Using Tools for Collaboration / Updates on Infrastructure Changes

Recently, I noticed a new error in our log file. It turns out the folks at WAMU changed to using feedburner for the url we had used for our feed here:

http://kjzz.org/programs/dianerehm

This is great for them, however there was some change in the feed that
caused our listing to break (or perhaps it's a combination of a change in
their feed and some incompatibility with our feed parser).

As a result, I simply opted to pull in the feed for the Diane Rehm from NPR
instead. This works great... and it doesn't break.

However, this does bring up a question is, why isn't there an email list where changes like this could be announced (or maybe even some kind of blog which we all could post to and whose resulting rss feed we could use as a means of keeping track of these kinds of changes).

On a similar note. The other day, I needed to make some changes to the FPRAZ Store, the online store we have set up for our friends organization. This is based on open source software made by Alex Koval and his team at zwarehouse.org. These folks happen to live in Kazakhstan and so, rather than call or email, we opened a jabber session using meebo, a web based jabber/instant messaging client.

Were we to be collaborating more as a network, would it be possible to put together a "buddy list" of instant messaging addresses for web developers (and web designers and web strategists) within public broadcasting. I mean, I was able to get some great work done in one half hour session, and I see how our working together in this way would be beneficial to all.

Look forward to hearing your thoughts about this.

Following Brendan's Lead

We just followed Brendan Greeley's lead as described in the section "Playing nice with bloggers" in the Current article here:

http://www.current.org/web/web0615opensource.shtml

and invited two guest bloggers to talk about Real Estate in the discussion for our locally produced edition of Here and Now.

We also followed Bill Swersey from WNYC's advice about NOT moderating the discussion prior to the show.

As a result, over the course of the show, we had an amazing 60+ posts here:

http://kjzz.org/programs/hereandnow/comments/66/

In listening to the broadcast unfold, it was great to hear how our listeners posting to the web really become a part of the show. If you would like to hear an archived version of this broadcast check out:

http://kjzz.org/news/arizona/archives/200609/realestate/

Thanks to the folks at Radio Open Source for the advice and for pioneering this format!

John T.

Call for Open Source Projects

As you may have heard by now, North Country Public Radio has launched a site at www.pubforge.org to act as a repository/demo site/promotional space for open source tools oriented toward the needs of public broadcasting stations and organizations. We are actively seeking projects to recommend in the site, particularly those that are ready or can be made ready for use by others in the community immediately. PubForge is best set up to host demo versions of projects that run in an apache/php/mysql environment, but we have offers of technical support to host projects with different requirements. Projects of interest that we may not be able to host are still welcome--PubForge will provide a resource area for descriptions of other projects with links to download sites and demo areas that may exist elsewhere.

We are also seeking to build a developer/support community around these projects with a longterm aim of being the go-to site for small and underresourced stations who want to create a strong online presence using tools built and supported by those who know the needs of public broadcasting best, their colleagues in the community. If you are interested, please email dale@ncpr.org.

The on-demand media revolution

Has it really been this long since someone posted to Opensourcemedia.org? I'm about to remedy that, but let's ponder for a second some of the momentous events that have occurred in the interim: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Runaway Bride story, and the release of iTunes 4.9.

OK, the Berlin Wall was fully torn down by 1990. It hasn't been that long since the last post here, but it's been long enough that this space may be absent of an audience. So I'll just go ahead and scratch a few ideas on the wall and maybe they'll get discovered by some intrepid cave explorer in the distant future.

So here is today's topic, which is a bit of prognostication: The launch of iTunes 4.9 is the tip of the tipping point of the on-demand media revolution. But it is a flawed instrument, and will not by itself finish the job.

Most denizens of Opensourcemedia.org have long been excited about RSS as a means of easily publishing fresh content. When "podcasting" came along as a simple extension of RSS feeds, many of us naturally jumped in. Traffic on my own site grew steadily in the months preceding June 2005, largely driven by MP3 downloads of our local radio programs to clients like iPodder. After June 28th, traffic grew dramatically. I mean it basically doubled, and shows no sign of growing at a merely moderate pace in the near future. I'll be paying lots more for bandwidth in the coming year, that's for sure, and be happy about it.

