American Archive Pilot issues RFP

From Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB):

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) created the American Archive Pilot Program in response to the growing urgency to preserve and provide access to Public Broadcasting?s audio and visual heritage at risk of deterioration. Oregon Public Broadcasting is managing and administering the Pilot Program. This RFP is open to all CPB-qualified public radio and television stations.

For full details see: http://americanmediaarchive.org/application/

Lawrence Lessig at SXSW on Open Media and Public Broadcasting

(Crossposted from Pubforge.org)

My friend Kevin Reynan from the Open Media Project traveled to SXSW in Austin last week, and captured an interview with Lawrence Lessig…you know, the Stanford law professor and the guy behind Creative Commons.

(Kevin says “please thank whoever paid for the beer and food and the PBS happy hours during SXSW. I went there several times, but never met anyone who actually worked for PBS. Probably not the best use of your marketing dollars, but I appreciated it.”)

Anyway, Lessig has some semi sharp words for PBS relative to open content, or lack thereof, in public TV practice. PBS wants to protect its rights to distribute and properly monetize PBS productions, and I completely get that. But I have long argued for drawing a line between content that is expensive, heavily-produced, and highly marketable, and another class of content whose value in the public domain exceeds its private value. That line would often be fuzzy and hard to define, but I believe we have an obligation to try and draw it.

Here’s an example: Ken Burns’ new documentary, National Parks, begins airing this fall. Ken Burns and PBS are the rights holders to the documentary. They’ll use it during pledge drives, sell DVDs, and monetize it however they (and stations) can, all of which is appropriate. But doesn’t the general public have a stake in the production beyond this? Our (too small) tax contributions help pay for it, as does corporate underwriting and possible grant money. Most important, our continued investment and support of a public broadcasting system enables Ken Burns and PBS to produce and air the documentary in the first place. So how about making available lots of beautiful HD footage of national parks freely available for download? Stuff left on the cutting room floor, full-length interviews, images, whatever…all of this would be of great interest to lots of people if they could get their hands on it. This content would enrich us generally…but will probably never be released.

An objection to releasing it would be the cost of doing so. This is another argument for funding the American Archive, so important A/V materials like this can be preserved, and all citizens can benefit from a larger view of our lives and times. It’s critical that we make that happen…and that we clarify the rights to public media. My point of view is, making public media truly public should be the norm, not the exception.

Blog Tools

Recently I hooked up with Twitter, and find it pretty interesting. Some of my high-tech friends are following my tweets, and even some musicians in Brighton, England. I guess because I'm a musician and my last name is Brighton, the semantics are enough for a Twitter connection.

I have now ported my Twitter updates to my Facebook wall, so now one Tweet feeds both places.

What I want to do though, is have one interface for writing that can publish to one or more places. I write for about 10 different blogs, and some of them are closely related. In some cases I might want one post to appear on three different blogs. How to do that without copying and pasting?

So I'm exploring available blog tools, including at this moment an OSX app called Ecto. We'll see how Ecto works, along with other tool options, and report back!

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.