I attended BB in 06 and 07 but couldn’t make it because of schedule conflicts this year. If you found yourself in a similar situation, then check out the very complete report here.

I’ve just started digging into this, but it looks like some of the deepest discussions came in the afternoon during the Mapping the Money panel, which included Ernest Wilson, Walter Annenberg Chair in Communication and dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California… and board member of the CPB. He chided public media for not keeping up with the pace of change. “If you don’t get this right pretty soon, the quality of democracy will decline and stagnate, and it will be our fault.” Strong stuff, leading to robust discussion.

I’ve always thought this conference was particularly provocative and invigorating; the other “public media” conferences belong exclusively to the wealthiest branch of public media, the radio and television stations that serve a well-educated and largely passive audience (in the case of television, a mostly diapered audience).

I’m happily a part of that elite public media segment and I like those other conferences (I’m a PRPD board member and we put on a pretty good conference ourselves), but as someone who is supposed to be making decisions about the future of public media, it doesn’t hurt to be reminded that public media is much bigger than Public Radio and Public Television; that there are smart ways that we can all work together, if we’re willing to experiment thoughtfully; and that we bear the special burden of preserving democracy in a country where it’s under attack on many fronts.

Rob Paterson mentioned his plan to use Ning for a project in the comments, and now he’s posted in great detail on how he and KETC, and a larger community of public media folks (myself included) are using Ning to track an important initiative that KETC is undertaking to address the sub-prime mortgage crisis. This project is one to watch.

So, you have everyone at KETC, you have Rob, you have other partners, and you have a small group of public media “advisors” around the country – how do you keep everyone on the same page? Rob’s screenshots shows the power of Ning’s platform – you can see how they’re making use of internal blogs, asking questions and fomenting discussion in the forums, embedding clips of content as it’s created.

This is exciting stuff. You can do it with Basecamp and other tools, but Ning adds a social wrapper the project management that’s going on here.

I’m not a paid Ning spokesperson, nor do I wish to be, but I’m enthusiastic about the potential uses for this tool.

Her strong opening line: Nonprofit public media–and most especially public broadcasting–will embrace interactive Web tools that connect companies, producers and distributors of content and their target consumers in ways they once considered “commercial.” Three words of advice: Get over it.

She proceeds to list a number of those “formerly commercial” opportunities, each of which arises from either the quality content we’re already creating, or new initiatives we have underway to explore other platforms.

Her recommendations include better systems to acquire and process donations and contributions, stepping beyond the traditional concepts of membership, perhaps even a central fundraising mechanism; monetizing the connections we’re building with new tools like twitter and Facebook; and getting content out to third parties like Hulu and iTunes, where people can purchase it.

Mermigas offers only a couple examples of ways we’re currently generating revenue from our content, but in truth, there are only a few. She notes there are a lot of interesting things we’re doing that could be revenue generators, from our social engagement on twitter, to signature content we create.

And: An estimated $3.5 trillion of available investment funds are on the sidelines in the U.S.–as much as $40 trillion worldwide–as a result of the credit crunch, cautious lending and economic turmoil. There is a precedent for conditional, nonprofit investing that simultaneously advances social goals and business interests.

Mermigas isn’t giving us all the answers; her post encourages us to think again about what we’re doing and how we might pay for it.

It’s worth a close read.

Dennis Haarsager has introduced me and perhaps many others to the excellent analysis of Diane Mermigas through his blog Technology360. Some of you will remember Diane from her appearances at the Public Media Conference, most recently this last February.

Note: Here at WFPL/Louisville Public Media, we’re pleased to be listed among her examples of public media engagement.

It looks like they’re calling the concept 9Network (I love the name). This is a multi-layered initiative that draws on the strength of the television operation (and 9 STL is doing pretty well) and weaves into the strengths of the community. The result is a network mobilized to serve the community: public media.

This is an initiative to watch and to shamelessly copy.

Beyond Broadcast used it for yesterday’s conference; WAMU also uses it for its forum called “The Conversation.” Check out the sites. They look great. They have all kinds of functionality – profiles, discussions, groups, among other things.

The set up is just familiar enough that attendees won’t be scared off by it, and can interact with that at whatever level they prefer. Beyond Broadcast has always made great use of these tools – essentially handing them over to conference-goers and letting them make their own online/offline groups, enter their information, etc.

The first two years, the conference relied on a wiki. Using a social network is a step forward: some people are afraid of the arcane wiki markup language, and products like Ning have more versatility.

IMA used a wiki for its last Public Media Conference; for the next one, they might want to try a social network. PRPD is always looking for ways to keep members connected – hmm… I’m just saying…

You can explore all kinds of stuff tagged by attendees here.

UPDATE: Rob Paterson says KETC is going to use Ning for its Mortgage Project.

Dennis Haarsager, NPR interim CEO, was among the speakers yesterday and AU’s Center for Social Media blog has an excerpt of his comments:

“We’re trying to envision a world in which everyone can be a producer, but thinking about how to visualize this new world can be a challenge. Haarsager said his organization is looking at thei work in layers, the top being the goal of “enhancing human understanding.” The next two layers that are considered, then, are “what we do and where we do it,” Haarsager said.

