Big Web Pow-Wow, part 2

Thanks for weighing in last week about where NCPR should be going in exploring new online platforms and future online strategy. The main takeaways so far from listeners encourage us to go slow, to think more deeply about our real strategic needs, and to not lose sight of our core mission as broadcasters. You can read all the conversation so far at this address:
http://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/blogs/brainclouds/2010/02/big-web-pow-wow.html
Last week's post was pretty "top-level" in its approach. I'd like to ask you to weigh in now on some specific areas we are talking about exploring.

First is a new approach to the front page at ncpr.org. We propose to make page one more "newsy." Right now, news is available only in headline form there. We'd like to move the news one click closer--putting at least one story onto page one in full, with photos and direct audio links. We'd like to include more timely content about network programs, rotate new features through the home page more often, and make page one run deeper--including some NPR blogs, as well as NPR and other national features. The numbers driving this decision tell us that the average NCPR visitor is coming to the site only twice a month. A more news-heavy approach, starting at the home page, we hope, will encourage more people to put ncpr.org onto their daily news beat.

Second is a different approach to social media such as Twitter and Facebook. To date, our presence there is primarily driven by feeds that automatically put archive NCPR news and blog content into the social media space. We propose to move the clock ahead a little, giving more info about what's coming up instead of what's gone by. And we hope to use these platforms to engage the audience in story and program incubation, and to build such features as our winter and summer reading lists. And we hope to get more of the NCPR staff engaged with these platforms to post about what's happening in their areas.

Third, we hope to reorganize our approach to the music and arts of the region online, creating a more lively and two-way conversation about local music, regional arts, and cultural life--using new blogs, social media, and listener-submitted media in a more interactive way.

There are more areas where we are looking for change, but these three ought to be plenty for today. Give us your thinking in a comment below.

Where we breathe

Before there was the Worldwide Web, there was the WELL, the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, an online community that served the technophiles of the Bay Area through a network of text bulletin boards and other services delivered over slow phone modems. It was a little slow, a little clunky, and highly geeky, but it had one advantage that has been lost in the online explosion since--it "mapped" onto a terrestrial community--it created an analog of where its participants lived, and was deeply involved with its issues and objectives.

I was an early fan of the WELL, reading about it in CoEvolution Quarterly. Ever since I first became involved in creating websites, I wanted to work in countertrend to the fragmentation and placelessness that characterized the new online world. In particular, I wanted to build a place within the web that corresponded to where I actually lived. I saw the traditional infrastructure that maintained my community falling apart, the informal network of churches and social clubs, local news in print and broadcast in decline, the increased busy-ness of workers and the corresponding decrease of community volunteers. If my work online served only to further distract people from the places where they made their lives, I would be part of the problem.

In the decade or more since, that fragmentation has only grown, and communities-- particularly small ones--struggle ever harder to keep together civic life. While the new online social tools dubbed "Web 2.0" have done amazing things in creating communities of affinity, I still look forward to a "Web 3.0" to serve our communities of residence. That's the place where we breathe the air.

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.

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.

The world looks back

Online, NCPR's main aim is to inform the region about itself and about the world. A secondary aim is to inform the world about the North Country. In crunching the numbers, I am amazed at the way the second task works. One third of our traffic arrives via search engines such as Google. Most comes from North America, but in the last month we have had visitors from more than 100 countries, including 310 visits from the United Kingdom, 99 from Japan, 68 from Brazil, 107 from Austalia, 12 from South Africa, 20 from Jordan, and two from Fiji.

One of the slightly creepy wonders of a good stats package is that I can tell where visitors from a given country or city landed in our site. One of our Fijian visitors viewed an audio slideshow about an Ontario beekeeper. A visitor from Myanmar looked at our series on biofuels. One visitor from Sarajevo went to The Folk Show page; another went to the Community Calendar. Three visitors from China apparently wanted to know about finding nude models in Chestertown. Visitors from Iran wanted to know about trash burning and to hear a review of "My Fair Lady." One Ukrainian likes Celtic harp and flamenco guitar, while our single Paraguayan visitor favors String Fever. UpNorth Music performer Kevin Irwin has at least one fan in Poland. Next door in Germany they are listening to Celia Evans and Scott Shipley.

All told, the world appears to be getting a somewhat quirky and spotty view of the North Country. But then consider what I know about Fiji--nice beaches, or Paraguay--it's in South America. I have to wonder though, just what do they make of 'enry and Eliza in Tehran.

