May 1, 2008
Public Broadcasting and Twitter? Engagement and Authenticity!
Yesterday, I saw a note from the WBUR Twitter account pointing to a blog post about their recent experiments with Twitter. For those of you who don't know WBUR, it's an NPR member station in Boston that's been doing a lot of tinkering in the social media space as of late, so I follow their work pretty closely.
In his blog post, WBUR's Ken George talks about some of their social media projects, and how they're now heading into unknown waters with Twitter:
Now our media giant lumbers head first into the world of Twitter.After dusting off the mostly dormant WBUR Twitter account, and fortified with copious amounts of coffee, I managed to accrue a modest following (hey its quality, not quantity right?). But in all honesty, I remain uncertain - to the point of apprehension - about what I should "Tweet" about. Do you want WBUR news updates? Irreverent musings? Programming information? Personal trivia? Shout-outs to my peeps? A running chronology of my day?
An excellent example of Twitter's utility is public radio station KPBS using it to receive updates on wildfires then consuming swaths of southern California, information they then could relay over the airwaves. My own personal "ah-ha!" moment came yesterday afternoon when someone Tweeted me about a misspelling on the site. It just then dawned on me that WBUR too now has a potential army of researchers and fact-checkers at its disposal. The cranial cavity expanded six inches yesterday... cue "Also Sprach Zarathustra."
So maybe the right question is: In what ways can we help each other?
Lemme spin that question another way, if I may: What would I expect of WBUR - and any other public broadcaster, for that matter - as far as Twitter is concerned?
Above all else, I would expect two things: engagement and authenticity.
Since I first started encouraging NPR folks and shows to use Twitter last year, I've seen us try a lot of things: Twitter accounts like nprnews, which is just a rehash of our primary headlines RSS feed; bpp, the Bryant Park Project account used to chat with their community of users on a wide range of topics; and accounts like nprnewsblog, which blends automated blog updates with occasional comments from Tom Regan or me, particularly on primary nights.
Which of these work best? Well, it depends on your perspective of course, but for my money, BPP is the best thing we've got going on Twitter right now. It took a while for it to reach critical mass - it averaged less than two tweets per day in October - but as Bryant Park staffers saw the number of folks replying to their tweets, a rolling conversation erupted. They began incorporating it into their work routine, and kept the tweets going after work as well. Now, they're averaging upwards of 20 tweets a day. And looking at their tweet stream, you'll see that just over a quarter of their posts are actually public replies to others, either answering questions or participating in multiple conversations simultaneously. The team has gotten very good about signing off each tweet so you know if it's Laura, Allison, Matt or someone else writing the message. And it doesn't take long to recognize who's who - they each have their own style, even though they're compressing their thoughts into 140 characters or less.
Meanwhile, they're using these conversations as sources for on air dialogue as well. BPP staff regularly ask users questions via Twitter for topics they're trying to cover on air. Sometimes Twitter users will suggest stories or guests - and in some cases, they become guests themselves. One of my favorite examples of this happened when BPP began chatting it up with redsoxcast, a twitter account that offers play-by-play coverage of Red Sox games. It didn't take long before the conversation blossomed into a radio story as well as an online slideshow. Conversations generate coverage, which generate more conversation - a virtuous cycle that's a win-win for show producers and their community of fans.
The BPP Twitter strategy is beginning to rub off on nprnewsblog as well. When we first set up that account in the fall of last year, it was just an automated rehash of blog posts, with a headline and link for each new post. That in itself was perfectly okay for a while, but it didn't exactly generate much interest. By the time we got to Super Tuesday in this past February, it had only attracted a few hundred followers. But that night, we shifted gears in a big way. While Tom concentrated on posting new blog entries, I manned the Twitter account, writing summaries of precinct results as they came in from the AP, asking Twitterers about what was going on in their precincts, and passing along the calls when NPR's election unit called a race for a particular candidate (sometimes beating our on-air coverage, much to the amusement of our Twitter fans).
Since then, the nprnewsblog account has grown to nearly 4,000 subscribers, making it one of the largest news services on Twitter. While most days the bulk of messages are still automated summaries of blog posts (63% of them, for those of you keeping score), Tom's gotten comfortable in chatting and answering questions much more often than he used to do it. "It's a great tool," Tom told me earlier today. "I often get story ideas from the folks on Twitter. It's like having a whole lot of people looking for stories or passing along interesting ideas."
Meanwhile, I still chime in as well from time to time, along with Michael Olson of our election unit, particularly during major political events. Even if we're not physically present at an event like a caucus or campaign rally - and personally, I'm never present at these things - there's a good chance that other Twitter users are there, so we're able to use Twitter to track these folks down, find out from them what's happening on the ground and join them in a conversation as the story unfolds.
In each of these cases, I've pushed really hard for our Twitter experiments to embrace authenticity and engagement. Tweets from NPR folks need to be written in their own voice. Public relations-speak on Twitter is the kiss of death; you just don't get the medium if you're using it to spew talking points. If other Twitter users don't have a sense of the human being behind the Twitter account, they're gonna lose interest in you real fast.
Even if you're being true to yourself when you're posting your tweets, you can't ignore the fact that there are all sorts of people who want to interact with you. That's why I'm trying to get us away from feeds like the nprnews Twitter account where we just publish, and embrace feeds where we converse. Even though the Twitter tag line is "What are you doing?" the heart of twitter is really "What do you want to talk about?" And it doesn't take long to notice that Twitter users are serious news junkies; they want to talk about what's going on in the world and in their lives. Twitter is helping my NPR colleagues tap into these conversations for ideas and inspiration, while providing users with even more things to talk about. Creating a more informed public is at the heart of NPR's mission, and Twitter is an emerging tool for us to accomplish that mission.
So as far as WBUR is concerned, here's my advice. Don't publish - converse. Use your Twitter account to start new conversations in your community and learn about what people are saying. Get some of your colleagues using it, though if you do it all on one Twitter account, be sure to sign your tweets individually so users know who they're talking to. Follow as many people as you can manage, even if they're not all following you back. Whenever possible, answer user questions publicly. Organize local tweetups, or attend ones that others have organized. Become a part of the local Twitter community. And above all, explore ways of using these conversations to improve the quality and diversity of your journalism, whether it's on air or online. There's a huge community of people out there rooting for you and eager to help. Open the doors and invite them in. -andy
Tags: community | conversation | journalism | news | public broadcasting | public radio | Twitter | WBUR
Posted by acarvin at 2:40 PM
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January 15, 2008
Widget Fest: CPB Grant to Foster Public Broadcasting Collaboration & User Engagement for Election 2008
Earlier today, NPR and its partners announced that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is awarding more than $1.3 million dollars to a consortium of public media organizations to expand our coverage of election 2008 across multiple platforms. The consortium, led by NPR and including American Public Media/Minnesota Public Radio, Capitol News Connection, KQED, PBS, PRX, PRI/Public Interactive and The NewsHour, will work together to produce election-related content and interactive tools available to the entire public broadcasting system.
"By pooling content produced locally and nationally -- for radio, television, and online -- we will discover new ways of doing business to better serve the public," said NPR CEO Ken Stern in a note that went out today to the public radio system. "We are pleased to have succeeded in coming together to deliver on the commitments made at the 2007 Annual Meeting."
"This grant underscores CPB's support of innovative projects that move public radio and television into the digital future so they can help individuals better connect with their communities wherever they are," added Pat Harrison, CPB President and CEO. "This ambitious project will provide us with new ways of looking at how we serve the public on existing and emerging media platforms."
The basic premise of the project was built around a simple reality - many public broadcasters were planning to create on air content and interactive modules for their websites, but we didn't have a structure in place to work together during the election cycle. Around a year ago, NPR and PBS began conversations around editorial partnerships for the election, including the creation of an interactive map that would work on both of our websites, as well as on the TV show NewsHour. While that conversation was taking place, I co-organized a group discussion at the February 2007 Integrated Media Association conference for public broadcasters to talk about the Election 2008 social media plans and how those activities might be replicable across the system.
The conversation kicked into high gear at NPR's annual meeting last April, where you may recall I blogged about some of the ideas that were brewing among those of us present at the event. We organized breakout conversation in which we laid out what was at stake and how we might collaborate. It didn't take long to realize that we had an opportunity that might quickly slip through our fingers if we couldn't get our act together. We needed to pull together a SWAT team and get to work.
At the encouragement of CPB, we organized a May meeting at NPR laying out all the possible ways we might collaborate, and get that SWAT team going to pull together a plan. By the end of July, we submitted our plan to CPB, which today has been christened with this $1.36 million grant.
So what exactly are we doing? For one thing, we're going to take all of the cool online election activities we've got planned for 2008 and we're going to make them available as widgets, including:
- An interactive election map from NPR and The NewsHour;
- Localizable news modules from Public Radio International's Public Interactive;
- A curated collection of election audio and social media content from PRX;
- Election-related video from PBS;
- An archive of broadcast materials covering New York-based presidential candidates from WNYC;
- A collaborative content initiative entitled "Global Perspectives on Election 2008" from PRI;
- User-generated political commentaries curated by NPR;
- Capitol News Connection's interactive 'Ask Your Lawmaker' widget, enabling citizens to directly question their lawmakers and listen to answers obtained by CNC journalists;
- Election simulations and thought-provoking interactive activities from American Public Media and KQED.
Some of these tools, like the NPR/NewsHour map and CNC's Ask Your Lawmaker widget, are all ready up and running. Others, such as NPR's user-generated political commentaries project, will be launching in the coming months. (You have no idea how excited I'm am about this one. We're working like gangbusters to get this puppy launched - more soon.) In each case, the projects will exist wherever they originally resided, but they'll have widgets, too, so stations can take these tools and localize them for their own uses. Some of the projects, like our user-generated commentaries, will be embeddable on blogs or wherever else you'd want to place them.
Meanwhile, underlying all of these projects will be an experimental social network - a "knowledge network" for public media entities to share election resources and data, find tutorials and best practices for utilizing these tools and other social media activities, and coordinate their election coverage. It's basically an extranet for PBS and NPR stations, along with other public media partners. Last but not least, PBS will be creating curricular materials for some of these online modules so they can be used in classroom settings.
