If you haven’t heard from me in awhile, this is why. Some of you may know I’ve been working recently on an NPR / Timeline Mashup:
http://johntynan.com/scripts/timeline/
(Note: These scripts are in their early stages and are certain to change).

I mostly have been doing this to learn about JSON and to create an example of what can be done using the new NPR API.

This script owes an incredible amount to the NPR Digital Media team. You can find out more about the NPR API here. You can also read about what they’re up to on their blog Inside NPR.org

This also owes a great deal to the Simile Timeline project. You can read the documentation here, or ask a question about the timeline widget here.

I’ve learned a great deal. In particular, the idea of cross-browser data exchange using a “callback parameter” is great! See this simple tutorial. Then too, it’s great to be working in Javascript again.

Let me know if you have any comments on the scripts. This is definitely a work in progress, but I think it’s a work that could definitely go somewhere.

I’ve only listened to the first half of the interview, but I was so blown away by the clarity of thought and forward thinking that I heard that I had to transcribe it as best I could, to be sure I got this into my head just right. Here are some selected highlights:

Haarsager: (Loosely quoted) I’m disciple of Clayton Christensen and believe the disruptive innovation is unavoidable. That we need to figure out ways to disrupt ourselves and move forward in innovative ways. The step we’re in right now is realizing that for our company (NPR) and our 280 licensees/members which represent about 800 stations, that the individual portal strategy that we’ve been following ever since the web was invented is not enough. We definitely need those portals but we need to be able to put our content in places that people aren’t expecting it; whether that be through widgets or the open api, or through mobile and other kinds of distribution opportunities. We basically need to be everywhere, rather than expecting people to come to us… that’s not the way a lot of people use the web. And we need to harness the power of search in that regard in a much more powerful way. I’ve been calling it kind of easter egg strategy where we “hide” content in plain sight all over the web and ask people to go out and gather it up.

Gillmor: Hide? Is that something you are about to do or is this something that you are doing?

Haarsager: (Loosely quoted) The Open API is a very important first step. But we’re also looking at creating what we’ve been talking about as “a second prong of digital” something that’s independent in many ways from npr.org but enables stations to collect content on their own and form partnerships with other non-profits in their communities, becoming more important to them, and curating bundles of content that they can place with these partners and also producing content for these partners. The more places that we can deposit the stuff that we do the better chance that somebody will find it either because they visited that site or page rank has been enhanced because we have all this cross-linking out there. We’re actively trying to get that started. This will be consistent with some of the things that I’ve been working on in the past. Trying to make distribution work, but this time starting from an economic perspective rather than from a technology perspective.

…

Haarsager: It’s kind of geared toward moving from the scarcity world of broadcasting to the abundance world of the web. You know, like any good beaurocracy, us in public broadcasting tend to make a virtue out of a necessity sometimes, and so the notion of having to curate at a very high level all content in a way that is consistent with a broadcast message means that there is very few opportunity for us to, say, help the local nature conservancy group with its particular messaging. But that isn’t to say that this isn’t consistent with our mission. So, if we have the ability through our technology and through our ability to drive traffic to the web to help that group share its message with others in the community and to bring in great ideas from a nature conservancy organization across the country to their own constituents locally. That seems to me a real win, all to the good. And if we can bring to their web site not only that, but npr stories that are consistent with their mission, that’s also really good. So the idea then is to create these little opportunities for service that really aren’t possible in the broadcast environment, but are consistent with what we’re doing. And if you can make yourself more valuable in the community, then often revenue follows from that, from grant opportunities and tax based sources and sometimes from contributors. What we’re trying to do ultimately is to help diversify the economy of public radio in a way that helps us all.

…

It’s more sophisticated than the Public service publisher portal model in terms of its distribution mode. There we were looking at a portal and a portal that would be expressed in a distributed way over public station web sites, but those are also portals. So here we’re trying to break beyond the bounds of the portal to give us distribution very deeply into a community. So a given station might have a hundred partners locally, ultimately if it was able to put that together, and have content there. And some of that content would also express itself across the country because what they’re doing locally is of importance to somebody in N.C. when their base night be in N.D.. And all that is done in a little bit more planful way than we were looking for on the psp initiative which was to enable stations to make pay per use or subscription plays or simply to distribute the stuff for free, but mostly within the traditional bounds of their local web site. I just think that that’s a dated view of where we ought to be exclusively, and we need to recognize that other non-profits are just as interested in using the web to distribute their content as we are and the barriers to entry are relatively low, so why not do this community level aggregation in order to help everybody.

