Full Circle Associates

I'm getting sloppy. The day is getting long and I have to do a demo at the end, so I'll be slacking off here shortly.

Many of the presentations from Northern Voice can be found at http://blogosphereradio.com

There is also somethings at http:/www.hoveradio.com from Tod, a public radio geek.

These urls are from the Blogging Multimedia panel. I not verbatim blogging because Roland has bribed people to be brief. That translates into talking REALLY fast. I can't do them justice. So we'll let the podcasters send the stuff out to the world!

Couple of notes;

* Tod talks about vertical feeds to tap into feeds that are of particular interest to a person. Tod gets excited about taking public radio to the next level. He will be doing a blogwalk through the CBC broadcast center tonight instead of dinner. It will take about an hour. Meet Tod at 5pm at the back of the theatre on the left where the Blogosphere people are set up.

* Peter Bull - Jay Dedman's partner in crime. (I missed Jay's opener) Works for community technology center in MA. Creating method for people to share broadcast quality video over the web to be distributed over the web, public access stations. People who don't read blogs, those who do -- a real community thing. Excited about online collaboration and using video. Getting beyond geography. This guy can film it, this guy can edit it. (OH dear, I think I'm taking notes again.)

* Marc Canter - founder of Macromind, godfather of microcontent unification. Acknowledge wife and two daughters. Nice to travel to Vancouver. http://www.ourmedia.org . One of the thing about multimedia content is to store it. It's not just the storage, then you have the bandwidth. We’re attempting two things with ourmedia: free storage and free bandwidth. Does anyone know how to solve Tod's problem to subscribe to Tod's vertical health care? Metadata. What got left behind with podcasting is metadata. Otherwise known as tagging. Attach to your podcast. The participants of the case, topic, the general information about the cast. There are lots of things you can "explain" about a podcast. That is referred to as metadata. OurMedia wants to standardize on metadata. The first repository for stuff is the Internet Archives run by Brewster Kahale. Sold Alexa to Amazon. http://www.arhive.org
The books project. He has been storing petabytes of public domain materials. (1000 terrabytes). He has the entire Grateful Dead archives. We went to Brewster. Starving artists need a place to store artware. There is also a download tool which is hard on a webpage. We see blogging as just the beginning of a revolution on micro content. Now stretch your imagination. That chunk of text was a review. Those are all new standards we are working for a whole new platform for digital lifestyle aggregation.

Now open to questions from techies and humans.

Q: What is your vision of podcasting, implicit in this metadata conversation. Radio is one of the last community building, democratic, cross cutting media for things that people might not know they are listening to. What if they only listen to what they seek out.

A: Tod: This is one of the problems. If each of us self select our news the world would not know about many things. Headlines in newspapers catch our eye on the periphery. A news story that we weren't quite thinking a bout. Love to see an AI algorithm. Stumbleupon.com

Jay: People scour the internet. http://mefedia.com, instead of going to the NYT you go to your feed.

T: The irony of microniche, at some point we want to get back to the way it was, a trusted voice. There are reasons there are newscasters on for 22 minutes each night. I could choose her (the tagger) vs the news broadcast.

M: The difference between an expert is one that weaves a story that ties in all the other issues. Mamma expert. Knowledge and information is not compartmentalized. Keywords is artificial. At best it gives you help, but you need 5 - 10 - 15 tags. That's the difference about really good content.

Q: Thinking about feeds, Clearchannel and the anti community nature of radio in the US> What about Blogdex, delicious main feed, Google news. I'm still going to get some things pushed at me that I don't want to hear about it. Along sides RSS we have these feeds, Google Zeitgeist.

M: You should not choose just one thing. Nothing is one way or another. Radio did not go away when TV showed up. Everyone chooses how they balance it.

Q: Inclusionism. Learning to polarize. To move from one end of the polarization to the other and back again as a skill. Rather the whole idea of media has been about picking one spot and making a stand there. Learning to move back and forth.

T: there is great value in polarization if you have the full view. One of the cliche's on the radio... ending a radio piece is one of the hardest thing. You fall into the trap.. on one hand, or the other time... and time will tell, I’m so and so. That's the stream from one traditional channel. I can't disagree with that. BBC. Two extremes are just as valuable. People listen to podcasting are smart. They don't need to have it explained. BBC introduces comedy as if we needed a cue.

Q: I can see the practical implications of podcasting, but as far as the rest of the web, where else does it go. What are the practical implications.

A: Video blogging has only been practiced the last 8 months. New. View on computer. They are going to build boxes to view it. Distribution systems.

P: You're making a blog post that points to a torrent file and they can download it. (Bittorrent - a P2P system for sharing the cost of downloading.) If you combine with creative commons it is very powerful. You get all the pieces to put together your own work from the other sources. You listen to radio in the car. If you hear something in the car, you can't save it, send it to a friend, etc.

Set top boxes like TV you could subscribe to RSS audio or video feeds, you can make playlists and hit play. That’s already kind of happening with PVRs. TIVO has a thumbs up - it analyzes the metadata on the who, this great NYT article. This guy bought a TIVO, watched a couple of episodes of Queer as Folk and after that the machine recorded all the gay porn. That keywording brings it in.

TIVO is a closed system. That's a problem.

Q: If people are metatagging their own content. Does that scale. You have these meta keywords that become irrelevant.

M: A key part of our Our Media is that it is a community, the decentralized model. Clouds associated with particular communities. Your New Your City home boys, Canadian beer drinkers. Each would have their own clusters of keywords. Your musical event is my concert. Tags don’t scale up lineally.

That’s why I like tagging. You can put all you want and I can tag as well and use mine or others’ tag and folksonomies form, we’re using the same tags, connecting together. At the end of this year we are going to hit the scale issue. Then we’ll have new technologies. It is how I connect with other people. Communities. But you can’t have a community of a million people. Instead of a social network with a million members, think of a million communities with ten people in them.

Google – if you put in a tilde Google will find the synonyms and other key words.

Q: What about other languages

A: Our response is Wikipedia. Started with one language and grow. We’re not stopping it. We’ll give them all our source code. Starting from the bottom up.

Q: Business model?

A: No one can deliver exactly what everyone needs. No major radio station. So there is a huge niche market.

Northern Voice
multimediablogging