But I'm not just president of the Podcasting Hair Club for Men, I'm also a member. Suddenly I have found room in my more-than-busy life to become an active media consumer once again. I listen to On the Media when I go running in my favorite park; I take the show I produced for 16 years (Focus 580 on WILL-AM) with me on long trips; I consume the Gillmor Gang and laugh at Steve's grisly bear-ness at the gym. I'm becoming better-informed and -entertained as a podcast user, and it's changing my expectations about what media and media producers can do for me. As a media producer, this has changed my expectations of myself and the demands on my organization. The great part is, we can now serve people even better, reach a much larger audience, and have a global impact.

But the on-demand media revolution remains incomplete. "Podcasting" may actually divert us silly humans from the real pay dirt. What other really cool things could we do with RSS feeds and enclosures? As you know, RSS enclosures can be any media object. Video files sure, but let's think a bit harder about the possibilities. Why not include lesson plans and resources for learning, presenting pathways for understanding subjects in great depth? Links to additional background and source materials, included as a SMIL or Flash module? Instead of simply enclosing audio and video files, why not resurrect the idea of interactive media? We can enclose any media type whatsoever, so why not produce something truly outstanding?

So let's say we do that, and people get busy writing or updating clients to support downloading and managing different media files types and applications. We're still not finished. Because what we really want is persistence and interoperability, and these are properties of media objects that have been endowed with appropriate metadata.

This doesn't mean throwing in proprietary iTunes tags. I mean sure, we want our stuff to work in iTunes so let's do that. But what else do we want our stuff to work in? My argument would be to make it accessible to the emerging global media library. That means endowing all our media objects with library-grade metadata, like Dublin Core, PBCore, and/or the other emerging standards for exposing metadata and harvesting content in the online world.

An RSS client is basically a metadata gathering appliance, but without extended metadata it's not an intelligent client. Title, Subject, and Category are useful in a very limited sense. RSS clients could easily be built to recognize and do more interesting things with extended metadata. And extended metadata could play a very interesting role in creating intelligent media objects that update themselves in the online world.

All for now...I just updated my little iPod shuffle, which is all I could afford on my public radio salary. (Still, at $99 and a few ounces, it's got more computing cahones than Illiac ever had.) I'm going to go run and catch up my favorite shows. I guarantee none of them have anything to do with the Runaway Bride.

CPB and IMLS grant possibility

Submitted for your attention:

CPB AND IMLS CREATE PARTNERSHIP FOR A NATION OF LEARNERS Partnership for a Nation of Learners, a multi-year, $3 million initiative of CPB and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), will provide resources to bring together libraries, public broadcasters, and museums to leverage community assets and create new pathways to learning, discovery, and exploration. The initiative will offer competitive grants to support existing collaborations and to create new ones, encourage professional development, and conduct project evaluations to measure effectiveness. Grant application guidelines and more information about the initiative will be available on October 31, 2004, at http://www.cpb.org/partners/.
[SOURCE: Corporation for Public Broadcasting/Institute of Museum and Library Services Press Release] http://www.cpb.org/programs/pr.php?prn=375

We'll have to see what the guidelines say, but I bet there's an opportunity for collaborations relating to online digital archives. I'd like to see a testbed involving at least three public TV/radio stations partnering with local libraries and museums to facilitate public access to collections, using the metadata standards we've been discussing, and developing the tools for XML data harvesting and a nicely-designed interface. (Oh yes, and a marketing component to make what I just said intelligible).

If you're game, let me know.

The Internet, Libraries, and the Public Record

"It is both a pity and a sign of the times that the libraries do not have recordings of both conventions for the civic review," writes Andrea Antulov in the Letters to the Editor section of our local Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette. "I urge your readers to demand they ensure citizens have plentiful and easy access to historial, journalistic and civic records. After all, that was the purpose of libraries' creation, to ensure a literate, informed citizenship without regard to social class in order to protect democracy."

NPR has published RealAudio archives of the convention speeches on NPR.org, so anyone with an Internet connection (or who can visit the public library where they have a connection) can listen. Here they are:

Republican National Convention:

http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=3877883 (Day One)
http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=3882508 (Day Two)
http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=3885136 (Day Three)
http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=3887311 (Day Four)

Democratic National Convention:

http://www.npr.org/politics/convention2004/dnc_schedule.html (All four days)

This is great but...we don't know if these URLs will be valid four years from now. All audio is encoded in RealAudio streaming format, meaning that without, ahem, special tools you can't download and save the audio. It's part of the public record, but the audio files aren't in the public domain. I kind of thought they should be, so I asked Robert Spier at NPR.org what would be the reaction if someone made local copies of these speeches, solely for the purpose of public enlightenment. Here is the reply from our email correspondence:

Jack,

Here is what our Counsel's office offers in reply to your question from last week. Seems pretty clearcut.

