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Thursday, February 13, 2004
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 Thursday, February 13, 2004
started 2/13/2004; 9:37:59 AM - last post 2/14/2004; 1:42:24 PM
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Doc Searls - Thursday, February 13, 2004 
2/13/2004; 1:37:59 PM (reads: 4644, responses: 8)
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Sellers markets 
| | I have a friend here in town who wants to explore selling a variety of stuff on the Web: clocks, puzzles, writing and more. But he's not sure how to make it happen. I've never explored this subject at all. Whaddya do here? Yahoo? Amazon? eBay? Those are the "brands" in my mind. Are there others that make more sense? |
Pointing home a drive
| | After dropping off David and Dan at the airport in San Diego yesterday at the start of rush hour, I headed home to Santa Barbara on The Five. (In Southern California, highways take articles. The highway called "101" in the Bay Area is "The 101" in Los Angeles.) Traffic moved smoothly for a few minutes, then slowed to a crawl for the next twenty miles. |
| | I thought about cutting over to the Pacific Coast Highway. But I didn't know the area well enough, and didn't have local maps. I wished I'd had a vocalizing GPS like the iQue 3600 (which I covet); but I didn't, so I went to SCAN on the radio. San Diego seems to lack a full-time news station like KCBS in San Francisco and KNX in Los Angeles (both of which stopped SCAN on the radio while I was parked on The Five). The two big local talkers, KOGO and KFMB, were both running their nationally syndicated right-wingers (Hedgecock on KOGO and Hannity on KFMB). When I finally caught some traffic (I think on KPBS, the NPR station), there was no mention of any traffic on The Five. Then I remembered that not reporting standard tie-ups is also standard, pretty much everywhere. Still, no help. |
| | There Has To Be A Better Way, right? |
| | Well, there is. You'll notice that many of the radios in new cars in have this little RDS symbol. If you're lucky and some local stations take advantage of RDS (Radio Data System), you'll see the station nickname instead of the frequency on the radio's display (e.g. Rock 105 instead of 105.1). Some stations in the U.S. now take advantage of RDS support for displaying current songs or slow-mo messages (RDS only displays 8 characters, but that's still better than none). |
| | If broadcasters bothered to transmit RDS data the way they do in Europe (where it was developed), we might see some use for the "traffic" button that's also featured on some RDS-ready radios. Dig this from a U.K. FAQ on RDS: |
| | The radio display can show if the station broadcasts travel information. Since most stations do anyway, this feature by itself is of limited value. The Traffic Announcement (TA) feature allows interruption of a CD or cassette tape when there is a travel report from the radio station that is currently tuned-in. The radio will automatically switch from CD or tape to the radio for the duration of the travel announcement. |
| | Also this about EON, a facility of RDS: |
| | Most RDS tuners are now fitted with the EON facility, which offers the ability for local stations to 'break into' a national station's broadcast for the duration of a Traffic Announcement. When listening to a BBC national station, such as BBC Radio 3, EON will tell the radio about any traffic bulletins being broadcast by BBC stations in the local area. The radio would switch to the local BBC radio station for the travel bulletin, then back to the national station when the bulletin had finished. For example, when travelling through Oxford whilst BBC Radio 2 is tuned-in, the radio will switch to BBC Radio Oxford for any travel bulletins, with the TA function switched on. This feature is not usually implemented on commercial radio stations, such as Classic FM. While a proportion of the RDS datastream is used to provide programme and contact information for Classic FM, a small amount is classed as an "Additional Services Licence". This spare capacity on the RDS is used by Itis Holdings to provide a RDS-TMC (Radio Data System-Traffic Message Channel) service, using Classic FM's RDS. Cars fitted with the necessary electronics are able to decode this information and it is used to provide navigational and traffic information. |
| | The U.S. RDS standard (called RDBS, although most still call it RDS) doesn't support everything in the European standard, it's still the European standard and chipsets that are deployed in the U.S. radios equipped with RDS. Meaning: it can be done. Or so I'm told. |
discuss
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lou josephs - Re: Thursday, February 13, 2004
2/13/2004; 2:52:17 PM (reads: 397, responses: 4)
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Yeah it can be done but who has the rds encoders other then clear channel. This is stillborn tech...
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Ray Edwards - RDS is real and in use in the US...
2/13/2004; 4:16:32 PM (reads: 492, responses: 2)
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I'm in the radio business. It is not just Clear Channel who has this technology - quite a few other broadcasters do, too.