Amazing! I am seeing the start of a major media network attempting to re-invent itself, in accordance with its mission, on the web. And I’m hopeful that if we approach this vision, we’ll be doing as much good on the web as we’ve been doing on the air for years.

I’m reading over the birds of a feather dinner schedule, checking out who I’m looking forward to lifting a glass with, and which conversations I’d most like to participate in. I’m checking out the conference schedule and getting familiar with the presenters. Looking forward to seeing and hearing some great things! Looking forward to getting inspired!

In a quick IM session with Rene, she wondered why I wasn’t telling this story through a narrative. She said I didn’t really have a “story”. And that I only had the pattern: ABC / ABC / ABC / ABC.

I had told her two days prior, that I needed to make my own mistakes, and that’s just what I went ahead and did. I made the mistake of thinking about writing for radio in terms of writing a five paragraph essay. But I couldn’t just take her word for it that that’s what I had done. I remembered Ira Glass’ presentation from several weeks ago at the Scottsdale Center for the arts, wherein, he said explained his theory for writing for broadcasting is about writing anecdotes:

So, to fix this. Rene sat me down and helped me to transform this script for Draft 2. Notice how the highlighted text all are in alternating colors? This is because each color is a different interviewee. Rene then had me realign all the ACTs in the next Draft 3 so that I am only talking about one person at a time. See how the colors are arranged in large blocks? Rene also had me re-recording all my TRXs. And then Rene remixed the audio (while I went to my grandfather’s 99th birthday) and then, when I got home, what came out of this exercise was a completely different story using essentially the same clips. Have a listen.

Today, in subscribing to the Podcast for PyCon 2008, I noticed this entry:

“It almost seems like a joke: a family-owned newspaper in Lawrence, KS (population 80,000) releases an open-source web framework. It’s not a joke, of course: today Django is an increasingly popular web development platform. As an open-source community Django has been incredibly successful; in Tim O’Reilly’s OSCON keynote, he called Django “the new face of open source.” But it’s often unclear how we got here. How did a couple of programmers at a newspaper convince management to contribute to the open-source ecosystem? How does the company justify the time its developers spend on open source? And how have we as individuals and as a business had to adapt to become better open source developers?”

I was then like, “Huh! A family-owned newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas? That sounds familiar?!! Could it be? Yep, it is… Rob Curley the 2005 IMA Conference Keynote Speaker who “blew the roof off the Parc 55 with a dynamic presentation, illustrating his strategy of “hyper-localism.” Curley is one of the most decorated newspaper web directors in the United States. Some called it the best keynote speech–ever…” You can read more about his keynote speech here.

I remember coming away from the conference saying “I want to do what he does!” What an exciting, energizing person, who’s making a difference in his community and in the media industry. And now to find out that he’s doing it using open source technologies, and releasing a cool new web application framework based on python to boot! I find myself saying again… “I want to do what he does!”

I know there was some talk at last year’s conference about using Pubforge.org to support open source projects both within public broadcasting as well as independent media producers from beyond broadcast.net. I know too that, in addition to Pubforge.org , there’s always the Public Broadcasting Open Source Best Practices google group. There’s also the successful open source project from WNYC and KCRW, the East West Audio server. And there’s been collaborations that have not necessarily been open-source, like the momentum around the IMA’s with the Public Media Metrics project. But I wonder if the public broadcasting community could better support open source projects?

Tell me, what do you think it will take to foster a vibrant open-source community within public broadcasting? Tell me, what do you think it would take to have some real momentum around open-source software projects?

