Fake It Until You Make It
Words of wisdom from Mark Burnett, the reality television maven that brought the world Survivor and The Apprentice.
Podcasting - Traditional Radio Broadcasting’s Worst Nightmare
[Updated October 6, 2004 - see update at bottom]
A period of intense change is going on right now, and a fight is brewing. The fight is between traditional broadcasters of television and radio content, and their consumers who want more control over how they consume that content.
You might say right now that there are two kinds of people: those that have used a TiVo or similar Personal Video Recorder to watch their television content, and those that haven’t. For those that haven’t heard of them, think of a PVR as a VCR on steroids. You can record all of your favourite shows very conveniently, without ever having to change or rewind a tape, and you can fast forward past commercials or change shows at the click of a button. You can rewind or pause live TV - something that becomes second nature and then a necessity very quickly. Basically, you can watch what you want to watch when and how you want to watch it, not when and how the network wants you to watch it.
There are many, many solutions already available for PVRs for television, and the courts are full of battles about them, as you can well imagine. But what appeared to have been overlooked until now was the “other” broadcast medium, over-the-air radio. Video may have killed the radio star in the livingroom, but the radio star just packed his stuff up and moved to the car.
That’s the thing - you can’t watch TV when you’re driving. But look at our highways packed with commuters. How do they occupy their brain “cycles” while stuck in traffic? Radio.
But traditional over-the-air radio is broken in many ways even more than television is. An average listener does not have particularly good odds at finding something relevant to them on the dial, due to the limited number of viable radio frequencies. Satellite radio helps in this matter, but all it really does is introduce more of the “99 channels and nothing on” possibility.
What does this have to do with blogs and iPods? Everything. Adam Curry may be best known as an MTV VJ from a few years ago, but what he should be known for is being a cutting edge Internet broadcaster, or what is increasingly becoming known as a podcaster. His ipodder software is the first in what will likely be a long line of audio content aggregators. He is working closely with Dave Winer - the father of weblogging - on this stuff, and what they’re doing so far is mind-blowing.
But I’m not doing this subject justice. If you want to know more about the coming revolution in audio broadcasting - podcasting - check out this article by Doc Searls.
We’re in for a wild ride.
[Update]
From James H in the comments comes this great link: How Podcasting Will Save Radio
An analogy to the perspective the writer, Tod Maffin, takes in this article might be stated as “How the Automobile Will Save Carriage-Makers”. I think both perspectives are compatible - those in the traditional broadcast industry that embrace podcasting will be saved by it. Those that don’t, won’t.
Great post! Oh, and how cool is it that this comes from a fellow Canadian that works for the CBC?
iloveradio.org <- subscribed.
Simple Googling Tip
This a really simple way to improve your success rate when trying to find something using Google (or any other search engine, for that matter). In fact, it’s so simple that many people already do it, and those of you who don’t may wonder how you got by without this technique. In fact, I’m writing this post as a reminder to myself to use it more often.
When we’re searching for something on the web, and the results from our search query are not at all what we had expected or hoped to see, many of us immediately modify our query to include more or different words. But often the problem with the results that were returned is that they are full of references to material that is appropriate for the words used in the search query, but in an entirely different context. So, sometimes the thing to do is to remove words - not from your query, but from the results set.
Consider a (completely hypothetical) situation where you are searching for information about your house’s windows, but are generating search results with information about the Windows operating system. Rather than trying to find better words for “windows”, why not tell the search engine that you’re not interested in any results that contain the words “Microsoft” or “XP”? It may well turn out that your original search query perfect for the job, once the inappropriate words or phrases had been filtered out.
To exclude words from being included in search results, simply include a minus sign (-) before the terms you want to exclude. So, in the above example, you might search for:
windows information -microsoft -xp
Note that this is only an example, and I expect this particular search query really blows chunks. But you get the point.
Give it a try!
A Dark Day
Nike expresses exactly how hockey fans feel about the lack of a season this year.
The Top 25 Calvin and Hobbes Cartoons
This is a wonderful, annotated page of Calvin and Hobbes cartoons celebrating what the site authors believe to be the top 25 Calvin cartoons of all time. The thoughtful comments just add to the experience. Just go see it.