I am so glad to see this project announced publicly. I've been working on this for the better part of the last nine months, and it's so gratifying to see so many entities across the public media system coming together to improve our election coverage, while providing the public with interactive tools to help them make a more informed decision when going into the ballot box. This year is going to be a total blast. -andy
Tags: Capitol News Connection | collaboration | CPB | election 2008 | grants | journalism | KQED | Minnesota Public Radio | NPR | PBS | PRI | PRX | social media | widgets
Posted by acarvin at 6:19 PM
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December 21, 2007
Highlights from the NPR Utterz-Twitter Experiment
This week, NPR's Morning Edition will air a series on the 10th anniversary of the word "weblog" and the impact of blogging over the last decade. I've been helping the producers in a variety of ways, like writing a timeline tracing blogging's origins, tracking down interesting bloggers for them to interview and writing a story on my own experience with blogging over the years. (I'll post links to them once they go online.)
I also sat down with a producer from Morning Edition to do a demo of the mobile audio blogging service Utterz and the microblogging tool Twitter. We were curious to see what kinds of responses we'd get from Utterz Twitter users to this question: "What are you doing for New Year's Eve, and what do you wish you were doing?" We got 70 replies, and I thought I'd share some of the highlights.
For Utterz, I recorded the question as a voicemail over my mobile phone, which then got cross-posted onto my Utterz page, my blog and my Twitter account.
We got 42 replies to the question this way, including this one from video blogger Jonny Goldstein, who talks about attending a Chinese banquet with his in-laws:
Wendy Drexler, a teacher in Florida, described a trip she's taking to Maine:
Fricka, who designs apparel for gamers, recalls how she spent one New Year's eve helping a mother and baby after their car caught on fire:
It should come as no surprise that Hawaiian blogger InfinityPro is happy to be home in Hawaii:
In contrast, technology evangelist Len Edgerly would prefer to toast the new year with Barack Obama:
One Utterz user who goes by the name "rcow" doesn't know what he's doing because his wife plans all of their social engagements:
Jennifer Sardam, who writes the literary blog Observed in Books, plans to work on her reading goals for 2008, even though she'd rather be celebrating another new year in Germany:
Over at Twitter, meanwhile, I received 28 replies. Some of my favorites:
kthread: happy to be ringing in the new year partying with close friends at my house, attempting to make this: http://tinyurl.com/39rcsu
leh4: What I wish I were doing: scuba diving somewhere WARM. what i'm actually doing: moving into my new apt
karynromeis: I'm going to a party at my church. I wish I was going to a party with my friends back in Cape Town!
vgloucester: Probably sleeping - probably sleeping...lol.
ruby: I'll be at the beach with my friends and our families for the 11th New Year's in a row! It's ritual of laziness+food+drink+love.
ryanne: we don't have plans yet, but probably something low key!
ClareLane: Going to Sedona for R&R with nature and spirit and college roomie and our hubbies. Am very happy doing just that Thanks!
jonnygoldstein (supplementing his Utterz post): i'm will be in NYC. Going to Chinese midnight banquet with my wife and in laws. Wish I was going to be inebriated at some blow out.
digitalmaverick: I'll be, as every true Scot, wearing my kilt and singing Auld Lang Syne at a party, then at the bells I'll 1st Foot my neighbours
kanter: raising money for cambodian orphans http://tinyurl.com/yryffz
jensimmons: I'm sleeping on much of New Years, recovering from hauling all my stuff to Jersey. I'm thinking about heading to a yoga retreat.
Darshell: Hope to be going out with the hubby- dinner, dancing, etc but will probably be home with the kids. Who wants to babysit new year's?
Karoli: staying home watching the ball drop on the high-def TV. wish I were going to Corona del Mar and chilling
tigerbeat: not sure yet. Probably be up late enough to listen to the 3 am feed of Morning Edition on KQED. Wish i were somewhere warm & sunny
JoeGermuska: spending it in with friends, which is just the way I like it
BrassT: Watching movies and playing boardgames with the kids and hubby :-) How late will the kids sleep if I let them stay up til 12?
But my favorite reply came in the form of two responses from blogger/artist Susan Reynolds:
NEW YEARs eve home in VA recovering from breast cancer surgery but encouraged by all of you. Twitter pea avatars = VISIBLE SupportNEW YEARs eve - what I wish I was doing? I can't imagine feling more loved, so no celebration could be better
For those of you who don't follow Twitter, about two weeks ago Susan announced via Twitter that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer and would have surgery on December 21. Susan even created a blog called Boobs on Ice to document her sudden transformation into a cancer patient, including how she soothed the pain of her biopsies by using bags of frozen peas as a compress.
Almost immediately, the Twitter community responded. Dozens of people started changing their profile picture to show them with a bag of frozen peas, to show their solidarity with Susan. That gesture then morphed into a photo sharing group on Flickr, which now has almost 300 pictures of Twitter users with their bags of peas.
Meanwhile, it didn't take long for Utterz to get into the mix. NBC cameraman Jim Long, better known to the Twitter community as NewMediaJim, recorded an impromptu interview with Susan using Utterz, just after she finished her pre-op visit:
By the time Susan's surgery took place on the 21st, Twitter users had organized a fundraising campaign called the Frozen Pea Fund, asking people to donate to the American Cancer Society in Susan's name. Nearly 120 people donated more than $3500 in the first 24 hours. If that doesn't demonstrate the power of Twitter and Utterz as tools for building community, I'm not sure what would. -andy
Tags: microblogging | mobcasting | Morning Edition | NPR | Susan Reynolds | twitter | utterz
Posted by acarvin at 4:49 PM
October 30, 2007
Using Flickr Photos to Make a 3D Model of the World
New Scientist magazine published a fascinating article yesterday about a group of scientists who are using photos from Flickr to create 3D models of objects like Notre Dame cathedral or the duomo in Pisa, Italy. Normally, 3D modeling is an arduous process that involves setting up cameras at carefully selected locations, each offering a different angle and view. By arranging the cameras in a precise way, it's possible to use computers to stitch together a detailed model of the object in three dimensions.
This type of 3D modeling makes sense when you're trying to map out an object of a limited size, such as a car, but what if you wanted to make a 3D map of the entire world? Using traditional methods, this would be impossible, since it's totally impractical to send out teams of trained individuals all over the world with their cameras deployed in a mathematically precise way.
So a group of researchers in Washington state and Germany decided to try a new approach. Photo sharing sites like Flickr contain millions of photos taken by members of the public. Consequently, certain places frequented by tourists have been photographed many thousands of times from innumerable angles. Notre Dame, for example, is featured in more than 200,000 photos in Flickr - and the researchers know that because many Flickr users have taken the time to tag their pics as such.
The team created software that would ingest all the photos contained in Flickr tagged for a particular object. It would then examine each photo to see if it contained an angle that would be useful for modeling. Some photos would get eliminated because they featured a person in them, were blurry or exposed inappropriately, but anything else that was within an acceptable range would be analyzed in comparison with other photos. The system would then connect the dots and create a 3D model.
"The system provides an opportunity to use the billions of user-contributed images available online to 'reconstruct the world' without relying on specialised equipment," researcher Michael Goesele told New Scientist. "The quality of the reconstructions we can achieve from mere internet data is comparable to models acquired with traditional methods such as very expensive laser scanning systems. Overall, we see this as a very first step into an exciting new area – think of reconstructing Rome from the about one million images available on Flickr alone."
So far, the results are impressive. But don't expect to see certain details like color and contrast. Instead, they look more they're cast in wax: perfectly proportioned but monochrome and gummy. Here's Notre Dame: the real thing and the 3D model. Click on the model for a more detailed view.
On the project's website, you can view several other examples of objects they've renderered, as well as a video in which you can zoom in on the details of Notre Dame's facade.
I find all of this really intriguing, not only from the perspectives of technological innovation and crowdsourcing, but from a copyright perspective as well. For example, the Notre Dame model is based on more than 650 photos, selected from the original pool of 200,000 potential photos. Given that this was done for research, I think the scientists could easily make the case that it's a situation of fair use. But what if Google Maps wanted to take this technology and apply it to their own 3D model of the world? That would mean that photos taken by you, me and lots of other people would be analyzed, processed and rendered into a derivative work. Would such a commercial effort require permission of every photographer involved?
Given the fact that millions of Flickr photos have been licensed under various Creative Commons licenses, that might make this easier to sort out. For example, any photo licensed with a "no derivatives" requirement could be filtered out. Photos licensed merely with an attribution requirement would be the easiest to deal with, but you'd still have to be able to point to a list of all the Flickr users whose work contributed to the effort. You could also base it entirely on photos that were licensed with noncommercial or "share-alike" requirements, but any 3D models produced using those photos would have to follow those rules as well.
No matter how you slice it, though, one thing seems certain - it would be hard for the producer of a 3D model developed this way to claim sole ownership of it. These models wouldn't exist without the contributions of countless individual photographers, most of whom probably have no idea that they contributed in the first place. So if one were to make a model of the whole world, employing millions of photos from millions of people, we'd all have an ownership stake in it, even if it's just a small visual share. Who knows - maybe those pics you took on your last vacation may actually end up part of a public good. -andy
Tags: 3D modeling | copyright | Creative Commons | crowdsourcing | Flickr | photos
Posted by acarvin at 7:59 PM
March 10, 2007
Can Twitter Save Lives?
Some of you may have noticed a colored badge in my blog's right column that shows what I've been doing recently. If you haven't explored it further, it's from a messaging service called Twitter - and I'm beginning to wonder if it could be used to save lives. Seriously.
First, let's talk Twitter. Over the last year there's been an explosion of dot-coms blazing trails in the text messaging space. Twitter is just one of these companies. Some people describe it as a form of "microblogging." Rather than posting a blog entry to write a few sentences or paragraphs about what you're doing, Twitter lets you post quick phrases online, such as "Getting ready to board a plane to Texas" or "Doing homework - test tomorrow." That in itself isn't particularly interesting, given you could do that if you wanted to on any blogging platform. But Twitter's goal is to help you circulate these updates among a group of friends in real time, no matter where they are.
When you participate in Twitter, you identify other Twitter users as friends. Each time you post an update about yourself, it's circulated to them via multiple platforms: on the Web, through instant messaging, via RSS, and perhaps most interesting, using SMS text messaging. Your friends can pick whichever of these platforms suits their needs. So when you're at your PC, you might receive these updates via instant messaging, but when you're on the go, you switch the alerts to SMS. Similarly, you can use any of these platforms to publish your updates as well. It's all one big happy multiplatform group experience.
