New connections

Sometimes the clock just sits there, slowly grinding gravel into sand, and sometimes everything seems to happen at once. We're heading into one of the latter times now. Stuff from the back burner, things we have been chipping away at month by month, all come to a head. A lot of the action is being driven by new projects and initiatives from our network partner, NPR.

The big news of the last few days was NPR's acquisition of Public Interactive, the platform host of many public radio websites, and a service provider to many more, NCPR among them. The merger may save us some change in the long run, but it will help most in facilitating our use of content from public radio programs that originate with PI's former parent, Public Radio International, and with other media services PI has under contract. It will beef up NPR's digital shop and will help PI stations play more effectively on the national stage.

NPR is making a big investment in social networking for the public radio community and is set to roll out a platform on which stations can foster their own communities within NPR.org. Look for lots more on this in late September.

NPR has also jump-started stations into the arcanely-labeled field of mobilecasting, making a mix of station and network features available via cell phones and other mobile devices. NCPR expects to join them by November. For those of you who wish your cell phones had a cord and a dial, there will be a regular phone number you can call from any type of phone to get the latest NCPR and NPR news and features. This will make NCPR available for the first time in remoter parts of the region that don't have broadband internet, or cell service, or even radio reception.

Speaking of mergers, I have saved the best for last. NCPR station manager Ellen Rocco is tying the knot this weekend with Adirondack potter Bill Noble. We wish them all the best.

Topical relief

I hear occasionally from a web-usability guru who was kind enough to advise me during the NCPR website redesign. He dropped me a note this morning to say how much he liked the results, but he cautioned me on the dangers of fragmenting the news into too many topics--citing the mess of Yahoo's old topic-driven navigation system. I had already been thinking about this as a result of going to a major news site yesterday, and finding that of all the things going on in the world, their top story featured a guy who had been walking around with a two-and-a-half inch nail driven into his skull by a nail gun.

Here we see the freakish x-ray, and here is the guy himself, seemingly unharmed. He says the weirdest thing is that the surgeon chose a claw hammer as the best instrument to do the extraction. Owww! Not having had enough, I then Googled "nail in skull" and found that this is not only an irresistible topic of discussion, it happens way more often than one would think. There was the guy who drove the four-inch nail up his nose into the brain, then there was the guy who wandered into a Portland hospital, complaining of headache. The cause--twelve nails shot into his head in a failed suicide attempt. And the guy from South Dakota with the three-inch nail near the brain stem, and on and on.

An hour later, I closed my gore-spattered web browser and realized that I never did find out what was happening in the world. But on that one topic, I had it nailed.

Not a good look

I was walking one day in the crowded esplanade of the Danbury Fair Mall. A women in front of me turned to her companion and said, "I didn’t know we were in Connecticut." I have had that feeling over and over the last few days as I have surveyed scores of websites looking for inspiration to fuel the redesign of the NCPR website. Everything seems to look just like everything else--and I gotta tell you--it isn’t a good look. Crowded, chaotic, hard to navigate, hard to read, and little to make you want to stick around. If the media sites on the web comprised a metropolis, they would be the shantytowns of Rio. This is bad news for me; I was hoping for something to rip off--I mean emulate. NCPR's design, now more than six years old, belongs to the hamster-dance era of website fashion, and I am under the gun to roll out something new and fabulous for our 40th anniversary year, 2008.

Since my eyeballs are bleeding from the strain and my progress to date can be measured in microns, I thought I would get with the 21st Century program and tap into "the wisdom of crowds." Send me your candidates for websites that do what they do well and with a little style. And tell me a little about why you think they work. I'll compile a list of favorites and put it back out on the site, and maybe I'll find a few features that I can file the serial numbers off. Email dale@ncpr.org.

Lurch engine

I've been spending a lot of time the last few months observing your habits. No--that wasn't me following you home in the beige Corolla--but observing your habits as a web visitor to NCPR, as tweaked out by the subtle algorithms of stats analysis. One number that jumped out at me was that 30+% of you come to our pages via an outside search engine. That tells me a couple of things-first, that many people come to NCPR from all over the world, looking for one thing that matched their interest, not to visit a local public radio website per se. This is a good thing; part of our work is to provide a window into the North Country for the world. But it also tells me that large numbers of our local audience are resorting to Google because they can't locate what they are looking for either through our site navigation, or through the poor literal-minded, three-legged site search tool that is built into ncpr.org. And that is, how you say, suboptimal.

After years of looking for a better internal search feature--something cheap, feature-rich and open-source, by preference--after trying to write search tips that are rarely read and only occasionally helpful, after trying to add extra search tools that give the visitor different options, we have decided to break free from our instinctive public radio penny-pinching and solve the problem the old-fashioned way--throw some money at it. In these days, a search engine that doesn't function in the same way that Google or Yahoo or any other big player does is not a search engine, it's a hide engine. So on our immediate shopping list is the Google Mini Search Appliance, one more heat-producing device to compete with the air-conditioner in the web office, but one that will allow visitors to search (and to actually find) whatever they are looking for at NCPR. Also in the works is a retooled site design that will navigate in a more logical and consistent way from page to page. If you have any horror stories about getting lost at NCPR, and any suggestions on smoothing the way, please drop me a line at radio@ncpr.org.

