Where we breathe

Before there was the Worldwide Web, there was the WELL, the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, an online community that served the technophiles of the Bay Area through a network of text bulletin boards and other services delivered over slow phone modems. It was a little slow, a little clunky, and highly geeky, but it had one advantage that has been lost in the online explosion since--it "mapped" onto a terrestrial community--it created an analog of where its participants lived, and was deeply involved with its issues and objectives.

I was an early fan of the WELL, reading about it in CoEvolution Quarterly. Ever since I first became involved in creating websites, I wanted to work in countertrend to the fragmentation and placelessness that characterized the new online world. In particular, I wanted to build a place within the web that corresponded to where I actually lived. I saw the traditional infrastructure that maintained my community falling apart, the informal network of churches and social clubs, local news in print and broadcast in decline, the increased busy-ness of workers and the corresponding decrease of community volunteers. If my work online served only to further distract people from the places where they made their lives, I would be part of the problem.

In the decade or more since, that fragmentation has only grown, and communities-- particularly small ones--struggle ever harder to keep together civic life. While the new online social tools dubbed "Web 2.0" have done amazing things in creating communities of affinity, I still look forward to a "Web 3.0" to serve our communities of residence. That's the place where we breathe the air.

Weather report: improving

I've been having a hard time with the weather. Not the weather outside--that's pretty sweet--but the weather online. Providing accurate and comprehensive weather data for an area this huge is a struggle both on air, and on the website. For years we have largely abandoned the field to the weather networks online, providing at ncpr.org only sketchy plug-ins with minimal forecast data, no alerts, no regional radar. As many of you have been at pains to point out over the years--pretty lame.

Having become enamored of Google Gadgets, last week I tried to put together something better. I tuned up a forecast scroller for each of the regions pages that gave current conditions and twenty-four hours of forecast for a specific location or set of locations. Except that its notion of current conditions runs hours out of date. I found a beautiful zoomable regional map with animated precipitation radar, except that it wouldn't work for the 8% of our visitors using the Safari browser--showing the western US to newer versions, and crashing the older browsers altogether. No way to win geekly glory.

So we bit the bullet and installed the shareware package HamWeather, which gives about as much information as anyone can absorb. It's still in shakedown phase--current conditions are still too out of date, there are styling conflicts that make the display a little buggy, etc. But I'm psyched, and even better, have some control over how it works. Once all is in order, you will be able to set the page to your own preferred location for return visits. Oxbow is, after all, the rightful center of the universe. And at 2 pm, it's mostly sunny there and 78 degrees, relative humidity 34%, 0% chance of rain, winds SSW at 7 mph. Check out the new page; the weather is improving.

Leechcraft

There is something hideously fascinating about war news. The last week has given us a new one to follow--new geography to learn, "Ossetiya," new experts to hear from, and new smoke-shrouded, rubble-strewn streets to sorrow over. As long as there have been historians, they have attempted to explain why wars start, why they end--but they can't have gotten it right, else war would long ago have been done away with.

It's my theory that we don't have a theory. What if war is a disease that societies catch, and we are living in the era before germ theory? It could be evil spirits, we'd say, or unbalanced humors, or invisible miasmas that waft from battlefield to battlefield. When I listen to the pundits talk about war, what they tell me sounds like medieval pharmacopeia. Judging from the results, it's equally efficacious. Bleeding, as I recall, was one of the favored therapies.

New connections

Sometimes the clock just sits there, slowly grinding gravel into sand, and sometimes everything seems to happen at once. We're heading into one of the latter times now. Stuff from the back burner, things we have been chipping away at month by month, all come to a head. A lot of the action is being driven by new projects and initiatives from our network partner, NPR.

The big news of the last few days was NPR's acquisition of Public Interactive, the platform host of many public radio websites, and a service provider to many more, NCPR among them. The merger may save us some change in the long run, but it will help most in facilitating our use of content from public radio programs that originate with PI's former parent, Public Radio International, and with other media services PI has under contract. It will beef up NPR's digital shop and will help PI stations play more effectively on the national stage.

NPR is making a big investment in social networking for the public radio community and is set to roll out a platform on which stations can foster their own communities within NPR.org. Look for lots more on this in late September.

NPR has also jump-started stations into the arcanely-labeled field of mobilecasting, making a mix of station and network features available via cell phones and other mobile devices. NCPR expects to join them by November. For those of you who wish your cell phones had a cord and a dial, there will be a regular phone number you can call from any type of phone to get the latest NCPR and NPR news and features. This will make NCPR available for the first time in remoter parts of the region that don't have broadband internet, or cell service, or even radio reception.

Speaking of mergers, I have saved the best for last. NCPR station manager Ellen Rocco is tying the knot this weekend with Adirondack potter Bill Noble. We wish them all the best.