I've been using Twitter for a few weeks now, and mostly it's just a fun way to keep in touch with people - particularly the insane number of videobloggers that have embraced it in recent months. But along with being able to get a constant play-by-play of how people like Zadi Diaz and Steve Garfield spend every waking moment, Twitter raises some tantalizing possibilities as a tool for first responders in times of public emergencies.
Two years ago, not long after the Boxing Day Tsunami struck the coasts of Asia, several bloggers including Taran Rampersad began discussing the potential for SMS text messaging as a tool for first responders. Why SMS? Because it's often the last technology standing during disasters. Take Hurricane Katrina for example. Mobile phones and email became unreliable due to heavy traffic and damage to infrastructure. Satellite phones were few and far between. Yet text messaging continued to work, because it's very low bandwidth and designed to be re-routed around problem areas within a network. Taran and others began talking about building a tool called Alert Retrieval Cache, or ARC. ARC would be an SMS discussion group system allowing first-responders to text each other with updates and requests, each tagged with keywords so the message would get to the right person.
It was a great idea, but it didn't get very far. There wasn't a critical mass of people with the time and energy to make it happen. In the meantime, I began playing around with kludging together free tools like Google Groups and the SMS-email gateway known as Teleflip to see if it was possible to set up a discussion group comprised only of people sending and receiving text messages. It worked, but it wasn't exactly pretty.
Fast forward many moons, and now we have text messaging tools like Twitter, Mozes and others that were developed simply for people to keep in touch and have fun. I can't say I'm surprised that's how these tools are developing, because it's a hell of a lot easier to get venture capital from investors when you're creating a tool that would be the darling of teenagers everywhere. Now that these tools are slowly maturing, though, I think it's worth asking the question again: might text messaging groups serve any purpose in times of public emergencies?
My gut tells me yes. Take this hypothetical situation. Well before any disaster, groups of first-responders would set up accounts on Twitter, then mark each other as friends. After that, they might remain dormant until a disaster happens, but then they'd fire up their mobile phones and start texting each other through Twitter's shortcode. Almost instantaneously, messages would get routed to everyone in the group, allowing them to keep in touch with each other even when other networks crash.
Of course, that's somewhat of a primitive communication model of doing business. Not everyone in a given group would literally need to receive every message, and sometimes you'd need to communicate with multiple groups simultaneously. We'd need to see some extra functionality added to the system for this to happen. For example, we'd benefit from the ability to route messages to specific groups of people and contextualize them with tags. For example, a volunteer Red Cross worker who also happens to be a member of an animal rescue league might need to be able to route their posts to specific groups of people. So if they have a text they only want to send out to their Red Cross colleagues, they would text the phrase "groups: redcross" before typing the rest of their message, getting it to that specific group. The same idea could be used to send messages to multiple groups ("groups: redcross, animalrescue") or to all of your groups ("groups: all").
Taking it a step further, your messages might only apply to certain individuals within a large group, say Red Cross workers near New Orleans with access to insulin. In these cases, you'd want to be able to preface your text message with group designations and keyword tags for additional context. It might looks something like this:
groups: redcross
tags: insulin, requests, neworleans-louisiana
Insulin needed stat, Convention Center, 100 units minAllowing users to post to a group with specific tags would then route the message to other first responders who identify those tags as being relevant to them, in the same way current Twitter users would "follow" the posts of specific friends. Meanwhile, the same messages would go out via RSS, instant messaging, email and the Web, so those people who still had access to those platforms could monitor what's going on and offer their assistance. Similarly, entire cities of people could subscribe to groups and keywords related to their communities, so officials could communicate with them en masse, vice versa and with each other.
Anyway, I know tools like Twitter weren't designed for saving lives. But that doesn't mean they wouldn't if they had a few more features and were put to use properly. -andy
Tags: Emergency Management | First Responders | SMS | Twitter
Posted by acarvin at 11:03 AM
February 24, 2007
Map Your Local Media Moguls
Drew Clark of the Center for Public Integrity is now talking about their media tracker tool. Put in your zip code and it'll generate a map of your local media outlets and who owns them. I did a search for Washington DC. Along with the map, it gave me some interesting stats about the DC area:
- 26 licensed television stations
- 47 licensed radio stations
- 1 matching cable community
- 17 reported broadband providers
- 30 newspapers within 100 miles
And the companies with the biggest piece of the local broadcast pie:
- Clear Channel Communications Inc. : nine stations
- CBS Corporation: eight
- Radio One, Inc: four
- Bonneville Radio (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints): four
- Maryland Public Broadcasting Commission: three
Try it yourself and get informed. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 12:16 PM
February 9, 2007
JD Lasica and the Story of OurMedia.org
Watch the video An interview with social media advocate JD Lasica discussing the history of the pioneering video and podcasting service OurMedia.org, which he co-founded in 2005.Tags: JD Lasica | ourmedia.org | podcasting | video | vlogging | wemedia
Posted by acarvin at 10:07 AM
January 8, 2007
Second Life, Meet James Cameron. James Cameron, Second Life.
The same day that Hollywood director James Cameron announces that he's starting work on a $200 film that will be shot in an immersive virtual reality environment, Second Life reveals that they're releasing their immersive VR environment as open source. Coincidence? You decide. Either way, Iooking forward to seeing Cameron plug the two together so Second Life avatars can serve as movie extras. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 3:56 PM
November 25, 2006
Sitting for a Musical Portrait by Pete Townshend
This afternoon I helped compose a song with Pete Townshend of The Who.
Okay, not exactly. It was actually with Pete's computer.
I can see you're skeptical, so I better provide some context. To do that, we're gonna have to go all the way back to 1971, the year I was born. Because that was when Townshend began work on a musical project known as Lifehouse.
The Who had just found great success with their rock opera, Tommy, and Townshend was now working on a new musical project called Lifehouse. A science fiction story in which the world has suffered an ecological disaster, Lifehouse included a major plot line based around the idea that the world's music was controlled by a small group of powerful media conglomerates, which in turn pumped its mediocre muzak into the minds of humanity. (In some ways it's similar to Rush's 2112 album, which came out in the late 70s, without the Ayn Rand influence.)
Pete explains:
"The essence of the story-line was a kind a futuristic scene.... It's a fantasy set at a time when rock 'n' roll didn't exist. The world was completely collapsing and the only experience that anybody ever had was through test tubes. They lived TV programs, in a way. Everything was programmed. The enemies were people who gave us entertainment intravenously, and the heroes were savages who'd kept rock 'n' roll as a primitive force and had gone to live with it in the woods. The story was about these two sides coming together and having a brief battle."As part of their revolutionary struggle, the heroes of the story utilized a technological weapon called The Method, which would combat the soulless music they were literally being force-fed.
"What Lifehouse was about, at its root, was to reaffirm that what's important is that music reflects its audience as absolutely and completely as possible," Townshend explains on his website. In the early 70s, he was exploring Sufi mysticism, which no doubt put him in touch with qawwali music, like that of the famed Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, whom I got to interview in 1992. Qawwali concerts, which often extend to four hours or more, intend to use the trance-like power of lengthy musical performances to bring the performers and audience into a state of spiritual ecstasy. This, of course, is often a complete contrast to rock concerts, where performers and the audience show up, do their thing and leave. Townshend says:
Standing on stage and waving your arms about is wearing a bit thin, I think. There's going to have to be a way of listening to music which doesn't mean that you're going to have to face in a particular direction, there's going to have to be a way of listening to music that doesn't mean that you have to go out to a concert hall between eight and ten in the evening. I've seen moments in Who concerts where the vibrations were becoming so pure that I thought the world was just going to stop, the whole thing was just becoming so unified. But you could never reach that state because in the back of their minds everybody knew that the group was going to have to stop soon, or they'd got to get home or catch the last bus or something - it's a ridiculous situation.For various reasons, Lifehouse didn't come together as planned, even though Townshend composed many songs for the rock opera. Instead, these songs were published as part of the album Who's Next, arguably one of the greatest rock albums of all time. But Lifehouse - and the musical weapon known as The Method - never fully vanished from Townshend's creative consciousness.
This brings us to last February, when Townshend was wrapping up work on his novel, The Boy Who Heard Music. The novel was released chapter-by-chapter on a blog, and he invited the public to comment on the story and help improve it. When the novel was complete, Townshend announced that some of the bloggers who participated in the story's development would be invited to participate in his next project - the rebirth of The Method as online software that would interpret the images and sounds submitted by a person and convert it into music.
As I explained on my blog:
A partnership between Townshend, programmer Dave Snowdon and composer Lawrence Ball, The Method will perform musical works generated by a computer based on interactions with a real person, referred to by Townshend as a "sitter." Initially the website will feature works generated by The Method through interactions with Lawrence Ball and others, but Townshend plans to invite bloggers to "sit" with The Method and generate music of their own. At least that's the way I understand it from his description on his blog. From what I've heard of Lawrence Ball's work, his music is reminsicent of Erik Satie and Arvo Part. Adding Pete Townshend to the mix, along with a community of 500 bloggers, will hopefully lead to some exciting, unusual results.Yesterday, I received an email informing me that I was being invited to serve as one of the first beta-testers of The Method. I'd have a chance to "sit" and have three musical portraits painted for me. So this afternoon, I logged into and gave it a shot. The website asked me to upload a series of original audio clips, as well as a photo. This data would then be interpreted by the website to create an original electronic composition. I wasn't sure if it would take the content I gave it and sample it, or just be inspired by it. First, I supplied it with a photo of me from my honeymoon. I then gave it three audio clips:
- A loop of me saying "The moving walkway is ending; please look down."
- A sample of me doing babytalk to Kayleigh, and her response.
- A loop of a Tunisian malouf trio I recorded in Tunisia last year.
Once this was done, The Method went to work, composing an original work based on my inputs. The result is this song. It's just over five minutes long, and is very reminiscent of the work of Terry Riley, Michael Nyman and Phillip Glass, each of whom often utilize electronic-like repetition in their compositions. Personally, I like the piece a lot, though I can see how people might dismiss it as being too repetitive. (It also has some crackle noises at the beginning, which must have occurred when The Method saved the mp3 file.) I'll be very curious to see if my future experiments with The Method produce similar results. I'll have to go out of my way to submit a photo and audio samples that are very different from the ones I just used.
