impact of public service offered” – if I can be excused for mangling a concept on which Jon McTaggart and others at American Public Media are working.

BTW… I included these pieces on my link blog a few weeks ago; the link blog captures the things that I’m reading that I think are worth sharing. You can check out the blog, and if you use Google Reader to track the web, you can subscribe to it and share your links with me, too.

A few of my favorites:

• The connection with the consumer: “It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do.”So you can’t go out and ask people, you know, what the next big [thing.] There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, ‘If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me “A faster horse.” ‘ “
• On what drives Apple employees: “We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? So this is what we’ve chosen to do with our life. We could be sitting in a monastery somewhere in Japan. We could be out sailing. Some of the [executive team] could be playing golf. They could be running other companies. And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it. And we think it is.”
• On his demanding reputation: “My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better. My job is to pull things together from different parts of the company and clear the ways and get the resources for the key projects. And to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better, coming up with more aggressive visions of how it could be.”
• On Apple’s focus: “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.”
• On his marathon Monday meetings: “When you hire really good people you have to give them a piece of the business and let them run with it. That doesn’t mean I don’t get to kibitz a lot. But the reason you’re hiring them is because you’re going to give them the reins. I want [them] making as good or better decisions than I would. So the way to do that is to have them know everything, not just in their part of the business, but in every part of the business.”So what we do every Monday is we review the whole business. We look at what we sold the week before. We look at every single product under development, products we’re having trouble with, products where the demand is larger than we can make. All the stuff in development, we review. And we do it every single week. I put out an agenda — 80% is the same as it was the last week, and we just walk down it every single week.”We don’t have a lot of process at Apple, but that’s one of the few things we do just to all stay on the same page.”
• And check this out – on catching technology’s next wave: “Things happen fairly slowly, you know. They do. These waves of technology, you can see them way before they happen, and you just have to choose wisely which ones you’re going to surf. If you choose unwisely, then you can waste a lot of energy, but if you choose wisely it actually unfolds fairly slowly. It takes years.”

1. It’s not a fight, but listeners and viewers will win anyway. They have far more choice about what they hear and watch. They can produce media as well as consume it. And they have the means to take the lead not only in the choice and supply of media and content, but in participation with stations, networks, program producers and everybody else who plays a role in the system. The market for public media will finally become, truly, conversational and participatory.
2. There will be a new business model for public media, based on the ability of listeners and viewers to pay as much as they want, for whatever they want, whenever they want, wherever they want. We’ll call this new model VRM, for Vendor Relationship Management. It will supplement rather than supplant the old fund-raising systems. It will enrich and deepen the relationships between the consumers and producers of media, by working on terms provided by both sides, and not just by the supply side alone. This will not only increase the percentage of listeners and viewers paying for public media, but a new and vital source of funding for non-broadcast media — such as podcasts.
3. VRM will reform CRM. Once we have tools that that will allow any of us voluntarily to pay for music and everything else we call “media” — and beyond that to relate with suppliers on terms that work for us as well as for them — CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems will cease to be one-way marketing vehicles and start to become two-way means by which real relationships between individuals and institutions are supported.
4. Membership will mean more than schwag and promotion payoffs. We will cease to conflate transaction with relationship, and start relating to listeners and viewers in ways that conform to the shape of their wants, need an habits as well as ours. That means, if listeners care more about This American Life than about our stations, we help with that, rather than insist that listeners relate only to stations and silo’d CRM systems.
5. The Intention Economy will happen first with public media. This is the economy that will grow around customers’ and users’ actual intentions — rather than guesswork about those intentions, or efforts to capture or drive people’s attention. As a result, the advertising boom will come to an end, simply because the supply side will know more about what the demand side wants, and will have better ways of relating to it. Advertising won’t go away, and never will. But wasting money time and money with guesswork about what people might want will fade as a value system, simply because a system that starts the actual intentions of users and customers will be in place.
6. Cell phones will be the new radios and televisions. This will start to happen in a big way the minute Apple opens its iPhones to independent developers of native applications (rather than just ones that run in a browser). Then it will get a huge boost when carriers start selling open phones developed on Android, OpenMoko, Maemo, Trolltech and other platforms — all Linux-based, by the way. (Nokia buying TrollTech is a huge harbinger here.) The carriers will resist this development at first, and complain about how much bandwidth gets used, but they’ll deal with it because demand will drive supply, and openness will outperform the closed alternatives.
7. Websites will become as inadequate as transmitters. That is, both will remain necessary but insufficient means for reaching listeners and viewers, and for relating to them. “Live Web” methods such as streaming, file sharing, social networking and “rivers of news” will all play roles as well.
8. Archives will be the ultimate killer kontent. Stations and networks will come to value not only their own archives, but will work to make those archives as easy as possible to find, consume and otherwise use — and to open CRM systems for VRM tools to make it as easy as possible for listeners and viewers to voluntarily pay for the privilege. Bigger inventory, bigger income.
9. The end of analog terrestrial television will be a big mess and a wake-up call in more ways than we can name. The loss of analog TV’s familiar channels, and in countless cases their signals as well, will go beyond annoying millions of people who never asked for DTV, and will barely understand it. In the long run it will help break everybody free from the ancient model of broadcasting as a system defined by limits in time and distance. No longer will everything need to be “live” — and constantly to hog bit paths to listeners and viewers who are tuned in to something else. No longer will local be a strictly geographical concept.
10. Brands and reputations will matter more than ever. Familiar call letters, program names, personalities and institutions will have countless new ways to leverage their incumbent advantages, and to relate to their listeners and viewers, without both real and conceptual constraints imposed by transmitters and entailments such as “range”. What will matter most about those names and reputations, however, will not be limited to their familiarity. Instead they will be enriched or impoverished by the degrees to which they participate in a marketplace sustained by real relationships, and not just by marketing that goes by that name.

There’s a truckload of interesting stuff in there. You can read as well as I can, but let me highlight a few elements:

1. Doc and a group of colleagues are doing some great thinking around this concept of VRM – and it gets to the evolving relationship of “customers” with their public radio and TV stations. Forging deeper relationships with our members and opening doors to new forms of support that speak directly to the desires of our members is a key piece of the puzzle. If members want to support your station, make it happen. If they want to support a program and not a station, make it happen. If they want to give money to NPR, and not to a station, make it happen. We create so much value, and yet we offer a one-size-fits-all way for people to support us.

2. Web sites are important, but they’re not enough. If only a tiny fraction of our audience is spending even a few seconds with our web sites, well then, there are a few things we need to be thinking about: first, what is wrong with our web sites that leads our audience to believe that there is nothing compelling there for them; but also, second, are we prepared to understand that our online efforts are going to have to be platform-agile… reaching our audience in the places where they congregate, from Facebook to widgets, etc.

It’s an interesting argument – looks like it will be a good book.

The Public Radio Partnership began with the unification of three Louisville public radio stations. The name for that new organization was all about them, and rightly so. Mergers are difficult, time-consuming, internalized processes. Now, years later, the merger is history, a success, and it’s time for a new vision.

The new name represents a vital organization looking outward to its community – an organization committed to serving its listeners, enriching their lives, empowering them, in an era when local commercial broadcasters have disappeared behind the corporate curtain, behind the voice-track.

Names are symbolic, but symbols carry power and intent. Congratulations to the entire staff of Louisville Public Media on this important step forward. On March 10, I’ll be proud to join you.