When you don't want the whole pie

A few days ago an item jumped out at me in the New York Times headlines email--Google had just introduced a new feature allowing users to create custom searches for their own websites. You might think this is one more bell-and-whistle from an already somewhat tubby corporate marketing department, but if you haven't seen much of your resident geek for the last few days, it's because he or she has closed the office door to be alone with the exciting possibilities. Search engine users since the beginning of time--1994 that is--have been looking for ways to clean out the million-hit clutter that makes finding things online such a crapshoot. I've spent about six hours over the last two days creating something that has been talked about for years, but never done--a search tool that looks at all public radio sites, and only at public radio sites. Check out the test page. Fast, clean, ad-free, cost-free. I'm in heaven.

My fellow webnaut Bill Haenel has been exploring other possibilities--building a search universe that corresponds to the map--in this case, the North Country. His project has a more commercial cast, drawing revenue from ad-sharing and sales. Check out his efforts at North Country Search. Usually, the bigger a dot.com gets, the smaller its brain becomes. Nice to see one bucking the trend with a truly useful innovation.

Telepathy not required

Despite the forces of globalization and the popularity of mega-mall culture, people persist in "going local" whenever they get the opportunity. We may live increasingly in a global village, but we still have to rely on our neighbors. The Malaysian blogger you spend time online with does live in "the village," but he is not going to help you get your car out of the snowbank. And the flavor of local produce in season speaks louder than any ad. This gives me confidence in the future of community-based radio, despite the breathless claims of satellite and internet radio pom-pommers. That--and the consistent enthusiastic generosity of our listeners whenever we ask them to support our work on the air. Customers buy what and when they want, but a neighbor helps out whenever you ask--just as long as the feeling goes both ways. If you think NCPR has been a good neighbor to you in the past year, you don't have read our minds to find out we need your help to get by.Just tune in; we're asking.

Ground Control to Major Dale

We're getting ready to retract the gantry, which is all that restrains the lean, mean fundraising machine at NCPR. Organized, busy, determined, maybe a slight bit maniacal--it's like the flight ops center before a moon launch around here. People whip up and down the halls, focused, too busy for chit-chat. Joel has a headset on one ear and a phone in the other, staring at the waveforms of promos on the screen. June is vibrating at a frequency so high only dogs can hear it. The thank-you tanks are loaded to maximum capacity with mugs and member paraphenalia. Website? Website green to go. Pitch room? Loaded. Pastry product control? Optimum. Caffeination? Roger that. T-minus three days and counting--then we fire this puppy off. Thanks to all for the high-gee ride.

Frosty reception

I've been out exploring the googlesphere to find the text of the 88-year-old Robert Frost poem, "War Thoughts at Home," recently discovered by grad student Robert Stilling and published in the new edition of Virginia Quarterly Review. Given that one can find online the full text of thousands of books written before and after 1918, find the full text of Rep. Mark Foley's IM chats and emails, find endless accounts of the informal genetic experiments of celebrities, full-length pre-release Hollywood movies, 911 call audio, and every bad poem written in the last decade somewhere on the internet, I assumed this would be an easy search. Nada—locked up tighter than the next Harry Potter. Four lines here, four lines there, no more.

There's something out of whack in our notion of intellectual property. Robert Frost is, I am sorry to report, long dead. But through the endless legal extension of copyright beyond the lives of the artists whose right to benefit from their own work it was intended to protect, we are instead cutting ourselves off from the richness of our own cultural legacy. The estates and publishers of long-dead artists cling to their debatable rights more fiercely as time goes by. The text of the poem appeared briefly on one website, and was forcibly removed within hours. Ironically, the only new intellectual property associated with the discovery, Robert Stilling's account of the find, is posted on the VQR website for all the world to read for free. I was happy to read it; it's an interesting story. But I will pay VQR's $25 subscription price in order to read the poem online, only if they can promise to bring back Robert Frost to collect his cut. It isn't as if I can't walk over to the Owen D. Young Library and read the current issue for free. Frost himself probably took a similar walk around the St. Lawrence campus when courting his bride-to-be.