“I don’t know that there’s any one of us, even a national network, that’s going to be able to set an agenda for public media. We’ve now given voice to anyone that has an internet connection,” Haarsager said.

The bigger challenge is finding the voices out there and making sure they’re heard. “You can nominally distribute something by throwing it on YouTube, but making sure someone finds it requires techniques that are beyond the capabilities of many individual content producers. So there is still a role of an aggregator.”

– News from the Future of Public Media

I know a number of us were following the proceedings from afar yesterday on twitter. If you weren’t able to be there, here’s the main blog. There are some great demos there, related to the theme “Mapping Public Media.” I’ve not seen video of the sessions posted – perhaps I’ve missed it, or it’s not yet uploaded.

The most interesting site I’ve come across: IowaFlood.com.

This is one of those moments where you see the powerful results of some relatively simple aggregation. Use Yahoo! Pipes to pull in the pictures people are taking, aggregate all the #IowaFlood tagged content from twitter, add feeds from the weather service, news sites, plus original posts.

I’ve been following the “desmoines flood” tags on Flickr for a few days, but I’m seeing many more pictures here, and the content is more relevant to me than the mainstream news reporting.

Let me be very clear about what I mean by that: the mainstream news from the Des Moines Register and other sources give me the authoritative reporting that I need to gain a broad perspective of what’s going on. But IowaFlood.com gets right to heart of what I want to know: what’s it like in my old neighborhood in downtown Des Moines? What’s flooded? What do the streets and bridges I walked on every day look like right now? Well, this is my old neighborhood.

This is what really matters to me, and this is something that mainstream media can’t do for me and every other person who wants to see their neighborhood. But other people can do it, will do it, are doing it. That’s powerful.

There’s no “blurring of the lines of journalism” in this instance. Any intelligent human being understands the difference between the work of veteran reporters and editors… and the eyewitnesses with their cameras on the streets of Des Moines and Cedar Rapids, recording what they’re seeing. And any intelligent person knows both are invaluable.

When mainstream media teams up with these people or with aggregators like IowaFloods.com, it can be powerful and rich… just as sound married to text created the powerful medium of radio, and video married to text created television, or when human stories married to news created powerful public radio journalism.

I’ll stop getting all crazy ass on you. Summary: this is a good thing, and everybody wins.

Andy Brudtkuhl of 48Web Consulting set up the site.

UPDATE: after catching my spell-check turning “expatriates” into “ex-patriots,” I came back here to see if the same thing had happened. Yes, indeed… now corrected.

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.

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.

“Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you, may not be worth sitting still for.”

I’ve been meaning to post this for a long time. Clay Shirky gets at the impact of the architecture of participation and (sometimes) traditional media’s lack of understanding of the change we’re now experiencing. It’s less than 20 minutes, it’s informative, it’s fun… and it’s a better use of my cognitive surplus than sitting in front of a screen without a mouse.

UPDATE: Check out Jay Rosen’s excellent, related essay.

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.

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!

• #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.

The Spark wiki is in the early stages, but host Nora Young tells the Globe and Mail she hopes listeners will use it

to offer thoughts about show topics, to contribute questions for guests who might be coming up on the program, and generally to interact with her and the rest of the show staff.

The newspaper reports Spark is planning to do its entire show on February 6 using ideas generated by listeners.

Spark is using the Socialtext platform for its wiki. I don’t know a lot about Socialtext, except that I’ve heard good things about its ease of use. Wiki ease of use has always been a speedbump for me – a number of wiki platforms require the use of markup language. It’s certainly something you can learn, as evidenced by the thousands of Wikipedia contributors, but for internal station projects and such, I’ve set up wikis on Zoho and Jot for staff use because the WYSIWYG interface is less daunting. Socialtext is also in this category of products.

What’s a wiki good for? Internally, it’s an excellent place to maintain operations manuals, checklists, policies, etc. It’s an excellent collaborative space to discuss and co-create content. At Iowa Public Radio, our classical music team uses a wiki to share and discuss music programming; I use it as the official location for documents like our local/network break schedule, etc. If anyone on staff spots an error or needs to add new information, she can do it herself.

Externally, wikis can be a fun way to aggregate information. Probably the best-known example is Minnesota Public Radio’s Minnewiki, which is a truly encyclopedic exploration of music in Minnesota.

Wikis are a space where your audience becomes a true partner with you in creating something that’s useful to all. I think it’s one of those level playing fields where we can engage and really interact with our audience.

Not to oversimplify, but if you have information to share, and you know your listeners or viewers have even more information that they’d like to share… a wiki is a way to easily bring everyone together.

• What is a wiki?
• Wikipedia: Wiki
• Some free or low cost wiki platforms: Mediawiki, Socialtext, Jot, Zoho, Wetpaint, Wikispaces

BBC Three will also launch an ambitious multi-platform venture, encouraging user-generated content, some of which might make it on the air. This, along with other changes,is designed to emphasize the melding of broadcast, online and mobile content.