Weather report: improving

I've been having a hard time with the weather. Not the weather outside--that's pretty sweet--but the weather online. Providing accurate and comprehensive weather data for an area this huge is a struggle both on air, and on the website. For years we have largely abandoned the field to the weather networks online, providing at ncpr.org only sketchy plug-ins with minimal forecast data, no alerts, no regional radar. As many of you have been at pains to point out over the years--pretty lame.

Having become enamored of Google Gadgets, last week I tried to put together something better. I tuned up a forecast scroller for each of the regions pages that gave current conditions and twenty-four hours of forecast for a specific location or set of locations. Except that its notion of current conditions runs hours out of date. I found a beautiful zoomable regional map with animated precipitation radar, except that it wouldn't work for the 8% of our visitors using the Safari browser--showing the western US to newer versions, and crashing the older browsers altogether. No way to win geekly glory.

So we bit the bullet and installed the shareware package HamWeather, which gives about as much information as anyone can absorb. It's still in shakedown phase--current conditions are still too out of date, there are styling conflicts that make the display a little buggy, etc. But I'm psyched, and even better, have some control over how it works. Once all is in order, you will be able to set the page to your own preferred location for return visits. Oxbow is, after all, the rightful center of the universe. And at 2 pm, it's mostly sunny there and 78 degrees, relative humidity 34%, 0% chance of rain, winds SSW at 7 mph. Check out the new page; the weather is improving.

Rain of soup: the NPR API

For a longtime advocate of emphasizing the "public" in public broadcasting, this is an exciting moment. My online colleagues at National Public Radio have made it the first major media company to hand what amounts to the "keys to the kingdom" over to the public. They have done this via the introduction of an open API, or application programming interface--a mouthful of buzzwords describing a feature that allows the public to access the entire archive of 250,000 NPR stories, and to use them as they see fit within their own sites, pages, and blogs. Included are tools to organize collections of stories by topic, program, series, reporter, and/or search term, and to receive those stories in a wide variety of formats and at varying levels of detail.

Within a few months, NPR stations such as North Country Public Radio will also be able to make their own stories available to the public using NPR's API. So, for example, if you had a blog dealing with environmental issues in the Northeast, you would be able to create a collection of stories on the environment from NPR mixed with local stories from NPR stations in the Northeast. Or a bluegrass fan might collect all the performances by and interviews with bluegrass artists at NPR and mix in performers from the UpNorth Music project. Or you could just grab every story since 1995 about James Brown, the hardest working man in show business. Sweet.



Even better, outside developers are already building new tools to use the API in novel ways. John Tynan at KJZZ has worked out a widget that takes NPR stories by topic and drops them onto a timeline, so you can see how coverage of a given issue develops. Here is a sample of the work in progress. Geoff Gaudreault of Reverbiage has built a widget that combines a 3D globe mapping out the latest NPR stories with an embedded player to listen to the stories. See it work and get the code. At NCPR, we are in the process of switching to the API for all the NPR features syndicated within the site. You can play with the API yourself, and should. Use the "Query Generator" to select and view different slices of the NPR pie. Register to use the NPR API.

Geek pride

The leaves are halfway out, the black flies are all the way out, and lightning is driving the golfers off the course behind the station the way the angel with the flaming sword evicted humanity from the Garden. A perfect May day in the North Country. But it can do its worst outside, as long as the power holds out—I’m deep in the guts of ncpr.org and might as well be in a mine for all I care about the weather. Tweaking screenloads of gibberish to make infinitesimal improvements in the community calendar, rendering down volumes of old static content for the few drippings that will add to the savor of the database. I may not be able to move mountains, but I can move domains--clicking away in the half-light and chuckling to myself.

Aside from the somewhat rarified pleasures described above, yesterday brought a long-awaited satisfaction. A public version of NCPR’s homebrew web content management system, Public Media Manager, has long been on offer to other stations in the public broadcasting system. And I was beginning to feel like a guy who puts all this good stuff out by the road, and weeks later, no one has taken a thing. No more. First dibs goes to the Bloomington, Indiana community station WFHB, who filed off the software’s serial numbers, installed a roll bar and Hollywood mufflers, painted it all metalflake purple, and took it out on the road. Check it out: http://news.wfhb.org.

It’s like watching the kids grow up. I think I’ll print out a screen shot and tape it up on the refrigerator.

You can look it up

Everybody is talking about the Hamilton-Baker Commission's Iraq Study Group Report—what it means and doesn't mean, who is for it and against it, whether each of its recommendations will work or not work, and on and on. One of the truly useful things to come with the internet age is the instant availability of documents that just ten or so years ago would have meant a month's wait and a visit to a major reference library. President Bush received his copy yesterday at 11 am, and by 11:02 am NCPR had a link to the complete text on its home page, and by 11:15 am I had my own copy downloaded to my desktop. I may read all of it, or part of it, but now I no longer have to rely on someone else's interpretation of what it says. This may seem like a small matter, but in the long run, I think it could be analogous to the publication of inexpensive vernacular editions of the Bible. The church was never the same afterward. Not this one report per se--but the breaking of the monopoly hold that the modern priesthood of politicians, pundits and experts of all stripes has on the basic source material of the public conversation.

The NCPR news crew has been diligent about linking to original source material related to their individual stories, but there has never been one location where someone could go to find the public records, the original plans and studies, the text of legislation and agreements and proposals that drive public policy in the region. NCPR Online is now in the process of building a Public Records section to collect primary source documents that relate to all aspects of life in the region. This is a job that everyone can get in on—please. Recommend an archive site, a single document, historical materials, search tools, whatever you have run across that helps you get to the root of public matters in the North Country. Email radio@ncpr.org.

Frosty reception

I've been out exploring the googlesphere to find the text of the 88-year-old Robert Frost poem, "War Thoughts at Home," recently discovered by grad student Robert Stilling and published in the new edition of Virginia Quarterly Review. Given that one can find online the full text of thousands of books written before and after 1918, find the full text of Rep. Mark Foley's IM chats and emails, find endless accounts of the informal genetic experiments of celebrities, full-length pre-release Hollywood movies, 911 call audio, and every bad poem written in the last decade somewhere on the internet, I assumed this would be an easy search. Nada—locked up tighter than the next Harry Potter. Four lines here, four lines there, no more.

There's something out of whack in our notion of intellectual property. Robert Frost is, I am sorry to report, long dead. But through the endless legal extension of copyright beyond the lives of the artists whose right to benefit from their own work it was intended to protect, we are instead cutting ourselves off from the richness of our own cultural legacy. The estates and publishers of long-dead artists cling to their debatable rights more fiercely as time goes by. The text of the poem appeared briefly on one website, and was forcibly removed within hours. Ironically, the only new intellectual property associated with the discovery, Robert Stilling's account of the find, is posted on the VQR website for all the world to read for free. I was happy to read it; it's an interesting story. But I will pay VQR's $25 subscription price in order to read the poem online, only if they can promise to bring back Robert Frost to collect his cut. It isn't as if I can't walk over to the Owen D. Young Library and read the current issue for free. Frost himself probably took a similar walk around the St. Lawrence campus when courting his bride-to-be.