The challenge is: it's costly to add this technology to a station's signal, and most broadcasters are simply not going to have this at the top of their priority list. At least not until they can make money on it.
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Doc Searls - Re: Thursday, February 13, 2004
2/13/2004; 8:44:58 PM (reads: 481, responses: 0)
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According to my radio, KPFK, KPBS, and about half the stations in L.A. and everywhere else I go. If it's built into every new Delphi-produced car radio, why not take advantage of it?
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Doc Searls - Re: RDS is real and in use in the US...
2/13/2004; 9:14:19 PM (reads: 543, responses: 1)
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Let's see...
In L.A. you've got RDS happening on 88.1, 89.3, 90.7, 91.5 (that's all the major noncommercials other than KCRW),92.3, 97.1, 98.7, 102.7, 105.1 and 105.9. And that was just the last time I bothered to look when I was in town.
Only one of those (98.7) is a Clear Channel station.
There are lots of RDS encoders out there. Some are even free:
http://renaud.cerrato.free.fr/
If cost were the only issue, why are so many noncommercial stations using it?
Seems to me the cost runs up when you build the programmatic interface to the content stream, so every song title is captured and transmitted by RDS encoding along with the song. Still, it's not a huge hack. And you don't have to bother with that service. You can just put out your call letters and set the listeners' clocks.
Or make money by running text ads.
dMarc Networks, which currently runs promo messages along with song titles and station nicknames on KIIS <102.7) and The Beat (92.3) in L.A, is selling text messaging over both stations.
Seems like stations that use multiple frequencies or translators, which includes a huge percentage of stations in the West, would also like radios that auto-switch frequencies to stay on the program. RDS supports that, too (in Europe, at least. Not sure about the U.S. on the receive side.)
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lou josephs - Re: RDS is real and in use in the US...
2/13/2004; 10:50:20 PM (reads: 565, responses: 0)
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Once upon a time there was a radio station in the LA market that was traffic every 5 minutes on Am, the call letters 93 KHJ..Car Radio...
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Scott Reynen - Re: selling stuff
2/13/2004; 11:52:22 PM (reads: 448, responses: 0)
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you might consider bitpass.
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Dan Sickles - Re: "The 101"
2/14/2004; 2:07:57 AM (reads: 430, responses: 0)
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I think it's related to Freeway being a southern CA term. It's 'Highway 101' vs 'The 101 (Freeway)'.
The Pasadena Freeway was the first. The sharp radius turns and short on/off ramps tell how much slower traffic moved in those days.
btw: The 10 West becomes 1 North at the coast in Santa Monica. By the time you get there, it won't save you any time getting to SB but it's much better for the soul.
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Dave Ely - Highway technology needs
2/14/2004; 5:42:24 PM (reads: 487, responses: 0)
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I suppose that having this will help bring about better methods to deal with the disaster known as the SoCal freeway system, but by then we'll have even more of a mess.
What I need, at a minimum is a live feed from the local online freeway maps in my car. It would be nice to anonymously identify traffic patterns on the major roads as well. I know the freeways and how they connect, I know a lot of the major roads. I also know how to do Ventura, LA and San Diego in other ways. All I need is a sort of high level view of all the freeways and major roads. On radio, traffic has become high frequency, low detail. The binary concept of a SigAlert is pointless because that's all they talk about. No useful data from the area is provided.
I've used friends to help vector me in recent conditions. On Monday afternoon I ran into a mess on the 405 just south of John Wayne Airport. I called a friend to check on the backup distance and decided to forgo a trip across Irvine to the 5 since it was only a 2 mile backup. Had it been a bit longer, I'd have been on the surface streets heading east and south, avoiding traffic and eventually hitting 5 or tripping over the San Diego Freeway again. It's a game once you know the conditions in front of you. You need to know where on the road the blockage is and get on the opposite side and measure progress. If you're going to lose more than 15 minutes or so, you need to know the alternatives. Unfortunately, we learn these kinds of things because we've got too few of these high speed arteries and too many tourists.
I decided to wait until Friday to come up and used the 405 (aiming for the mid-day break). I ran into several little sag and go patterns but was generally moving well from San Diego all the way through into LA (they're unmistakable and lead to pile on behavior). I hit the LAX area around 12:30 and landed in what looked like a typical mid-morning morning snarl when I lived down there. A few minutes after landing in the mess, I heard a radio report of an accident near El Segundo. That was useless because we'd already gone past it without problems and the real problem was a few miles north on the LAX s-curve. It ultimately cleared by the time we got north of Marina Freeway (as I figured it would) but it would have been nice to know for sure.
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