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.

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.

Barbed reply

If the internet is--as Sen. Ted Stevens maintains--a bunch of tubes, it could sure use a dose of Liquid Plumber. The most persistent rap against the web has been that it's almost impossible to tell whether you are getting good information or not. In a time of reputation management, viral marketing, buzz doctors and spin control--not to mention the assortment of more pedestrian rumormongers, outright liars, and smear artists--who can you believe? Then there are the soreheads, the crackpots, the professionally paranoid, and the wearers of tinfoil hats. It boggles the mind (if the mind is not already boggled).

I assumed that somewhere in the jungle of social networking tools that is burying traditional media like a collapsed barn under grapevine, there would be a service that allowed the surfing community to tag specious content as crap. Something like :
428 readers reported (link to offending content) to SepticTank.org.
Tags: bogus (412), twaddle (15), how do i log in? (1)
Veracity score: 00.23%
But there's no such thing. I should know because I checked it out… on the internet.

Community self-policing works pretty well on individual sites like Wikipedia, but we lack a scheme that will apply to the whole ball of bits. Long before the days of cyberspace my friend Allen proposed the following, which can be taken as a model. Repeal all traffic laws and give every driver a dart gun. Each time a driver jumps the light, cuts someone off, straddles both lanes, or drives while shaving, a vigilant motorist fires a barbed dart with a red flag into the body of the offending vehicle. Collect enough flags and police wave the idiot over and ask him to step out. Then a big electromagnet lifts his car into the maw of a portable crusher. Harsh perhaps, but then Allen is a bit of a sorehead himself.

Lurch engine

I've been spending a lot of time the last few months observing your habits. No--that wasn't me following you home in the beige Corolla--but observing your habits as a web visitor to NCPR, as tweaked out by the subtle algorithms of stats analysis. One number that jumped out at me was that 30+% of you come to our pages via an outside search engine. That tells me a couple of things-first, that many people come to NCPR from all over the world, looking for one thing that matched their interest, not to visit a local public radio website per se. This is a good thing; part of our work is to provide a window into the North Country for the world. But it also tells me that large numbers of our local audience are resorting to Google because they can't locate what they are looking for either through our site navigation, or through the poor literal-minded, three-legged site search tool that is built into ncpr.org. And that is, how you say, suboptimal.

After years of looking for a better internal search feature--something cheap, feature-rich and open-source, by preference--after trying to write search tips that are rarely read and only occasionally helpful, after trying to add extra search tools that give the visitor different options, we have decided to break free from our instinctive public radio penny-pinching and solve the problem the old-fashioned way--throw some money at it. In these days, a search engine that doesn't function in the same way that Google or Yahoo or any other big player does is not a search engine, it's a hide engine. So on our immediate shopping list is the Google Mini Search Appliance, one more heat-producing device to compete with the air-conditioner in the web office, but one that will allow visitors to search (and to actually find) whatever they are looking for at NCPR. Also in the works is a retooled site design that will navigate in a more logical and consistent way from page to page. If you have any horror stories about getting lost at NCPR, and any suggestions on smoothing the way, please drop me a line at radio@ncpr.org.

Geek pride

The leaves are halfway out, the black flies are all the way out, and lightning is driving the golfers off the course behind the station the way the angel with the flaming sword evicted humanity from the Garden. A perfect May day in the North Country. But it can do its worst outside, as long as the power holds out—I’m deep in the guts of ncpr.org and might as well be in a mine for all I care about the weather. Tweaking screenloads of gibberish to make infinitesimal improvements in the community calendar, rendering down volumes of old static content for the few drippings that will add to the savor of the database. I may not be able to move mountains, but I can move domains--clicking away in the half-light and chuckling to myself.

Aside from the somewhat rarified pleasures described above, yesterday brought a long-awaited satisfaction. A public version of NCPR’s homebrew web content management system, Public Media Manager, has long been on offer to other stations in the public broadcasting system. And I was beginning to feel like a guy who puts all this good stuff out by the road, and weeks later, no one has taken a thing. No more. First dibs goes to the Bloomington, Indiana community station WFHB, who filed off the software’s serial numbers, installed a roll bar and Hollywood mufflers, painted it all metalflake purple, and took it out on the road. Check it out: http://news.wfhb.org.

It’s like watching the kids grow up. I think I’ll print out a screen shot and tape it up on the refrigerator.

Postcard of doom

Writing in haste again, taking a break between sessions at my annual geekfest, the Integrated Media Associates Conference, this year in Boston. Nice for me, because I get to bunk with friends in Medford and hang out a little with my daughter in her adopted town. Yesterday was the hard-core techie sessions, with a higher concentration of bluetooth ear phones and bitty foldout keyboards than anywhere outside freshman orientation at MIT. Once again, it's the end of the world as we know it, according to keynoter Michael Rosenblum, video journalism guru. The explosion of services like You Tube represent the tipping point from old media to new. That is, from centralized, cash-fat and exclusive media, to lean, inclusive, democratic media. "Adapt or Die!" is the cry. The difference this year is that CEOs and senior producers are joining the ranks of the believers and the terrified. The message is received, but what will be done with it is totally up for grabs.

Somewhere the mix of social networking, blogging, visitor submitted video, audio and text will intersect with professional curation, the necessary resources, and the deep storytelling expertise of old media to create a synthesis that doesn't have a name yet. At least that is the hope. The alternative looks like holding stock in buggy whips and Betamax. That expressionless psuedo-personality The Market, as always, shrugs and says "Tough noogies." Next up, a day of sessions at MIT, with the title (ominous to many in the room) of "Beyond Broadcasting."