Best.

Robert Spier
NPR Online Station Services
202.513.2448 rspier@npr.org

Love NPR? Support your local station: http://www.npr.org/stations/index.php

This would be very problematic for several reasons, including: (1) I don't think any of the speeches qualify as works of the United States government (even the speeches by public officials), and thus they probably aren't in the public domain, (2) music rights issues, (3) I think we got some audio from a "pool" so there is a question of rights in the recordings, and (4) there may be some conditions from the convention halls or RNC and DNC that I don't know about.

I like and respect Robert Spier, but I had to reply that it's clearcut in no way at all. I won't knowingly violate anyone's copyrights, which leaves me in a tough spot if I want to "ensure a literate, informed citizenship without regard to social class in order to protect democracy."

Did I mention how many people searched my web site looking for MP3s of the Barack Obama speech? I'd like to make this stuff available, and I don't care if it's on my site or yours. I think we should be in this literate informed citizenship business together, but we can't publish the goods because we don't know what the rules are. So what's a brother to do?

With the Internet we now have the technical means to create a vastly useful digital library. I understand that the CNNs of the world want to protect their proprietary work and get paid. But in the public media universe, we're not serving a private interest but a public good. If we're going to make the public broadcasting web useful for citizenship and democracy, we need to view it less as a gated community and more as a public library. And stock the shelves as best we can.

PBCore (Public Broadcasting Metadata Dictionary) Launch Imminent

I received this yesterday on the dm-broad@LISTSERV.VIDE.NET listserv. Sorry for the length and the news release style, but that's what it is. Regardless, the info is pretty important:

The inaugural version of PBCore (Public Broadcasting Metadata Dictionary), a standard way to describe all public broadcasting content, has emerged from the Test Implementation phase and is being finalized for the launch of version 1.0 in September 2004. Under development since January 2002, PBCore is the result of unprecedented cross-organizational cooperation by a team of public radio and television producers and managers, archivists and information scientists.

A common metadata protocol is fundamental to public broadcasting's ability to work in collaborative environments to deliver and exchange content across new digital distribution platforms. PBCore will enable more efficient and cost-effective ways to leverage content and service partnerships to serve existing and new constituents. PBCore will facilitate new production collaborations and the ability to parse traditional programs into short segments for Web distribution or as niche content for specific community, service and institutional needs. For these applications where granular manipulation and interoperability are required, PBCore will be essential.

In May, PBCore was deployed in three test scenarios to determine:

1. its effectiveness when used as a data inter-operability/translation tool;
2. if PBCore can be used to initiate a digitizing/archiving process and
assess its ability to assist in asset or record discovery; and
3. to map PBCore to several emerging metadata standards.

Participants included public television station and national producer WGBH, public radio station and national producer Minnesota Public Radio, national public broadcasting distributors PBS and National Public Radio, local station Kentucky Educational Television, and recognized metadata expert Grace Agnew.

The tests were completed successfully and highlighted areas for further refinement. In response to consistent feedback to make metadata standards easy to use, the number of PBCore metadata elements has been reduced. Also, efforts are underway to provide more PBCore examples that are specific to television and radio.

The need for a shared descriptive language for public broadcasters was underscored in the results of the test implementations, as well as the March 2004 Request for Comments. Ninety-six percent of the RFC respondents agreed public broadcasting needs a core metadata dictionary and that PBCore meets this need. In addition, 44 percent of participants plan to implement a metadata project within the next year, and 74 percent within the next two years. Respondents indicated the use of PBCore would provide public broadcasting with a necessary tool for increasing station and network efficiencies and inter-station resource sharing. And 80 percent agreed the use of PBCore could afford new service opportunities for their organization or those with whom they work.

The PBCore is built on the foundation of the Dublin Core (ISO 15836), an international standard for resource discovery (http://dublincore.org), and has been reviewed by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Usage Board. Version 1.0 of PBCore will be published in September 2004. It is anticipated that PBCore will be available free of charge.

A summary of the Test Implementation results, version 1.0 of PBCore (once published), a User Guide with an orientation to understanding PBCore elements, presentations, background articles, and resources are available at http://www.utah.edu/cpbmetadata/.

The Public Broadcasting Metadata Dictionary Project is funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and administered by WGBH/Boston.

Press contact:
Lisa Cerqueira
Senior Publicist, Interactive Marketing
WGBH Boston
lisa_cerqueira@wgbh.org
(617) 300-5334