So what's next? For one thing, The Method is still in beta, so it's not totally ready for prime time yet. Eventually, more people will be invited to sit for musical portraits, and even be invited back repeatedly to work with Townshend and his collaborators to expand them into major works. They'll also take their show on the road, doing live performances of some of the compositions, with sitters like me invited to attend and potentially participate.
Meanwhile, any musical works produced by The Method will be co-owned by Townshend and the sitter. For all practical purposes, that means that if you sit for a musical portrait, you can do whatever you choose with the results, as can Townshend. We just can't veto the other's uses of it. That way, we can both use it, refine it, sample it, license it and perform it. Not like I would ever say no to Pete if he wanted to incorporate it into a concert or anything like that. :-)
So that's the result of my first experienced with networked musical composition. I can't wait to do it again. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 5:44 PM
October 12, 2006
Nokia N93 Experiment: Dual-Mode Self Portrait
Watch the video This video is a pair of clips I shot with the Nokia N93 video phone. The first clip was recorded originally in mp4 format, which is very high resolution. As I was playing with the phone's settings, I decided to switch it to its video phone mode, which records in a lower-resolution 3gp format. The video stopped recording, so I had to start shooting again. I've put the two clips together so you can compare the quality of the two modes, as well as seeing what the modes look like in a mirror. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 10:50 PM
Nokia N93 Experiment: Winston and the String
Watch the video The good folks at Nokia are letting me borrow one of their N93 video phones this month, so I've just started shooting some footage with it. This is a video clip of Winston playing with a string. The clip is actually a reduced-sized version of the original 34 meg mp4 clip, which I've uploaded here. Since that clip is too large for streaming, I made this shorter clip. It was shot in fairly low light, so the quality is somewhat granular. The audio quality is better than I expected, though. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 9:45 PM
July 13, 2006
A Slice of Second Life
The latest issue of the Boston Phoenix has one of the best articles I've ever read about Second Life. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, Second Life is an immersive, multiuser virtual environment where the entire world is created by the participants. More than 200,000 people have created virtual characters, or avatars, which they use to construct their own islands. What's on these islands? Everything you can imagine - surf shops, casinos, libraries, drive-in movie theatres, even refugee camps. If you've never tried it, Second Life is an extraordinary experience.
My Second Life avatar, Abdi Kembla.
As it turns out, I was interviewed for the article, because my SL avatar, Abdi Kembla, is African. Most SL avatars tend to look like idealized versions of the people who created them, or bizarre fantasy characters straight out of the Mos Eisley cantina in Star Wars. So I decided to try something different and create an avatar modeled on a former child soldier from Somalia.
Here's my small contribution to the article:
Another real-world person experimenting with an entirely different SL persona is Boston-based blogger Andy Carvin. Last fall he joined SL as Andy Chowderhead, but he got "bored with it" and decided to create Abdi Kembla, an African refugee he modeled after photos he found online of former Somalian child soldiers."Previously, when I used my old Andy Chowderhead avatar, I found people were more likely to come over, say hello, and start a conversation. But with Abdi, people tended to just act as if I just weren't even there," says Carvin, who estimates that he spent between 20 and 30 hours in February and March exploring as Abdi. "The more I traveled through SL, the more I realized I seemed to be the only African-looking character around anywhere." He adds, "I encountered gnomes, floating beams of light, characters that were shaped like boxes, elves, everything you can imagine — but no African-looking characters."
"I think Second Life will be like the Web eventually," says Aimee Weber. "Almost everything cool will need to have a 3-d presence online."
In general, you can lump Second Life avatars into two categories: hot or fantastic. Women are mostly busty, hourglass-figured, and sexy. Men tend to be buff and handsome. "More often than not, people have a picture in their head of what they look like at their best: very few people want to have their avatar look like they just woke up, haven't shaved, [have] bad breath, and gained a few pounds after the wedding," theorizes Andy Carvin. Otherwise, avatars tend to be surreal — think Snoopy, dragons, and "furries."Anyway, it's a very well-done, well-researched article, so please check it out. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 3:36 PM
March 31, 2006
Talkr: Creating Audio Podcasts of Your Text Blog Entries
I've just started experimenting with a rather funky tool called Talkr. Essentially, Talkr is a podcast generator for text blogs, and it has enormous implications for people with visual impairments and limited literacy.
When you look at a typical blog, it's mostly text. This may be no problem for many people, but if you're reading skills aren't strong or you don't see well, text blogs can be quite a challenge. Meanwhile, thousands of Internet users create their own podcasts, which are basically blogs containing audio files. Apart from being really cool for everyone, podcasts are particularly useful for people who can't read or see well. But they're not exactly practical for the hard of hearing, either, who would benefit more from reading a text blog. Theoretically, it would be great if every person who wrote a text blog would record a podcast of it as well, but very few, if any bloggers bother to do this.
Enter Talkr. Talkr is a Web-based speech synthesizer that takes the texts of blogs and generates and MP3 file, with a computer voice speaking the text. For people who just want to visit their favorite text blogs and listens to them, Talkr works as blog management tool; you simply add your favorite blogs to your account, and it will create a computer-generated voice mp3 for each entry. Meanwhile, for all of you bloggers out there, Talkr lets you embed a computer-generatd mp3 into each of your blog entries, and supplies you with an RSS feed for them. This means that users can either come to your blog and click a link to listen to the mp3, or they can use iTunes or another podcast management tool to subscribe to the feed and receive each new mp3 file automatically.
Talkr is still a work in progress, but it's fascinated me to the point that I've decided to take a shot at integrating it into my blog. Each of my blog entries will now have a link at the bottom that says "Listen to a computer-generated podcast of this article." Clickling the link will bring you to the mp3 file where you can hear the text being read aloud. (Note: I've noticed that the mp3 files don't work immediately when you've posted a new blog entry; it takes at least a few minutes to generate the file.) For example, here's the MP3 file that was generated by my last blog entry, about race and the digital divide.
Meanwhile, I've also added a new RSS feed that allows you to subscribe directly to the mp3 via iTunes or another podcast manager:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/carvin-audiotext
I will be very curious to hear what all of you think of this tool. The computer voice takes some getting used to - it's also a woman's voice, so don't expect to hear a radio-friendly baritone or anything like that. In practice, though, this tool could be used to help people who experience limited literacy skills or visual impairments, giving them a whole new way to participate in the blogosphere. Please let me know what you think. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 4:43 PM
March 30, 2006
Behold the Power of Digg
For many months now, Digital Divide Network member Phil Shapiro has been singing the praises of the technology news digest Digg. Unlike many news digests, where news blurbs are posted chronologically or by the whim of a particular editor, Digg determines story placement by voting. Anyone who joins the Digg community can submit a link and summary of a news headline from elsewhere on the Internet. Digg members then get to vote for it - or "digg" it - and make comments about the story. The more diggs a story gets, the higher profile the story has on the website.
My blog traffic experiences the Digg Effect
I've been playing around with Digg for a little while now but yesterday was the first time I felt the power of Digg in action. I posted a digg headline about my blog entry on student vandalism of Wikipedia. Previous Digg headlines of mine had only garnered a handful of Diggs, but this story took off. In less than 24 hours the headline received over 800 diggs and 100 comments, placing it on the Digg homepage for much of the day. My blog traffic spiked because of it; rather than getting a modest average of 1,000 page views a day, the blog received over 10,000 page views.
Apart from generating the extra traffic to my site, I was quite happy with the comments posted by Digg members. While some of them were sarcastic or dismissive, many of them were constructive commentary on the subject discussed in the blog entry. I was particularly surprised by the number of students and educators who posted comments about their own experiences with Wikipedia vandalism, including:
"Wow, we made the news! The Timmins school is my school board - and yes, this entire school board, geographically the size of *FRANCE*, shares the same IP for every school in the board. I'm a teacher at this board and spend a lot of time showing my students how to find things in Wikipedia. I was always hoping our board would make the news for technology, but always thought it would be for 'shop' or 'welding'"
"My school was banned from editing Wikipedia because a student conducted a test to see how long it takes to correct information by adding false information. After one student tried it others did too including the library staff, therefore getting the school banned from editing articles. My school doesn't allow us to use it for any research because apparently a few hours is too long for a correction to be made."
"In truth, institutions concerned with the quality of source material choose not to accept Wikipedia because of its lack of quality controls and fact checking. Anyone on the planet can submit articles and revisions, with no party truly accountable for accuracy. The fact Wikipedia is corrected within only a few hours is a testament to how good it is, but the fact that none of it can be trusted as truth or fact is its biggest problem. That is why it should be taken with a grain of salt, and used as only a *starting* place for research."
"My college has been banned. I went to fix an article and it said that my IP had been banned due to multiple acts of vandalism."
"Long ago I put a block in place to stop children from editing (well, vandalising) pages on Wikipedia - as it can be useful as a resource, but there's no need for them to be editing it. However, since our single IP is shared among 50+ schools it can get a bit hairy. I dont want to ask Wikipedia to block us from editing, because it's not my decision to ask Wikipedia to block so many schools. Many other schools don't have the kind of advanced filtering system we have in place that will allow them to just block the editing alone. Kids are kids, they're going to vandalise stuff. It's just not something schools can police on their own."
"I hate Wikipedia vandalism. At my friend's school, as part of "investigative research" to show how inaccurate wikipedia is, some kid deliberately put misinformation in that school's entry. My friend edited it back promptly, but the punk kept editing in the misinfo over and over again, saying that it was proof that anything can be put on wikipedia, even misinformation."
"As IT manager for a school district. I get the displeasure of seeing this kind of stuff happen quite often. I love letting the HS kids have the opportunity to use the internet for learning and seeing new things. Unfortunately, teachers(not all of them mind you) think computer labs are great "babysitters" They go BS with their peers while the kids do as they please. Proxy servers are great, but you can never stop everything:("
"i teach computer class for 3rd - 5th grades. i push and use wikipedia in class ALL THE TIME! however, the district went and bought a (i'm sure) expensive subscription to World Book Online this year. our school district is in need of cash so badly right now. i questioned the high school librarian who initially pushed for World Book as to why they don't use wikipedia. her response was that it's too easy to edit and there is too much incorrect information. i challenged her points, but it was too late anyway. the schools had already forked over the dollars for World Book. i was given the user/pass for World Book and told to teach the kids how to use it, but i refuse. i'll stick to wiki, and i don't give a shat if the administrators would like it otherwise... it's my classroom."