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.

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.

Obscure passages

If you have gotten past the homepage at NCPR in the last day or two, you'll have noticed that the new site design is starting to appear. My apologies for the interim confusion, but it is nothing compared to my own. It's ugly down in the crawl spaces of cyberspace. And the basic tools of web design are still primitive. Picture monks in the scriptorium, transcribing obscure passages from Leviticus by tallow lamp. Church Latin has nothing on javascript. What could "for (i=0; i<(args.length-2); i+=3) { test=args[i+2]; val=MM_findObj(args[i]);" mean? All I know for sure is that it is tiny and made of pixels I can barely read. And that you can't get the code wrong without sending people off to fan sites for Romanian calvary collectibles, or injecting heresy into scripture, or creating some other form of disproportionately large trouble. If by mischance you run horribly astray, just keep clicking. Eventually you will come across me in one of the sub-basements, busting my knuckles applying a torque wrench to a gunked-up function. We can help each other find the way back to daylight.

All things made new

Home renovation on the internet can be as messy and frustrating and time-consuming as in the real world. It's also prone to schedule creep, going over budget, etc. If you've been tuned in, you know that NCPR has moved into its 40th anniversary year, and you may have glimpsed our new logo on station correspondence. But so far you have not seen much at ncpr.org. That's about to change in the next few weeks, as we roll out our first complete website makeover since 2002. Things may be a little squirrely during the transition, with parts of the site being updated and part not. We'll do our best to keep the train on the tracks.

The look is intended to be more clean and contemporary, and more user-friendly to navigate and search. You will find that the menus will be consistent in content and location from the home page on throughout the site. The page itself is larger, taking advantage of the shift toward larger monitors in recent years. And we have taken a close look at how people are using the site to introduce some new pages that bring what people are looking for more front and center.
Take a sneak preview of the new design in progress.

It is a test page for the news section home page of the site. Most of the navigation works, sending you to pages in the old site. Some links to new pages do not work, and some of the destinations will have additional and/or changed content in the new design. But let us know what you think, quick, before I mess everything up. Email dale@ncpr.org.

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.

Postcard of doom

Writing in haste again, taking a break between sessions at my annual geekfest, the Integrated Media Associates Conference, this year in Boston. Nice for me, because I get to bunk with friends in Medford and hang out a little with my daughter in her adopted town. Yesterday was the hard-core techie sessions, with a higher concentration of bluetooth ear phones and bitty foldout keyboards than anywhere outside freshman orientation at MIT. Once again, it's the end of the world as we know it, according to keynoter Michael Rosenblum, video journalism guru. The explosion of services like You Tube represent the tipping point from old media to new. That is, from centralized, cash-fat and exclusive media, to lean, inclusive, democratic media. "Adapt or Die!" is the cry. The difference this year is that CEOs and senior producers are joining the ranks of the believers and the terrified. The message is received, but what will be done with it is totally up for grabs.

Somewhere the mix of social networking, blogging, visitor submitted video, audio and text will intersect with professional curation, the necessary resources, and the deep storytelling expertise of old media to create a synthesis that doesn't have a name yet. At least that is the hope. The alternative looks like holding stock in buggy whips and Betamax. That expressionless psuedo-personality The Market, as always, shrugs and says "Tough noogies." Next up, a day of sessions at MIT, with the title (ominous to many in the room) of "Beyond Broadcasting."

Makeover

It’s the hinge of the year, when the old passes away to make room for the new. The day has shrunk as far as it will go, and has started to expand toward summer again—no matter what your bones tell you come January. New toys, new clothes and gizmos, books and baubles—they’re just waiting to be unwrapped. Food and festival, company and cacophony, we all cut loose a little before the long wintering-in.

In the spirit of the season, NCPR has renewed the look and content of all our email publications. The shiny new makeover of our daily headlines email began on Monday, including more information on each news story, and adding in all the day’s events from the Community Calendar. There's a new (and improved, I hope) Listening Post. Tomorrow, the new design of our weekly topical news briefs will debut, and come the new year, we will begin a new work in our Books by Email serial. Please drop me a line at dale@ncpr.org with your reaction on unwrapping the new goodies, and any suggestions for improvement. All my best for the season, and for the new and improved year ahead.

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.

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.