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| Friday, June 4, 2004 |
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Think of it as Radio Simply Sydicated 
| | Says here Nokia wants your cell phone to be a radio too. Makes sense. Naturally, they want it to appeal to "consumers" in the usual goofy top-down ways: |
| | Now the company wants to make the mobile phone the preferred way of listening to the radio and accessing related content. |
| | Nokia calls its scheme Visual Radio, and is slowly rolling out the service with help from Hewlett-Packard. HP will promote and sell the service to radio broadcasters, and will host the Visual Radio service on its servers. |
| | Stations that deploy the service will send out the song's title and artist information. While the music is playing, on-screen buttons will let users buy the song as a ring tone. Stations may also offer listener polls, surveys and quiz contests, and promote concerts or other events. Listening to radio broadcasts via cell phone will be free, but there may be a charge for some of the related content, which will be displayed only on a new series of phones. |
| | Okay, now we need to do four things. |
| | First, somebody here in the computer industry needs to tell folks in the radio industry (starting with NPR and PRI — 'cuz they might listen and they've already gone pretty far downstream with making their programs ready for this, and they have a business model that makes money from listeners rather than advertisers) to send out RSS notifications with every single program they put on. Hell, every advertisement too. Might even create some demand for appropriate messages. RSS can be really, really huge for the industry. It might make the damn industry not only interactive, but accountable. Meaning, for example, you can count, and account for, your listeners. If you're an NPR station, maybe you can get the listeners to buy the "content" that only 10% are paying for right now. Think about it. You can change the whole industry for the better. Fast. Provided, of course, that ... |
| | Second, folks in the cell phone business start thinking bigger here, but not just by talking to each other, and partnering in BigCo2BigCo ways, but by partnering with the independent developers out here running the Live Side of the Web, as it's developed so far, which is pretty far, but still far from far enough, considering. The sky is open to the stars, Locke said. RSS-fortified radio on cell phones opens a whole galaxy of possibilities. |
| | Third, we need to jump at our chance to free Internet radio from the worst instruments ever created for playing it: the browser, and all forms of client software, including relatively nice ones like iTunes. They all suck. Not just compared to an iPod, but to a Sony transistor radio, circa 1958. I know, that's because they're on computers, and maybe that's the best they can do. Well, maybe. But cell phones can be radios a lot easier than computers can. Start rethinking How This Should Work. |
| | Fourth, we need to take this chance to break radio free from the notion that it's just a commercial utility controlled by government and exempt from constitutional as well as common sense protections of free speech. That means we start our own stations, on which we play, much as we now blog, what we please. But not on the old broadcast model. Instead, on the new RSS-fortified interactive model. The one with the civic gestures we call links. |
Listen already
Show her a good time
| | Ruby is making her first-ever trip to San Francisco for PlaNetwork. Wish I was going too, now. |
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