The comments go on and on - 103 of them at last count.
Right now, Digg is set up to focus on high-tech subjects like hardware, gaming, robots and Linux, but the creators of the site have been talking about adding other topics. I'd love to see topics like "education," "human rights," "economic development" or even "digital divide" be added, so it would be more amenable to sharing and debating topics that go beyond traditional geekery. Until then, I'll keep placing my stories under the vague category of "technology" and see what happens. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 11:28 AM
March 7, 2006
Gizmodo's Phake Photo Phun
The technology blog Gizmodo is currently having a contest for the best fake tech product. They asked readers to submit images of non-existent technologies they'd like to see appear on store shelves, and now you can vote for your favorite. Some of them are products that could become a reality, such as a high-def video iPod or a two-screen Motorola Razr. Others are just intended to be funny - and they usually take aim at the iPod. My two personal favorites were the iWedge and the iStool:
Voting continues through this Wednesday. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 9:24 AM
January 11, 2006
Launched: Google Earth for the Mac
Google officially unveiled Google Earth for the Mac yesterday. You can download it here.
According to Chikai Ohazama on the Google Blog:
[W]e have a brand new member of the family -- Google Earth for Macintosh. We're happy to finally have some good news for the, ahem, vocal Mac enthusiasts we've been hearing from. Let's just say that we have gotten more than a few "requests" for a Mac version of Google Earth. They've gone something like this:1) "When is it coming out? Your website says that you are working on it."
2) "You know, Mac users are very heavy graphics/mapping/visualization/design/ architecture/education/real estate/geocaching/social-geo-video-networking fans who would certainly use Google Earth a lot."
3) "So when is it coming out?"
We heard you loud and clear.
To run it you'll need the latest operating system - Mac OSX 10.4. If you try to upload it on OSX 10.3, you'll get a message saying they're still working on a 10.3 version. Looks like I finally found the excuse to upgrade.... -andy
Posted by acarvin at 11:46 AM
November 2, 2005
My New Digital Camera: The Canon Powershot A610
As traumatic as it was to have my old digital camera stolen in Bangladesh last week, at least it gave me the perfect excuse to upgrade. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce my new digital camera, a five megapixel Canon Powershot A610.
Self portrait of my Canon A610 Powershot digital camera. Click the picture to see the full-size, five megapixel version of the photo.
I've always been a big fan of Canons; before I switched to digital, I used a 35mm Canon EOS Rebel for almost 10 years. I then bought the 2.0 megapixel Canon A60, which served me well for the last two years, from Hong Kong to Oman. When it was stolen last week in Bangladesh, I immediately started looking at the latest generation of Canon Powershots. I was tempted to get the seven megapixel Canon A620, but since I already have an eight megapixel Konica Minolta dImage A200 for professional occasions, a more compact (and more affordable) five megapixel camera seemed to make the most sense.
I didn't receive the camera until sunset today, so I haven't had a chance to put the camera through any rigorous tests yet. Hopefully I'll have a few minutes during lunch tomorrow to run outside, snap some pics, shoot some video and see how they turn out. Until then, I'm just happy to have a digital camera I can slip into my pocket and carry with me to Tunisia late next week for the World Summit on the Information Society.... -andy
Posted by acarvin at 5:27 PM
September 28, 2005
Social Computing Roundtable
Notes from the social computing roundtable at the MIT Tech Review conference.
Panelists:
Joshua Schecter, del.icio.us
Mark Cordover, it.com
Dennis Crowley, dodgeball.com
Chris Heathcote, NokiaCrowley: Moving social software to the offline world. We spent a summer playing with Friendster while developing it. the difference is that online profiles allow users to connect in person using mobile phones. let's people in a 10 block radius link up. Users can create crush lists- people you find cute.
MIT media lab rep: using tone of voice to judge emotion, interest. One tool will help people negotiate better, another detects depression.
Cordover: The wisdom of crowds. group intelligence algorithms. talked about the intro of paper currency in the 18th century. real estate values jumped around the base of operation. a crazy, frenzied atmosphere. "men it has been well said, think in herds and go mad in herds, but they recover their senses one by one." Charles Mackay. if you put group diversity together with individuality you can get group wisdom. just give them wireless ICTs. they allow for the aggregation of diverse thinking. it.com now has a search database to discern who the players are around a particular meme, the players in an IT space.
del.icio.us: a system for socially sharing info. now focused on url sharing. users find they like, tag them- about one per second. each user builds their own taxonomy for categorizing info they care about. group patterns rise out of individual behavior.
Heathcote: we make phones, so why are we here? there are more phones than tvs, credit cards or cars. phones connect people. social structures have gone from family and friends to communities of shared interest. (a culture of likemindedness, methinks -ac) phone manufactures must work to innovate social networking technologies. place will be the next big thing in social computing.
Posted by acarvin at 1:43 PM
Creating the $100 Laptop
The fifth annual MIT Technology Review Emerging Technology Conference kicked off this morning with a presentation from Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab. Negroponte discussed his $100 laptop initiative, in which he is working to produce a low-cost laptop for mass distribution in k-12 schools in the developing world.
Nicholas Negroponte talks about the $100 laptop
"It is the most important project I've ever done in my life... The reception it's received has been incredible," he said. "The idea is simple - it's to look at education. This is an education project, not just a laptop project. If you take any world problem - peace, the environment, poverty - the solution to that problem certainly includes education. And if you have a solution that doesn't include education, than it's not a real solution at all."
"In emerging nations, the issue is not connectivity," Negroponte continued. "It was the issue; it's not a solved problem, but there are many people and many systems working on it... It's happening; it doesn't need me, MIT or the Media Lab. But for education, the roadblock is the laptop."
Negroponte told the story of building schools in Cambodia. He gave students laptops to bring home, but they came back the next day, the laptops unused. Their parents would not let them use them because they were worried they'd break it. The students went back home with a note saying they didn't have to worry about the cost of the laptops; the parents loved them because they were the brightest lights they had in the home. In the first three years, only one laptop out of 50 broke (though all the AC adapters died). "Why is that? It's because of ownership. The kids polished them, made bags for them; they certainly wouldn't get broken."
Later, MIT's Seymour Papert helped persuade the state of Maine to give laptops to all middle school students. This raised the possibility of expanding the program internationally, particularly to the developing world.
"Since communications isn't the problem, can we make that laptop now cost $100?" Negroponte said that it was important to make this a nonprofit initiative, so all monies made could go into helping lower the cost of the laptop, rather than satisfying shareholders.
"Scale is important, but not for the obvious reasons. It's important because of mindset, attitude and share." When he's talked with companies about getting involved, "you're immediately dismissed, until you say you need 200 million units."
"Impossible at MIT is a code word for 'do it.'"
The laptop's display is a major focus of the Media Lab's efforts. They've managed to bring the cost down to $35 per display. It's a dual mode display - a 7" screen, as well as a reflective display that can be read in bright daylight. Eventually he hopes the display will cost 10 cents per square inch, and will be produced by being printed on an e-ink printer, technology developed by the Media Lab.
Image of Negroponte's $100 laptop
A lot of the cost of the laptop goes to supporting the operating system, he explained. "You try to download a PDF, and you're waiting and waiting; it's gotten so slow and unreliable... SO we've started over, going skinny linux, skinny open source... It lowers costs and gives you a faster experience."
"Design is important. A lot of people think low-end products need to look cheap and be cheap." He showed a picture of it, describing how it would work with a wind-up crank for power, and would seal hermetically when closed to prevent damage. The swivel for raising the display would also be a handle, which the AC cord will also serve as the shoulder strap.
At the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis, they'll launch "tethered prototypes" - working demo units. The beta units, expected to come out in one year, will number from five to 15 million units, expected to be deployed in five countries and the commonwealth of Massachusetts. By year two, they hope to reach 150 million units.
He mentioned Wikipedia as an example of a major source of content for the initiative, and asked how many people in the audience use it - about 50%. "It's by far the best encyclopedia on the planet," he said. "It's so fresh, so current, if you go look up yourself, you're probably in it."
"It's the Wikipedia equivalent (of hardware)," he said, describing the spirit of the laptop initiative.
Posted by acarvin at 9:10 AM | Comments (4)
August 21, 2005
Using iTunes to Get My Podcasts and Videos
Along with the ultra-cool Wall of Video I was able to create this weekend, the team at MeFeedia have made it easy for anyone to subscribe to my podcasts and videos on iTunes. In case you haven't heard, the latest version of iTunes has a podcast manager that handles both podcasts and video blogs. So now you can have all of my latest stuff sent to you directly in iTunes, without ever having to visit my site -- not that you shouldn't visit, just to say hi...
I've added a couple of links in the right sidebar on my homepage that do all the work for you - once you've installed the latest iTunes, of course. After you've installed it, you can simply click one of two links, depending on whether you're a Mac or PC person. Here they are, in case you can't see them on the right side:
Subscribing for Mac users | Subcribing for PC users
If you publish your own video blog or podcast, you can add a link like this to your site as well. Here's how to do it.
Step 1: Go to Mefeedia.com and add your RSS feed.
Step 2: Mefeedia will then bring you to a page with several links on it. One of them will invite you to get an iTunes 1-click subscribe button on your blog. Click the link.
Step 3: Mefeedia will show you some HTML code. Add it to your website, tweaking it if you like.
And that's that. So for those of you use iTunes, please subscribe to my podcasts and videos! -andy
Posted by acarvin at 8:32 PM | Comments (1)
June 19, 2005
Review: My New Olympus WS-200S Digital Voice Recorder
I just picked up a new digital voice recorder for conducting interviews and recording podcasts. It's the Olympus WS-200S digital voice recorder, and it's a pretty sweet little device. I got the idea of getting one after reading Brian Russell's experiences with another Olympus recorder, the DS-2. The WS-200S, which came out a few months ago, is smaller and holds twice the memory, with 128 megs of storage space.
The WS-200S fits easily in your hand.
Much better than the iTalk recorder I use on my iPod, which records at a meagre bit rate of 8000 bits, the WS-200S records at a solid 44,100 bits, perfectly suitable for high-quality voice recording. While it won't let you reproduce CD quality music, it's ideal for almost any other recording scenario using voice or on-the-street ambient sounds. As an example, I recorded this podcast a few minutes ago.