Here there be transmitters

With the little time left me this week in racing on to page 759 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I have been playing with the niftiest thing since sliced bread, a free web application that allows you to make up and mark up your own interactive maps and drop them onto your website. Geo-cachers and other cartographic weenies take note--you'll love QuikMaps. Whether you just want to chart and annotate your latest pub-crawl on some pseudonymous blog, or plot out all the locations for a county-wide arts tour, it's easy--not "as long as you're a webmaster easy"--but actually easy.

I registered with the site at noon yesterday, and by four pm had created several maps, including a new NCPR coverage map, with all our transmitters and facilities plotted to within a couple of feet. You can zoom down on our studio icon, switch to satellite view a find yourself looking at the roof over the control room. I can tell which car in the parking lot is mine. Look for news and event maps in the future. My geeky heart is going pitterpat.

Made redundant

While visiting my daughter Elena a few weeks ago in Boston, I had her place to myself for a few hours while she and my wife left to engage in the retail form of mother-daughter bonding. I thought I would take the opportunity to check out some major-market public radio and tune in WBUR or WGBH and see what they were up to. At first I thought there were just too many buttons and doohickeys on her stereo for me to find the fm tuner—but it turns out there wasn't one. And no clock/radio in the bedroom—and no kitchen radio/CD combo, no boom box, no shower radio. No radio! If she hadn't stolen my favorite Django Reinhart CD when she left town, I'd worry that I had raised some kind of changeling cultural mutant.

As it turns out, she does listen to a little radio--even NCPR—on her laptop. Back when Al Gore and I invented the internet, we had theorized that one consequence might be that people would want to listen to what they wanted to listen to, when they wanted to. But no radio?—ouch! She gets the news from websites and headlines email—she gets music from sharing and download sites; she gets recommendations via web and IM and the murmur network of an active urban scene. In other words, she gets what I get from radio, elsewhere. Just as living a block from the Davis Square T has replaced her need for a car, broadband in the home coupled with an iPod Nano has replaced most of the need for a radio. And she is one of a growing legion. Hang it up with the buggy whip?—I don't think so. But it does underscore the necessity for anyone who is serious about having a future in broadcasting to provide services that are not duplicated or available in the growing elsewhere of new media. The next generation does not listen to network pass-through stations. The network content is—well—on the network, anytime they want it. In the new world, you have to be making your own. And you have to put it where they want it, when they want it. But just for luck, I've put an iPod fm tuner add-on on Elena's stocking-stuffer list.

When you don't want the whole pie

A few days ago an item jumped out at me in the New York Times headlines email--Google had just introduced a new feature allowing users to create custom searches for their own websites. You might think this is one more bell-and-whistle from an already somewhat tubby corporate marketing department, but if you haven't seen much of your resident geek for the last few days, it's because he or she has closed the office door to be alone with the exciting possibilities. Search engine users since the beginning of time--1994 that is--have been looking for ways to clean out the million-hit clutter that makes finding things online such a crapshoot. I've spent about six hours over the last two days creating something that has been talked about for years, but never done--a search tool that looks at all public radio sites, and only at public radio sites. Check out the test page. Fast, clean, ad-free, cost-free. I'm in heaven.

My fellow webnaut Bill Haenel has been exploring other possibilities--building a search universe that corresponds to the map--in this case, the North Country. His project has a more commercial cast, drawing revenue from ad-sharing and sales. Check out his efforts at North Country Search. Usually, the bigger a dot.com gets, the smaller its brain becomes. Nice to see one bucking the trend with a truly useful innovation.

High maintenance

The internet police caught up with us this week, finally noticing that NCPR had more than 50% more audio online than the site was rated for. They locked us out of putting up any new content—such as the next day's news—until we had brought the site back within its budget. Eeek! So I spent a chunk of the weekend and Monday pulling off old audio and stashing it until we could negotiate a bigger dedicated server. This comes at a time when we are changing over our pledge and newsletter services to another vendor, and making other structural changes at ncpr.org. It brought to mind how issues of scale come eventually to bear on any situation. We continue to reach out for the new, the innovative, but as we build larger, more and more energy is required simply to maintain what has already been done. Trees grow beyond their ability to transport water upward, family homes ramble out over new crawl spaces until it becomes a full-time job just to keep it all from falling back down. An ant can lift twenty times its own weight, but if you scale one up to human-size, it can't even hold itself up. Fortunately, we drink a lot of coffee around here, and look forward to stunted growth.