New cafe at Queen and Parliament

If there was ever evidence that what’s happening farther east of us on Queen Street is spreading into Corktown, it’s the new coffee shop that opened up at 354 Queen East (next to Ray’s Convenience). I went by tonight after Jenna texted me to announce its existence, and peered in the windows. I spotted comfy chairs and an espresso machine, so it at least looks better than Coffee Time.

Looking forward to trying it out tomorrow morning, and pitching the owner on mesh networking.

Consider me zapped

I think a lot about Spark, the radio program I work on. I talk a lot about Spark, too — mostly to Liz and Nora (my co-workers), to listeners, and to other radio people.

This past weekend I attended Zap Your PRAM, a non-conference organized by Charlottetown-based silverorange and Reinvented. I was asked to give a talk loosely based on “how being involved with a radio show that tries to use the web in new and interesting ways has actually worked out.” And it was a genuinely refreshing experience. Mostly because (I think) I wasn’t talking to a group of radio people. I was talking to a group of technologists.

The format of talks at Zap lends itself to interjections, questions, spontaneous discussions, and derailments. Which was wonderful. Rather than walking in, presenting my prepared points, playing my prepared clips, and taking question at the end, the flow of comments and questions seemed to start almost immediately, smack dab in the middle of what I thought I was going to talk about.

As someone who’s used to performing off a script, it was scary. Terrifying, even. People asked questions about points I hadn’t made yet. People questioned things I take as givens. And through it all, the participants got me thinking about the work I do in ways I hadn’t thought of before. (A particularly helpful comment came from Rob Paterson, who mentioned NPR’s Bryant Park Project, Planet Money, and the difference between radio -> web and web -> radio.)

And I think that’s sort of what made Zap wonderful for me — the ecclectic mix of people with perspectives that I would probably never otherwise have access to.

Did I make all the points I wanted to make in my talk? No.

Did I properly articulate anything about how I see the relationship between public broadcasting and social media? Probably not as clearly as I would have liked.

But in the “inline discussion” during my talk, and in the various chats I had with people one-on-one afterwards, I picked up some very useful nuggets from some very smart people that may help our radio show continue to improve. Hanging around designers for a weekend’ll do that, I guess.

Between the talks, the venue (beautiful), the amazing food, and the great people I met and talked to, Zap was a great success. Congrats and thanks to Steven, Dan, and especially Peter, who not only invited me, but took me on a Sunday afternoon tour of Charlottetown after the conference was over. The Überloo was a touchless wonder. Consider me zapped.

What’s a “href?”

I love, love, love this. From 10 reasons why newspapers won’t reinvent news:

Hey news executives! Try this newsroom pop quiz: Give each staff member a pencil and tell everyone to stop what they’re doing and write out the tag that creates a hypertext link. If most can’t, you’re not spending enough on training. If anyone in your management team can’t, you’ve got a crisis.

[via Kottke]

This American Financial Crisis

Kottke chimes in on This American Life‘s two excellent programs on the American financial system:

This radio program made the rounds last week, but I finally got caught up this weekend so I’ll add my voice to the chorus urging you to listen to This American Life’s episode on the financial crisis, Another Frightening Show About the Economy. Paired with The Giant Pool of Money from back in May, this is an excellent overview of what’s going on in the financial markets right now. The hosts of the two shows are also doing a daily blog/podcast thing at Planet Money In addition, the last half of this week’s TAL concerns the political angle of the financial mess. I haven’t had a chance to listen yet, but check it out if you’re into that sort of thing.

I don’t have much to add to this beyond my own endorsement of these two programs, and also (because both shows have slipped into TAL’s archives) two direct download links to the MP3s:

Another Frightening Show About the Economy

http://audio.thisamericanlife.org/jomamashouse/ismymamashouse/365.mp3

The Giant Pool of Money

http://audio.thisamericanlife.org/jomamashouse/ismymamashouse/355.mp3

Full list of CBC Radio 2 streaming “channel” URLs

Update, 11 April 2012: This page is old, and the URLs don’t work anymore. You’re probably actually looking for my Full list of CBC Music direct URLs instead.

Update: CBC now has official lists:

• Radio1 Direct URLs
• Radio2 Direct URLs

—

Along with the re-launch of Radio 2, CBC created four new streaming “genre” channels: Classical, Jazz, Canadian Composers, and Canadian Songwriters. You may have heard the heavy advertisement for them on both CBC Radio 1 and 2. To hear these new channels, you have to listen at the Radio 2 website, or listen in iTunes under “Radio” in the sidebar.

But what do you do if you don’t want to leave a browser window open? Or if you’d rather stream using VLC, or WinAmp or something?

Because I can’t seem to find one anywhere else (including CBC’s own Windows-Media centric Direct CBC.ca URLs for listening to CBC Radio page), I’ve put together a full list of CBC Radio 2 streaming “channel” URLs list here:

Classical

http://atl2.fla.abacast.com/cbc-canadianclassicalhi-192

Jazz

http://atl2.fla.abacast.com/cbc-jazzhi-192

Canadian Composers

http://atl2.fla.abacast.com/cbc-composershi-192

Canadian Songwriters

http://atl2.fla.abacast.com/cbc-songwriterhi-192

How did I find these?

1. In the “Radio” section of iTunes, I browsed for each of the four channels
2. I dragged each of the stations into a new iTunes playlist
3. In the playlist I right clicked on each item, I clicked “Edit URL” and copied the URL (For example, the Canadian Songwriters URL was http://pri.kts-af.net/redir/index.pls?esid=6ae4b0420afe423a4f04585b4c0b1ed1&url_no=1&client_id=7&uid=68efed4d03ec7e45fd3978262c107180&clicksrc=xml)
4. I pasted that URL into Firefox, which downloaded a .pls file
5. I opened each .pls file in Textedit, which gave me the above URLs.

Interesting:

• Abacast (abacast.com) is an American company
• It looks like the Live Streaming service costs either $395 or $695 per month per channel, depending on the package
• Though the URLs (and iTunes Radio listings) suggest the bitrate is 192 kbps, my copy of VLC reports otherwise, between 112 and 160 kbps. Perhaps that’s a limitation of my broadband connection, though.
• Abacast lists complete listener statistics as part of its streaming audio packages. I wonder how many people are listening. I wonder if these numbers will ever become as public as BBM reports.