At its highest quality, you can record up to four hours and 20 minutes of audio; at its lowest, a whopping 55 hours. Later I'll record some audio samples at different levels so you can hear the difference. I may also try using an external mic for the recorder, which will improve the audio quality singificantly, though its internal condenser is nothing to sneeze at.
It's a very small device -- almost too small.
The device's simple button set-up allows me to play, record, pause, rewind and fast forward easily; you can also tap the play button extra times to slow down or speed up the playback without altering pitch, ideal for transcribing interviews. The only problem with the buttons is that the recorder is so small, it takes some practice hitting the right buttons.
Perhaps the coolest thing about the device is its self-contained USB key. Rather than having to carry around a cable to plug it into your computer, you simply put it apart, exposing the USB key on the inside. Then you just stick it in your computer and upload your recordings.
One drawback to the WS-200S is that it records audio only in Windows Media format. If you prefer WAV or MP3 format, you'll have use a converter like EasyWMA, but it's very easy: you just drag and drop the WMA file into the application and it automatically creates a new file in the format of your choice.
The WS-200S plugs right into my laptop with its self-contained USB key.
So my first impression of the WS-200S is that it's a really handy, easy-to-use recorder with decent audio quality -- well worth the $100 I paid for it.... -andy
Posted by acarvin at 5:03 PM
June 15, 2005
Flickr Photo Stream from CTCNet
Yesterday I created a news digest of blogs covering this week's CTCNet conference. Later that same day, Marnie Webb posted a blog entry wondering if I'd do the same for users of the Flickr photo portal. Here's your answer, Marnie. :-)
I've now added a Flickr photo gallery to the digest. As a test I've uploaded two pics from last year's conference, one of Max Gail and the other of Shireen Mitchell. At the time of writing this, Max's picture was displaying just fine, though Shireen's pic hasn't come through yet. Hopefully it'll appear soon.
The photo stream uses the same principle as the blog digest: I'm using RSSDigest to create the digest, but instead of using Technorati to create the necessary RSS feed, I'm using an RSS feed from Flickr showing all photos that have been tagged with the word CTCNet. RSSDigest then takes the feed and converts it into a java script that's viewable on any website.
For those of you who still don't know what RSS is, I beg you to read my essay What's RSS and Why Should I Care About It?. Hopefully that will shed light on why RSS is such a killer, killer app... -andy
Posted by acarvin at 1:54 PM
June 5, 2005
The Roomba is Dead; Long Live the Roomba
It happened without warning, coming as a shock to us all. My family was going to be visiting Boston to celebrate my grandmother's 90th birthday, so Susanne and I did the polite thing and neatened up the apartment. Part of this routine was to use our trusty robotic friend, the Roomba, to perform a quick maitenance vacuum of the apartment.
Our deceased Roomba, its remains guarded faithfully by Winston
I started by placing the Roomba in the bathroom, where it went to work picking up bits of kitty litter around our cats' litter box. Then, I directed it to the bedroom, while I proceeded to clean the rest of the bathroom. The Roomba makes a bit of noise, which you soon get used to, so I quickly noticed an unexpected silence from the bedroom. Before crossing the hallway, though, I heard it restart; it must have hit a rough spot and gotten stuck for a moment. But then after a few seconds it stopped again, then started, then stopped.
Entering the bedroom, I watched in horror as the Roomba spiraled pathetically in a backwards arc, going in circles to nowhere before stopping in confusion. A moment or two later it would start again, but then return to its dreadful death spiral. I shut it off and went to the iRobot.com website to diagnose the problem. The very first entry on the troubleshooting page dealt with the issue "Roomba repeatedly starts and stops and/or spins in place" -- precisely our little robot's problem.
I spent the next hour or so going through the troubleshooting list, working out each potential problem: cleaning its sensors, using canned air to clean dust out of its wheels, unscrewing various parts to remove debris (read: prodigious amounts of cat hair). Eventually, the Roomba was quite clean, as clean as it's ever been since the day last September when we first introduced the world to our Roomba.
I then brought the Roomba back into the bedroom, placing in a spot that had been cleaned previously. There were no obstacles to get in its way, nor was there any dust. This would be a clean, smooth test run -- hopefully, at least.
The Roomba played its Simon-like song of simple tones, then began to work as usual, arcing slowly before beginning its reconaissance mission across the room. But within 30 seconds, the painful dance began yet again: the Roomba stopped, went backwards, and arced out of control before shutting down for a few moments before repeating its death spiral. There was nothing left to do except let it die with dignity. I shut it off, dusted off its top one last time, turned it upside down and removed the battery. I had pulled the plug on my one and only robot.
After a few moments of grief, the anger set in: how could a machine less than nine months old be dead? I picked up the phone and called iRobot to ask them. The person I talked to was very supportive, though; she quickly promised to send us a brand-new Roomba within three weeks. I only had to mail in the wire support frame that holds in its spinning parts as a proof of purchase; they'd then send me the wire frame back along with the new Roomba.
So now, the Roomba sits in the corner of our apartment, upside down in the most undignified fashion, lest it disembowel itself by sitting rightside-up, its innards falling out because its wire support frame is gone. If all goes well, before the end of the month we'll have a new Roomba to take its place; for now, though, we mourn and honor its faithful service, both as a cleaning assistant and as never-ending entertainment for our two cats. Oh, and we'll have to use the upright vacuum again.
The Roomba is dead; long live the Roomba. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 12:35 PM
September 17, 2004
RSS Syndication of Photo Blog Images
As some of you know, I've been playing around with camera phone blogging for the last six months or so. Most recently, I've started using Buzznet.com to host my camera phone pics; it's similar to phlog.net in the sense that they both let you email pictures from your camera to a personal in-box, then host them on a photo blog homepage for you, but Buzznet has a nice extra feature: RSS syndication of your pictures.
Normally, a person could go to my photo blog collection to see my latest photos, but the RSS feed lets me display thumbnails of my most recent pictures on my blog -- or on any other website for that matter. So if you look at my blog homepage on the left-hand side, you'll now see a vertical strip of photos recently posted from my camera phone. (At the moment there a some pictures from around Boston, plus my cats, who always make for fun candid photos.) Buzznet users get access to a script they can post on a Web page so they can syndicate their photos.
Buzznet offers a free service, though you can upgrade to a paid service if you want to post a lot of photos on a regular basis. It also has advertising, which is an annoyance, but I'm willing to put up with it for the sake of the automatic RSS feed.
So if you're a photo blogger and want to syndicate thumbnails of your images, check it out... -andy
Posted by acarvin at 8:37 AM
August 15, 2004
Yahoo Joins the RSS Aggregation Bandwagon
For those of you who have an account on Yahoo, you can now take advantage of a free RSS aggregator on your My Yahoo! page. If you're not familiar with My Yahoo!, it's a personalized Yahoo homepage that lets you receive your own selection of news, weather reports, etc. Now that they've added an RSS aggregator, you can add your favorite blogs to your personal Yahoo page. For example, you can add my blog to your Yahoo page. Clicking on the previous link will let you do this, as will clicking on the Add to My Yahoo! button in the left column of my blog's homepage. The site will let you add as many blogs as you want to your personal Yahoo page, so it saves you the trouble of registering with other aggregating websites or using software to do it.
Of course, I could raise the question of why it took Yahoo so long to add a feature that could have been added five years ago, but hey, the Olympics have put me in a charitable mood today... -Andy
Posted by acarvin at 11:06 AM
August 9, 2004
Geosphere: An Interactive Spinning Globe with a World of Possibilities
This weekend I discovered a fascinating interactive globe generator called the Headmap Geosphere. Geosphere will display a globe on your website, which you can spin in any direction by clicking on the globe and dragging your mouse. You can set your globe to display markers all over the globe; for instance, I've set up a personal travel globe to display places around the world for which I've published photo galleries or travel journals. If you click on a place marker, it'll open the Web page you associate with it -- so in my case, the links are to my galleries and travelogues. If there are several markers very close to each other, when you click on the group, the map will zoom in and give you a more detailed look, until you're close enough to select one of the markers individually. Check it out below:
You need Java to see Globe Applet.
The Geosphere is currently being developed by a guy in California named Dav Coleman. It's an open source project associated with the developer website, Sourceforge.net. Dav has used the geosphere in some interesting ways; for example, he's created a globe mapping out anti-war protests last year. He wrote a perl script to extract the photo URLs and the cities from a website listing the protests.
Setting up the map was very straightforward. I know a bit of HTML, and I'm not a programmer, but I still managed to figure it out without too much effort.
First, I had to upload two applet scripts to a folder on my website -- in this case, my blog's home directory. These two scripts are normally available on the Geosphere page at SourceForge.net, but at the moment one of them appears to be missing, so if you want to get a copy of them, you can find them here:
http://edwebproject.org/andy/blog/GlobeApplet.jar
http://edwebproject.org/andy/blog/sjg_xml.jarSave a copy of each of these scripts, saving them with their original names, then place them together in a directory on your website. These scripts will be used to generate the globe.
Meanwhile, you'll have to create a text file that lists all of the places you want to plot on your globe. This text file is basically an XML document with some very simple coding in it; if you view the source of my geocoding file you'll see a long list of latitude and longitude points, each with a URL and a title associated with it. For example, here's my geocode text file.
To make your own geocode file, create a text file called geocode.xml and paste the following into it:
<headmap>
<site latitude="x" longitude="y" href="LocationURL">LocationName</site>
<site latitude="x" longitude="y" href="LocationURL">LocationName</site>
<site latitude="x" longitude="y" href="LocationURL">LocationName</site>
</headmap>The two <headmap> tags are used to identify the start and end of the data list. In between are three <site> tags, each used to plot an individual marker on your globe. In order for each <site> tag to work, you'll have to fill out the latitude, longitude, Location URL and Location Name. For example, here's the tag I used to link to my wedding photo gallery:
<site latitude="39.25" longitude="-76.43" href="http://edwebproject.org/wedding /gallery.html">Our Wedding, Stevenson, MD (2003)</site>
You then repeat the <site> tag as many times as you want, depending on how many points you wish to place on your globe. Be sure to type a carriage return after each tag, so they're all listed on their own separate lines. So if you run a project with team members in 10 different cities around the world, you'd have to repeat the <site> tag 10 times, each time adding the appropriate latitude/longitude, URL for the person and their name. A handy tool for identifying a city's latitude and longitude can be found at Astro.com. Interestingly enough, it's for horoscopes, but it's got a sizeable city database.When your're done, your geocode.xml file should be saved in the same directory holding the two script files.
