New podcast

As promised, my weekly CBC Radio technology column is now available in podcast form. Updated Tuesdays.

You can subscribe to the RSS feed, or subscribe in iTunes.

P.S. I really should have shaved and got a haircut before they took that photo.

Physical memories, digital backups

A fews months ago, in the midst of a digital backup frenzy, it struck me that if our apartment burned down, there’d be no need to try and save these framed pictures. We could just print out identical copies from the digital files (stored safely off-site). In an odd way, we have a digital backup of some very physical items.

CBCjobs is now workatCBC

CBC HR asked me to hand over control of the unofficial @CBCjobs Twitter account I made last July. I agreed.

I plan to keep the automatic job postings going @workatCBC. More details in the update here.

Segmentation matters

This American Life has split its back catalog of shows up into individual stories (or “acts” in TAL parlance):

First off, on each episode page, in addition to the big PLAY button at the top, there are now play buttons for individual stories. No more shuttling through audio to get to that one story your friend told you about. Of course, we believe that the episodes are best heard as a whole, but we understand that sometimes you’re just after one particular act. So there’s that.

This is great. I’ve been preaching this kind of simple segmentation to my colleagues at CBC for a long while now. Yes, we work hard to create shows that often have themes running through them. Yes, we want our shows to be more than the sum of their parts. And yes, it can be a little painful to build a show up, then cut it back down into its component parts.

But arguing that radio shows “are best heard as a whole” and not offering individual stories sounds a bit like how AC/DC  refuses to sell individual tracks on iTunes, saying, “We don’t make singles, we make albums.”

This American Life‘s new offering makes their show so much more spreadable and sharable by fans.

The other day, a colleague and I were discussing CBC’s digital radio strategy. Particularly, the CBC’s approach to online sharability and spreadability. I offered the following exercise as an illustration of where we’re just not getting it right.

Compare and contrast the experience of the following:

1. Point a friend to a YouTube video you saw
2. Point a friend to an NPR news story you heard on the radio
3. Point a friend to a CBC story you heard on the radio

Let’s try this by writing a few imaginary email messages. First, pointing a friend to a YouTube video:

Hi, Tom.

Check out this video about marmosets: «http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oiLfTnrC40». You’ll love it!

-dm

Next, pointing a friend to an NPR news story I heard on the radio:

Hi, Tom.

Check out this crazy NPR story about zombies: «http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2011/05/19/136465244/cdc-has-tips-for-zombie-apocalypse-and-other-disasters». You’ll love it!

-dm

Finally, pointing a friend to a CBC story I heard on the radio:

Hi, Tom.

Check out this story about Fabian Manning. Go here: «http://www.cbc.ca/asithappens/episode/2011/05/19/thursday-may-19-2011/» and then click on “Listen to Part 2” and once it’s loaded, scroll to about the 16 minute and thirty second mark. You’ll love it!

-dm

See the problem here?

I’m not trying to pick on As it Happens here (honestly, I’m not). They’re just a convenient example of a magazine-style show with a bunch of different stories in it. They do lots of stories every day, and there’s a good chance I might want to send one story in particular to a friend. The majority of CBC Radio programs are in exactly the same boat.

Here’s the point: people want what they want when they want it. Offering easy access to individual stories (like TAL does, or how Quirks and Quarks offers a segmented podcast) helps people share and spread the stories they love. It helps create the conditions for virality.

There’s a technical challenge here. There’s a resource challenge here. And there’s a culture challenge here. You need the right publishing tools to make segmentation easy. You need a human being to actually do the segmentation. But most of all, you need a workforce that understands how informations is spread and shared online.

Comparing the spreadability of radio stories from NPR (with it’s relatively small budget) and CBC, we have some catching up to do. Why are we not breakup up all of our shows into pieces? Why can’t I embed a radio story on my blog in the same way I can embed a YouTube video? Shouldn’t we? Shouldn’t I be able to?

How can we build a city that thinks like the web?

People have different names for it: the networked city, the real-time city, the smart city, “a city that thinks like the web.” Call it what you want, the idea of improving the places we live through technology, open data, and connectivity is definitely hotting up these days.

MIT has an entire lab dedicated to the exploration of that idea, where researchers attach tiny cell phones to trash, and build award-winning networked bicycle wheels.

Events like the Cognitive Cities Conference in Berlin attract a diverse collection of “urban planners, designers, technology geeks, environmental experts, public officials, urban gardening enthusiasts and cultural influencers,” where high fliers like Adam Greenfield are treated a bit like rock stars (if rock stars were obsessed with ubiquitous computing).

The networked city is also fertile ground for artistic work, like John Ewing’s Virtual Street Corners project, which transformed two street-level shopfronts into a large-scale videoconference last year.

But running alongside the potential benefits of a networked city are risks (like overextended surveillance and control) and unintended consequences (like crime maps’ impact on housing prices). And though much of the underlying technology for networked cities exists today, we don’t yet have well-established social norms and protocols for living in such places. Our fluid, contextual notions of public and private often bump up against the binary on/off nature of digital technology in all sorts of surprising and unexpected ways.

All this to say, I’m really excited to explore some of these issues soon with three big thinkers: Cory Doctorow (Boing Boing), Mark Surman (Mozilla) and Sara Diamond (OCAD University). I’m moderating a panel discussion with them on June 4, called “How can we build a city that thinks like the web?” Of course, we’ll address the titular question, with the requisite follow-up, “Should we build a city that thinks like the web?”

It’s free and open to the public, but pre-registration is required.

Hope to see you there. Really looking forward to it.