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Monday, January 29, 2007
Well, oh 
| | The Best of Technology Writing 2007 is taking nominations. Since candidate pieces need to 1) be engagingly written for a mass audience and 2) be no longer than 5,000 words, I'm not sure I've written anything that qualifies. |
Live support
| | Ratings aren't the problem. Some of the 81 affiliate stations, if you can find them, actually do okay. Little 650-watt KIST/1340, here in leftish Santa Barbara, is tied for 7th with a classical and a Spanish-language station. Big-signal KPOJ/620 is tied for 5th with rock & pop FMs in equally leftish Portland. |
| | Al withstanding, the network has been pretty much unlistenable — for me, at least — since it went live on March 31, 2004. I dunno why, but all-left radio is even more insufferable to me than all-right radio. (Credit-where-due: Rush Limbaugh remains the best of the talk breed.) But politics isn't the problem. Even listenability isn't the problem (again, ratings are there, at least to some degree). Connectedness is. |
| | Like most broadcasters, the AAR folks "get" the Net about as well as a fetus gets a fastball. While everybody with an iPod has iTunes, and while iTunes has a radio tuner for Internet stations radiating streams in MP3, Air America's website pushes Air America Radio Premium, with a picture of an iPod and a link to a page where you fill out a form to open an account, if you don't have one already. This is high-friction stuff, though countless sites put you through it. |
| | Then, if you get past the Premium jivewall (yes, I did), you get a list of all the shows, available as podcasts. Sooo... why hide them? And doesn't "premium" suggest that it costs more? In fact it doesn't, but the suggestion (and the friction) is there. |
| | Just as oddly, the tabbed directory on the Air America site makes a distinction between Listen and Find a Station. The top link under Listen opens a linkproof window that gives you a choice of Real Player or Windows Media Player. (Like many of us, I use neither.) Meanwhile, Air America is actually listed among 29 Talk/Spoken Word streams in iTunes' Radio tuner. Why not say so on the site? The Find a Station tab goes to a /stations directory that not only fails to provide links to stations, but doesn't even list their frequencies. How, if I'm in northeastern Ohio, am I supposed to know where the eff WARF-AM is? Well, I can look it up on Google. (Here it is. And here's much more from Wikipedia, which is getting real good at providing in-depth radio station info) But why require that? |
| | Radio is live. That's what makes it radio. Nothing is a better-suited companion to The Live Web than radio. If Air America 2.0 really wants to do better than Air America 1.0 (and to be as hip to the Digital Age as the version-number approach makes their ambitions sound), it needs to get hip to the Live Web. Right now it ain't. |
Basketball dreams
| | Just helped our builder get one of these ($100 cheaper than that price too, from a local retailer even) out of his truck. After we wrestled the pole box out and carried it to the side of the driveway, we saw it says "lift with 4" on the side. I think the box weighs about 300 pounds. |
| | If all goes well (meaning it doesn't rain), the concrete shoud be dry in a couple days and we'll have the pole up and I'll be shooting baskets every day with the kid, in front of our new house. |
| | Basketball is the only way I ever got much exercise. I don't know why I love it so much, especially when I'm approaching 60 and my few skills are pretty much shot; but I do. |
Public speaking
| | I'll be speaking at IMA's Public Media 2007 late next month in Boston. Details pending. |
| | Meanwhile, I'll be making connections between VRM and public broadcasting. Specifically, I like the challenge of coming up with simpler/faster/better ways for public broadcasting's listeners and viewers to pay for the programming they like. |
| | Waiting for program-suspending fund drives and sending in $50 for thanks and a coffee mug seems kind of lame and retro to me. There has to be a better way, no? Same goes for relating with public stations in general. There's still a distance between public stations and their listeners and viewers. If we reduce the communications friction, two things will happen: 1) more consumers will become customers; and 2) better relations will turn into better programming. |
| | I say let's make it happen. Give me something to talk about at the show. Post your ideas, or otherwise send them along. I'll post mine too. |
| | Guidance: this should be something new and better that comes from the listener/viewer side. Not yet another (or an improved) system that works only on the stations' side. We need to get the listeners and viewers more involved, on their own terms. |
Thanks, Cox
| | I'm not often kind to carriers. But I have to slip a small kudo in the general direction of Cox.com, which has quietly upgraded the upstream speed of our High Speed Internet service, I just noticed: |
| | For what it's worth, I'm paying $63/month for 10Mb down and 1Mb up. It's the up that I want, and I'm using that increased speed as an excuse to add some old pix to my Flickr pile right now. |
| | I bought that level of home service back when we hooked up the house last summer. The service guy on the phone told me Cox was rolling out the 10/1Mb service at some point in the next year, and that paying for those speeds would be the best way to get at least 756Mb on the upstream side. I've been getting that level since then; but this is the first I've noticed anything higher. Nice to get that. |
| | I still want more, of course; but every improvement is appreciated. |
Hillary farts in public
| | I take a silly pride in almost never opening any of the hundreds of spams that get past my filters (which catche thousands) every day. But every once in awhile I get fooled by a subject line. The headline above was one I opened by mistake today. |
| | So I figured, Hey, if it worked for those turkeys... |
An exception that proves no rule
There goes the fire season
| | When I drove up to San Francisco last Tuesday, it didn't look like Winter. That is, it didn't look green as Ireland, which is the usual botanic routine for California Januaries. This was because the rainy season had been sunny, so far. Or mostly. |
| | That changed on Friday. We've had the customary rains since then. Hope it keeps up and recharges the reservoirs. |
| | An interesting fact: The rains were so heavy two winters ago (when landslides for awhile isolated Santa Barbara) that streams seeping out of watersoaked hills continued to fill Lake Cachuma (our main reservoir), even through the last two dry summers. |
| | Anyway, we've been digging the rain here. |
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