One last step: Cut and paste the source code from my globe page and save it as an html file. You can tinker with the code to change the title, the colors of the globe, background, markers, etc. The only required change is to update the line that says "codebase." This should point to the directory on your website where you're storing the two script files. In my case, the line says this:
codebase="http://edwebproject.org/andy/blog/"
because the two scripts are stored in that particular folder. But you'll have to update it; otherwise it'll display the markers on my globe, and how useful would that be? Once you've saved your HTML page, place it on your website and open it in your Web browser. If all goes well, you'll see your own private globe, with hyperlinked markers to your heart's content.... -andy
Posted by acarvin at 11:10 AM
August 4, 2004
A Very Creative Map of Creativity
Someone on my WWWEDU discussion list just posted a summary of a project called the Map of Creativity. It's a very cool Flash animation connected to a database of 400+ ICT initiatives around the world. When you visit the Flash site, it displays a circle made up of little dots, each representing a project. They're arranged around the circle by region; for example, Middle Eastern projects are in one part of the circle, South American projects another part. You can glide your cursor over the dots, which will magnify them and allow you to click on them for more information about the individual project.
Meanwhile, to the right of the circle is a menu that allows you to "filter" out projects based on target age group, theme, ranking, and date submitted to the database. For example, if you move your cursor over "ages 4 to 7," the site will animate the circle, magnifying the various projects that target children of that age group. And because the circle is organized by region, you can visualize immediately where these projects for this age group are geographically located. Similarly, there is a long list of themes ranging from Access, Activism and AIDS to Wildlife, Women and Youth; move your cursor over your theme of choice and again the circle will magnify all the projects relevant to that area. When you click on a theme, the circle will remove all the irrelevant projects and allow you to explore the remaining projects by applying additional filters, such as subtopic or age of target audience. Lastly, for people with disabilities, Flash-incompatible browsers, etc, you can access a simple table of all projects in the database with links to each project.
I'm really fascinated with this visualization tool and am eager to find out what the licensing is for the flash interface, as I don't know if it's open source or not. But it would be really, really fascinating to use a similar tool for visualization digital divide initiatives by location, topic, target audience, sector, etc. Definitely worth exploring further.... -andy
Posted by acarvin at 11:11 AM
June 16, 2004
New Feature: Where in the World is Andy?
As many of you know, I've been hopscotching the world over the last month, attending a variety of digital divide conferences. I became interested in figuring out a way to connect my blog to a mapping tool so readers could see maps of where I was traveling.
My first experiment was with a tool called GeoSketch, which is supposed to create maps of cities you mention in your blog. It seems like a killer idea, but unfortunately the server that processes the maps appears to be dead at the moment, so I wasn't able to get it working.
Then, I discovered another tool called WorldKit. Basically, WorldKit generates a Macromedia Flash map of the world, and allows you to mark the map with text and images based on latitude and longitude. Each time you plot something on the map, you can hyperlink it to a web page as well. It's a fairly simple tool, though you need to be able to look up the latitude and longitude of places you want to plot on the map. But apart from that, it's just a matter of editing the XML code of an RSS feed, filling it in with descriptions of each place you want to plot on the map.
So after a little bit of experimentation, I've created a small image of a world map, which you can now see on the left side of my homepage. If you click the title of the map, you'll be brought to another page, Where in the World is Andy? This shows a map of the world, marked up with the various places I've recently traveled, and where I'm going next.
It's a neat little tool, but it requires manual upkeep unless you're creative enough to auto-generate latitude and longitude data in your blogs, which is a little too uber-tech for my limited skills. Perhaps when I get back from my trip to Tunisia I'll create a map for my photo.spotlight photo blog. Until then, give it a try and let me know what you think... -andy
Posted by acarvin at 6:00 PM
May 3, 2004
Translate This Blog: Now Available in 12 Languages
Some of you who visit my blog regularly may notice that I've added links to translations of my site in 11 languages. So if you include English, my blog is now available in 12 different languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Greek, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Of course, I'm not a polyglot (though I can count to 1000 in Thai, Turkish and Indonesian, for what it's worth), so the translations come courtesy of Altavista's Babel Fish translation tool. While the translations are far from perfect, I hope they'll help readers who don't speak English as their first language.
Like almost everything else on my blog, these translations are an experiment. So if you speak one of these languages fluently, I would love to receive comments on how well the translation worked..... -ac
Posted by acarvin at 3:02 PM
April 3, 2004
MobilePhlog: My Harmonic Convergence of Mobile Phone Photo Blogging and RSS Feeds
It was only a matter of time -- okay, about 24 hours since I first got the idea -- but I've figured out a way to post photos from my camera phone in near-real time onto this blog.
About an hour ago I discovered a great free resource called Phlog.net. This website allows anyone to set up an account for hosting their own photo blog. Once you've got your account set up, you then email a photo to your own private email box at phlog.net. The site then processes your email, posting it on your photo blog page (here's my page), using the email title as the title of the phlog entry, the email body as the description, and the photo attachment as the photo being displayed.
As I began to play with the site I thought to myself, now if this site only had an RSS feed. Then lo and behold, I saw a little tidbit from phlog.net's designer saying that anyone who's use the site to host their photo blog could simply put /rss.xml at the end of their webpage and find an RSS feed for it. For example, my page is located at http://www.phlog.net/user/acarvin, so the RSS feed can be found at http://www.phlog.net/user/acarvin/rss.xml. Once I knew this, I was able to go to Feedroll.com and create a script for displaying my RSS feed here on this blog.
So, if you take a look at the left column of this blog's homepage, you'll now see a new entry called MobilePhlog, with a list of photo titles below it. These are the pictures I've taken with my Treo smartphone and emailed to phlog.net. In other words, every time I take a picture with my camera phone, I can get it posted to the blog in a matter of minutes. It's not as integrated into the text of the blog as I would like, but it's a really cool start if you ask me. So, stay tuned for more photos from my mobile phone to appear here on my blog. Whether or not they'll be worth looking at remains to be seen, but it's still a pretty cool little experiment if you ask me.... -ac
Posted by acarvin at 5:53 PM | Comments (2)
March 26, 2004
Wi-Fi: Strength Through Security
After fiddling with my Netgear wireless router for the better part of the last week, I concluded that the router was unable to let my wireless Mac laptop access the Internet through an encrypted connection.
Okay, lemme back up for a minute for those of you who aren't part of the wi-fi universe yet (don't worry, neither was I until 10 days ago). Wi-Fi, or Wireless Fidelity, is the common name for a technology that allows you to connect to the Internet wirelessly. (Picture walking around your house with your laptop or palm pilot and having Internet access without being plugged into anything -- that's what it's all about.) It's been around the for the last decade or so -- I remember seeing presentations by wi-fi pioneer/Colorado cowboy Dave Hughes back around 1995 and 1996 -- but it's only caught on as a mainstream consumer technology in the last few years. For 50 to 100 bucks, you can go out and buy a little box with an antenna on it, then connect it to your DSL or cable modem to set up a wireless network in your home or office.
The downside, though, is that being wireless means that you're opening yourself up to others accessing your Internet connection -- and potentially your computer and everything you send over the Internet. Sometimes this type of open access can be a very good thing -- the cafe below my old apartment in DC, for example, offered customers free wireless access, while others set up public networks so anyone can show up at the local park and go online for free. But for the typical home wi-fi user, beaming your wireless signal into the neighborhood isn't a good thing, because neighbors or anyone going out war driving (cruising neighborhoods with a wi-fi computer in search of networks to explore or hack) could access your connection and computer.
So, the powers that be created a variety of ways to secure your wireless connection using special types of encryption. With encryption, anyone who tries to access your network will need to crack a 10-digit password to get inside. Sure, it's possible, but for the casual neighborhood slacker, it's usually adequate.
My problem: because I own a Mac, I was unable to set up my Netgear wireless router to use encryption to protect my network. I spent several occasions on the phone with Netgear's nice tech support people in India, and they pretty much came to the same conclusion -- the router will work on my Mac only if I don't use encryption.
Fortunately, the folks behind the Best Buy empire were prescient enough to offer their customers a 30-day, no-questions-asked return policy. So I packed up the Netgear router with all of its accoutrements (warranty info, CD-ROM, incomprehensible startup manual, twist ties, the works), and walked back to the Landmark Center to the local Best Buy. I swapped the Netgear router for a D-Link router, which according to online hearsay was a bit more Mac-friendly than Netgear.
Back at the apartment, the basic set-up went by easily -- desktop Mac connected, laptop connected. Then I tried to set up the encryption; once again my laptop got cut off. So I called their tech support (someone with a southern US accent rather than a southern Indian one) and went step-by-step through the process a couple times over. No dice. The tech support guy put the phone down to read the Mac manual (oh, the price I pay for loyalty) while I fiddled around on my Mac.
After 30 minutes of this, I managed to get the encryption to work and connect the laptop wirelessly. "Okay, I got it working," I said. "Thanks for your help...."
"Woah, wait a second," he replied. "Tell me exactly how you did it so I don't have to go through this again." (I couldn't tell if he was curious, annoyed or both; probably both.)
I spent another five minutes trying to recreate what I'd just done -- I wasn't totally sure myself. But it ended up as being as simple as letting the Mac guide me through the configurations process rather than having me do it all manually. It was just a matter of selecting the "assist me" option, and the Mac asked me all the right questions, setting up the laptop for flawless, encrypted wireless Internet access.
So now it's approaching 6pm, and I'm sitting in my living room in our black lounge chair, listening to Georges Brassens sing "Je M'Suis Fait Tout Petit" while our orange tabby stretches out on our liquor cabinet. Look ma, no wires.
Stay tuned for my next trick -- this weekend I'll try to figure out a way to get my nine-year-old, totally obsolete Mac powerbook 1400cs onto my wi-fi network....