For those of you who came away from Rob Curley’s 2005 IMA Conference Keynote Speech and felt, like I did, that “I want to do what he’s doing!” And for those of you who would like to do this, like Rob, using a collaborative, open source approach, tell me, is 2008 the year for us to get organized? Is this year’s Public Media conference the place for us to start?

http://kjzz.org/programs/scheduleforday.xml?day=0

Then, I thought maybe iCal would be a good, next format for exchanging schedule data:

http://kjzz.org/programs/schedule.ics

However, I just had a discussion with our assistant engineer which makes me wonder if Program Segmented Data (PSD – for use with HD Radio / Program Assisted Data) is the next RSS?

http://kjzz.org/programs/schedule/pad

I found some good information here:

http://psd.publicbroadcasting.net/cookbook.html

Has there been any discussion about going from the Web to HD?

we must promote open standards for aggregating content – consistent tagging protocols at the station level, heavy use of RSS to pull content together, distributed content modules that can exist simultaneously on local and national websites, etc – to allow all us to mix and mashup these resources so they can surface at the local and national level.

Additionally, Craig Rosa’s comment about microformats had me thinking… how does the taxononomy/lexicon for describing objects using microformats inform how we might structure a database of web resources? While I know PBCore is noble and vast and everything, it’s primary goal is to be used for digital asset management – not for web sites (please let me know if I am wrong in my thinking about this). Are there content management systems out there which use microformats as a naming standard for metadata right out of the box? And how would this help facilitate a consistent “tagging protocol?” Also, in looking for how we might do this, I wonder if RSS is only the tip of the iceberg. Does this also mean a standard API for searching (and retrieving) RSS… if so, does this imply a standard REST protocol for querying a station web site and getting information back? I did a quick search for “common api standard REST” and came up with this modest proposal: Atom Will Change the World which contains a sprinkling of all the best buzzwords: Atom, GeoRSS, Dublin Core, etc. etc. But what it also says is that Atom is not only a syndication format, it’s also a publishing protocol:

In case you are not familiar with Atom, the syndication format provides a standard format for saving blog content in XML and the publishing protocol provides a standard API for clients to read, create or update Atom documents stored on servers.

This article goes on to say:

By combining a simple data model, a standard data exchange format, easy extensibility and a common API and simple specifications, Atom offers a great foundation for building web services.

and that Atom

provides a foundation on which anyone can build. Its much easier to build a Web service by adding some custom content to an Atom feed than it is to create a new XML exchange format and API from scratch. Thus, I believe Atom will become the de facto way of building web services. The first place to look is to Web 2.0 sites. Many currently expose their data via proprietary web service APIs – I’ll wager over the coming year most will move to Atom.

Shoot! Should I, as a webmaster at a public radio station, be implementing Atom feeds and moving towards an ideal of a standard API? And is the API already out there? Should I be learning about the Atom publishing protocol?

I’ve have testing the ability to map KJZZ’s news stories here:

http://kjzz.org/news/map

http://kjzz.org/map

using, for example, the following rss feed:

http://kjzz.org/search/georss?keyword=immigration&size=5

http://kjzz.org/search/rss?keyword=immigration&size=5

I’ve also started testing this with Yahoo Pipes.

It would be interesting to see what a world map would look like if NPR was geotagging their stories, or what a national map would look like if we aggregated stories from public broadcasting stations across the country.

Are there other stations doing this, or considering doing this, with their stories? If so, should there a dialog between stations about aggregating stories and about the possibilties and best practices for mapping stories?

Is there some kind of national initiative for at stations across the system to start serving their content in this way. Is there support for Andy Carvin’s Election 2.0 Task Force where he says:

we must promote open standards for aggregating content – consistent tagging protocols at the station level, heavy use of RSS to pull content together, distributed content modules that can exist simultaneously on local and national websites, etc – to allow all us to mix and mashup these resources so they can surface at the local and national level.

What are your thoughts and experiences?

My question was this, how do we make it easy for people to talk about our work, to cite it, to “copy it” to display it. Is it through an embedded flash player that we can make it easy to include the appropriate attribution information, the station’s call letters/url, the author’s name, the link back to the story. If there is a standard practice out there, please let me know about it.

For instance, I got an email from The Herberger College of Fine Arts at Arizona State University, they wanted to use an interview that we did with one of their professors, Jazz Studies director Mike Kocour. I babbled on in technicaleese about attribution etc and they simply said, “just give us the audio.” For all the slickness and polish of ASU’s site, when they finally post the audio that they said they just wanted, what will the presentation be like? Will this be accurately and equitably presented?

How do we as public broadcasters have this conversation? If we start with how to protect the rights of our own content, then maybe it will be easier for us to think about extending similar protections to user generated content.