The world looks back

Online, NCPR's main aim is to inform the region about itself and about the world. A secondary aim is to inform the world about the North Country. In crunching the numbers, I am amazed at the way the second task works. One third of our traffic arrives via search engines such as Google. Most comes from North America, but in the last month we have had visitors from more than 100 countries, including 310 visits from the United Kingdom, 99 from Japan, 68 from Brazil, 107 from Austalia, 12 from South Africa, 20 from Jordan, and two from Fiji.

One of the slightly creepy wonders of a good stats package is that I can tell where visitors from a given country or city landed in our site. One of our Fijian visitors viewed an audio slideshow about an Ontario beekeeper. A visitor from Myanmar looked at our series on biofuels. One visitor from Sarajevo went to The Folk Show page; another went to the Community Calendar. Three visitors from China apparently wanted to know about finding nude models in Chestertown. Visitors from Iran wanted to know about trash burning and to hear a review of "My Fair Lady." One Ukrainian likes Celtic harp and flamenco guitar, while our single Paraguayan visitor favors String Fever. UpNorth Music performer Kevin Irwin has at least one fan in Poland. Next door in Germany they are listening to Celia Evans and Scott Shipley.

All told, the world appears to be getting a somewhat quirky and spotty view of the North Country. But then consider what I know about Fiji--nice beaches, or Paraguay--it's in South America. I have to wonder though, just what do they make of 'enry and Eliza in Tehran.

Rain of soup: the NPR API

For a longtime advocate of emphasizing the "public" in public broadcasting, this is an exciting moment. My online colleagues at National Public Radio have made it the first major media company to hand what amounts to the "keys to the kingdom" over to the public. They have done this via the introduction of an open API, or application programming interface--a mouthful of buzzwords describing a feature that allows the public to access the entire archive of 250,000 NPR stories, and to use them as they see fit within their own sites, pages, and blogs. Included are tools to organize collections of stories by topic, program, series, reporter, and/or search term, and to receive those stories in a wide variety of formats and at varying levels of detail.

Within a few months, NPR stations such as North Country Public Radio will also be able to make their own stories available to the public using NPR's API. So, for example, if you had a blog dealing with environmental issues in the Northeast, you would be able to create a collection of stories on the environment from NPR mixed with local stories from NPR stations in the Northeast. Or a bluegrass fan might collect all the performances by and interviews with bluegrass artists at NPR and mix in performers from the UpNorth Music project. Or you could just grab every story since 1995 about James Brown, the hardest working man in show business. Sweet.



Even better, outside developers are already building new tools to use the API in novel ways. John Tynan at KJZZ has worked out a widget that takes NPR stories by topic and drops them onto a timeline, so you can see how coverage of a given issue develops. Here is a sample of the work in progress. Geoff Gaudreault of Reverbiage has built a widget that combines a 3D globe mapping out the latest NPR stories with an embedded player to listen to the stories. See it work and get the code. At NCPR, we are in the process of switching to the API for all the NPR features syndicated within the site. You can play with the API yourself, and should. Use the "Query Generator" to select and view different slices of the NPR pie. Register to use the NPR API.

Just in time

Back in the old economy, if it was time for a little home baking, Mom might send me down the block to Don's Market for a can of sweetened condensed milk. Don would take out his can claw and hook me down one, and blow the dust off the top. If the shelf was bare, no matter--he'd order a year's supply at a time and keep the extra cases back in the stock room. These days nothing has a chance to gather dust. They teach just-in-time manufacturing and inventory in MBA school. Fedex has offices in Papua New Guinea. If you asked people what they really wanted from the Internet, they'd tell you they want the ability to download a cup of cappuccino and a ham sandwich, because they don't have time to leave the desk. Busy, busy, busy, knocking off the to-do list just in time. (Cappuccino, by the way, generates 22,600,000 search results on Google.)

Paul Willcott was in the studio this morning, working on the audio book of his novella A Franklin Manor Christmas (which Joel assures him will be done "just in time" to accompany the print release). Paul asked if I had my Listening Post essay done yet, and I had to laugh. There were hours to go before the deadline. As usual, I hadn't a clue. He suggested something about Sundays, but writing about the day of rest requires more leisure than I have available. Besides, I had to write all the other stuff first.

Joel dropped by my digs later on, just in time to put the kibosh on a concert feature for the online section, but Kevin, also just in time, came up with an alternate feature from our reel-to-reel archive. This would have been a good time to have had a couple of essays in the can--back in the stock room, as it were. But that's 20th Century thinking. So here's a new one, just in time to make the email deadline.

A child's garden

These days my gardening efforts are pretty much reduced to weeding the perennials that survived another winter and the predation of the deer. Life in Millennium 3 seems to leave less and less time for playing in the mud. But I'm finding that each year of neglect brings my yard more closely into line with what I remember from my childhood. The hardy survivors seem to be those favored by earlier generations of North Country gardeners. The honeysuckle and mock orange will probably outlive me. Day lilies and bearded iris grow where they've always grown, and have even spread to the old compost pile where I dumped the spade-damaged thinnings. Exotics and annuals have long gone extinct, but the lily of the valley and the myrtle undergird the thick old lilacs each season. The peony transplanted from my grandfather's house sprawls each spring in aromatic disarray.

Dutchman's Pipe shaded many a North Country porch

The elms of my childhood are long gone, supplanted by maples that struggle now with their own blights. Much else that once shaped the North Country yard is also gone rare. As a once-voracious grazer of my neighbors' bounty, I can tell you that style has changed from "eating apples" to flowering crab apple in most places, and that the ubiquitous twin patches, one for rhubarb and one for raspberries, are now a rarity in town. And in the age before air conditioning, a vine-shaded front porch was the summer living room. Now only the Potsdam Food Co-op seems to sport the huge-leaved vine (I forget its name) that once broke the summer sun all over town. And I miss other old-fashioned favorites—few plant gladioli and more, or the simple miniature cabbage roses--modest, but hardy.

But then there was also that rash affection for japonica, or "bamboo"—three and four generations later, we still pay the toll on our knees, digging out the roots that extend without end—who knows—all the way through the earth to their Pacific island home. Long after we're all gone, japonica can fight it out with the cockroaches.

The thirty-threes of sixty-eight

Radio Bob wandered in this morning with his latest $5 CD treasure, a compendium of Vanilla Fudge and Iron Butterfly--tasty. The music of 1968 was special for a lot of reasons, but most special because I was then 15 years old--an age when musical passion runs an inch wide but a mile deep, when there are only 3 or 4 decent bands in the world and the rest of everything is chopped liver, when you can listen to the same cut 15 times in a row, just because that screaming guitar lick is so freaking amazing.

My early adopter friend David stopped me on the street in the summer of '68 to pass along a brand new copy of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, Iron Butterfly's side-long rock extravaganza. I was about to hustle it home to fire it up on my crunchy portable, the one with the tone arm weighted down with a penny to grind the needle over the skips. David said, "No man--you gotta do this with headphones." I trekked up to the college library's listening booth and jacked in. And the world changed, or so it seemed.

But the world changes, and then it keeps on changing. Iron Butterfly just doesn't sound the same. I listen to '60s music still, but different music, and with a different ear. Less naïve perhaps, but also less engaged, less willing to be transported. I have the benefit of experience, and the deficit.