Posted by acarvin at 5:49 PM
March 20, 2004
Joining the Wi-Fi Universe
Yesterday at lunchtime I ran down the street to the local Best Buy and picked up a wireless router for my apartment. I'd just gotten a new Mac G4 12" laptop for work and wanted to be able to use it at home, but our other Mac was already teathered to our broadband Internet modem. So setting up a wireless network made a lot a sense - that way, I could jump online with the laptop without unplugging my desktop Mac from the Net and plugging the ethernet cable into my laptop. Even better, a wireless network would let Susanne and me both work from home at the same time without jousting over who'd be online at any given time.
So now I've got a Netgear wireless router running in our sunroom/home office, allowing me to walk around the apartment with the laptop and type this very blog. (Right now I'm sitting at the table in our breakfast nook with our cat Dizzy sniffing the LCD screen.) The wireless connection is working well, but I'm having some issues setting up the amount of security I'd like to have. The tech support folks at Netgear were rather evasive, basically saying they weren't sure about how to set up all of the various security features on the Mac unless I kept it plugged into the router -- and what's the point of that if you're trying to be wireless?
So, I've got a few weeks of trial time to figure out whether I can add a stronger wireless firewall to my new network; otherwise I'll just have to send it back to Best Buy, bite the bullet, and buy the Apple-branded wi-fi system, AirPort, which costs nearly three times as much as the Netgear unit.... -ac
Posted by acarvin at 9:32 AM
February 29, 2004
Improved Email-to-RSS Feeds
Since reporting on my experiments with email-to-RSS feeds last night, I've managed to improve the feeds I'm using for my two listservs on my blog homepage. One list, WWWEDU, is a yahoogroup list, while the other, DIGITALDIVIDE, is a Listserv list.
Improving the WWWEDU list:
The feed I demonstrated in yesterday's blog entry was problematic because it was displaying the 30 most recent stories, with the most recent at the bottom, while the Feedroll syndication script displays the most recent from the top down. This meant you needed to show all 30 stories in order to see the latest one.
Problem solved. I figured out how to get yahoogroups to show a shorter rss feed. For example, here's how to get a wwwedu rss feed for eight stories:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wwwedu/messages?rss=1&viscount=8
By adding the "&viscount=8" to the end of the URL, it limits the number to eight, which is a heck of a lot more manageable than 30. So if you want to access wwwedu's RSS feed, I'd suggest you use a variation of this. I then went to feedroll.com to generate a syndication script for it. The script looks like this:
And this is what it looks like when you include the code on a webpage:
Improving the DIGITALDIVIDE List:At first I tried creating a fake Yahoogroup for the list which would do nothing but create the RSS feed for the site. Then I discovered Mailbucket.org, which I also described in yesterday's blog. By creating a mailbucket account on the listserv, I was able to generate an RSS feed, which I then fed into feedroll, giving me this script:
When you put this script in a webpage, it comes out looking like this:
So that's where things stand with my email-to-RSS feed experiments. Stay tuned for more once I get settled in our new apartment in Boston. For now, though, it's time to pack and get ready for the movers to come tomorrow. Stay tuned... -ac
Posted by acarvin at 3:05 PM | Comments (2)
February 28, 2004
Experimenting with Email-to-RSS Syndication
A few days ago I thought it would be interesting to see if it would be possible to use RSS feeds to syndicate my WWWEDU and DIGITALDIVIDE discussion lists over the Web. In a nutshell, RSS syndication is a way of sharing dynamic online content, such as a blog or a news feed. Normally, someone's website might feature a static link to someone's blog, for example, but RSS syndication allows them to display the actual blog entries themselves -- or at least their titles and a link to the blog entry.
I've been using RSS feeds as a way of displaying the titles of the latest photos from my photo.spotlight gallery on my blog. If you go to my blog homepage and look at the left-hand column, you'll see the RSS feed for photo.spotlight. Every time I post a new photo to that site, the list of new entries gets updated on this site. That's RSS syndication.
Getting RSS syndication to work between my two websites was one thing, but then I wondered if I could also display the latest email postings from my discussion groups. As it turns out, there are several tools on the Web that "parse" an email into RSS. It doesn't matter if your email is simply a hello to a friend, or the latest message from your discussion group; these parsers will convert your emails into RSS so you can then syndicate them to your hearts content.
Two of the most interesting parsers out there are MailBucket and DodgeIt. They both work on the same principle: you create an email address at either site -- for example, andy-rss-test@mailbucket.org and andy-rss-test@dodgeit.com. Try sending a test email to either of them. Once you've done this, you can go to each website to see the RSS feed generated by the incoming emails. Follow these links to MailBucket and DodgeIt to see the RSS feeds. (From what I can tell, the DodgeIt RSS feed gets generated almost immediately, while MailBucket takes its own sweet time before appearing as RSS.)
When you look at either of these RSS feeds through a web browser, they'll probably just look like a bunch of code and text - not very readable to the average person. But if you take the URL of each of these feeds and then go to a website like BlogLines, you can set up a personalized collection of your favorite RSS feeds and view them at Bloglines whenever you want.
Most people use sites like Bloglines to follow their favorite blogs, but why not use it to follow your favorite discussion lists? This is where tools like DodgeIt and Mailbucket come in. Basically, it's simply a matter of subscribing a new email address to your discussion list of choice that would send a message back to either DodgeIt or MailBucket. Example: pretend there's a discussion group called ANDY-COMPLAINTS for people who want to complain about me. You'd simply create a subscription to this discussion either as andy-complaints@dodgeit.com or andy-complaints@mailbucket.org, then go to their respective website to get ahold of the RSS feed generated by the website. Once you've got the RSS feed's URL, you'd simply go to bloglines.com or a similar "news aggregator" service and add that URL to your collection of favorites.
In my case, I was interested in displaying RSS feeds for my discussion groups on my blog homepage, as well as encouraging friends and colleagues to do the same on their sites. My first experiment involved utitilizing the RSS feed automatically generated by Yahoogroups.com, which I use to host my WWWEDU list. In the case of WWWEDU, you can find the RSS feed simply by adding /messages?rss=1 to whatever the homepage of the yahoogroup list is. This means you don't necessarily have to use a tool like Dodgeit or mailbucket to do it for you, since yahoogroups does it automatically. As for my DIGITALDIVIDE list, since it's not on yahoogroups, the only way to take advantage of Yahoogroup's RSS feeds was to create a new yahoo group that has only one job -- to subscribe to the DIGITALDIVIDE list. So whenever someone posts a message to my list, a copy of it gets sent to the fake list a yahoogroups. Wham, bam, instant RSS feed.
The next trick is getting these RSS feeds to display on your homepage. In my case I'm experimenting with feedroll.com, which allows you to input an RSS feed to generate a short script for you to include in the HTML of your website. Let's go back to the example I gave before, in which you can send an email to andy-rss-test@mailbucket.org and andy-rss-test@dodgeit.com. Doing this allows you to create RSS feeds for emails that get sent to those addresses: see the examples I have for MailBucket and DodgeIt.
With Feedroll.com, I can take the URL for either of these two feeds and generate a little script that can be placed into the HTML of any website. This HTML then displays a list of all the emails sent to either dodgeit or mailbucket as if they were a newswire feed. Here, for example, is the DodgeIt feed, as seen by feedroll:
As you can see, it has a problem displaying the feed; it's interpreting the date of the email as the title of the email, so it doesn't look very good.
And here's the feedroll interpretation of our test of Mailbucket:
This one looks better, though it still seems to take a while for it to be up-to-date with the latest emails.
RSS feeds generated by Yahoogroups work okay through Feedroll, but not great. The problem is that the Yahoogroup RSS feed displays the latest message at the bottom, rather than the top, whereas feedroll assumes that the latest message appears at the top, as is standard on most blogs. What does this mean in practical terms? For example, here's the Feedroll feed for my WWWEDU list, based on the RSS feed generated by yahoogroups:
As you can see above, the only way to get the most recent posts from WWWEDU to be displayed this way is to show all 30 of the posts captured by Yahoogroup's RSS feed. The most recent messages are at the bottom of the list, and the oldest are at the top.
So, if you try to show only a handful of posts - let's say five - it looks like this:
This is much easier on the eyes, but it's not up to date, since it's cutting off the 25 most recent messages because it's only showing the five oldest out of 30 messages displayed by yahoogroup's RSS feed. (got it?) Compare the two feeds to see how the second feed is displaying only relatively older messages.
So what's the solution? Good question. For now, I'm having my blog display my WWWEDU and DIGITALDIVIDE messages by using yahoogroup-generated RSS feeds processed by feedroll. I have to display over 20 messages for each list so they display fairly recent messages. The more I display, the more recent they are; the less I display, the less recent. I'm hoping the holy grail in my quest for a good email-to-rss parser may be MailBucket, but so far the website is running so slow I can't tell how it's going to work. Stay tuned to this blog to find out how the quest goes.... -ac
Posted by acarvin at 3:41 PM
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Recent Entries
- Public Broadcasting and Twitter? Engagement and Authenticity!
- Widget Fest: CPB Grant to Foster Public Broadcasting Collaboration & User Engagement for Election 2008
- Highlights from the NPR Utterz-Twitter Experiment
- Using Flickr Photos to Make a 3D Model of the World
- Can Twitter Save Lives?
- Map Your Local Media Moguls
- JD Lasica and the Story of OurMedia.org
- Second Life, Meet James Cameron. James Cameron, Second Life.
- Sitting for a Musical Portrait by Pete Townshend
- Nokia N93 Experiment: Dual-Mode Self Portrait
- Nokia N93 Experiment: Winston and the String
- A Slice of Second Life
- Talkr: Creating Audio Podcasts of Your Text Blog Entries
- Behold the Power of Digg
- Gizmodo's Phake Photo Phun
Andy's Work Websites
Mobcasting
Education Sites
EdWeb: Exploring Technology & School Reform
From Sideshow to Genocide: Stories of the Cambodian Holocaust
Travelogues and
Photo Galleriesphoto.spotlight
The 2005 Boston Marathon
Cursed No More: Celebrating the Red Sox World Championship
A Week in Mauritius
Scandinavian Snapshot
Hong Kong Odyssey
WSIS Geneva Photo Gallery
Oman and Dubai Photo Gallery
Susanne and Andy's Wedding
Bali Honeymoon
Rajasthan: Land of Kings
Havana Gallery
Southern Balkans Gallery
Anatolian Fortnight
High Plains Backpacker
Southeast Asia Diary
Susanne's Southeast Asia Journal
The Children of Southeast Asia
Subcontinental Adventure
Andy's Mideast Journal
Etcetera
