How not to do geoblocking

I’ll admit that up until yesterday, I was unaware of the CBC Television program The Big Decision.

(Aside: I predict that within five years, every single CBC Television program will be based around Dragons’ Den personalities.)

Anyway, I didn’t know about The Big Decision, but after following some tweet or another, I found myself on the show’s website, and decided to check it out. Here’s what happened when I hit the play button:

In case you missed it, the video thumbnail was replaced by a completely blank rectangle, while a robotic voice soaked in reverb said, “This content is currently unavailable.”

I suspect this is because I’m in France, and the content has been geoblocked. My suspicions were confirmed after I used Sidestep to connect to a Canadian proxy server and was able to view the video without any problems.

Now, my issue isn’t with the geoblocking itself. I completely understand the business reasons why certain types of online content are restricted in this way.

My problem is how The Big Decision‘s geoblocking is implemented.

If I’m being geoblocked, at least have the decency to tell me I’m being geoblocked. Do this:

I’m no UI genius, but it’s not hard to recognize that a completely blank screen and reverb-y robot voice that says, “This content is currently unavailable,” is less than ideal feedback. There’s just not enough information to be useful.

Why, dear robot voice, is the content unavailable? Do I not have the right plug-in installed? Are there gremlins in the CBC’s online video system? Or am I outside of the geofence?

If I’m being geoblocked, tell me. At least then I’ll know when to fire up Sidestep.

Flipboard does audio, and why segmentation matters

Today, Flipboard added audio playback controls and a new Audio category to its app:

The section is searchable but comes with recommended SoundCloud users, as well as popular shows from NPR (National Public Radio) and PRI (Public Radio International).

I’ve played with the new Flipboard for a while, and it’s yet another example of why  segmentation matters, and how for public radio, the atomic element is the story.

Radio networks and shows that split their programming up into sharable, spreadable component parts are reaping the rewards of new platforms. And it’s not just Flipboard.

• Audiofiles is a web-based sharing and discovery platform for radio, sorting stories based on mood, type, length, producer, and source.
• NPR’s Infinite Player is like Pandora for public radio, playing a customized stream of stories that listeners can fine-tune as they listen.
• The Super Times is a forthcoming iPhone app that assembles a personalized audio magazine of “the best audio stories from around the web.”

All of these platforms rely on content being broken up into its component parts. Segmentation is a prerequisite.

As of late 2011, Flipboard had 5 million users. That’s the opportunity here — to reach millions of potential new listeners, inside an app they already know and use.

So then, for radio programmers: even if you have the best content in the entire world, if you don’t split it up into easily sharable pieces, you’ll miss out on a whole new wave of new consumption technologies. I’m looking at you, CBC Radio.

Get out your scissors. Quickly.

Radio, comics, and abstraction

It’s been on my “to watch” list for quite a while, and today I finally got around to watching Jad Abumrad’s presentation at MaxFunCon 2010.

In it, Jad uses many examples from Radiolab (and borrows heavily from Walter Murch) to create a model that explains the relationship between words, music, various types of sound effects, and their relative levels of abstraction. Needless to say, if you’re interested in radio (or sound at all, for that matter), find an hour, and watch this in its entirety:

As I watched, I couldn’t help but notice a common thread between Jad’s model of sound, and Scott McCloud’s Big Triangle,  which aims to “put all of comics’ visual vocabulary (pictures, words, specialized symbols, etc.) into some kind of easily understood map of possibilities.”

It’d been a while since I’d last read Understanding Comics, and in digging around for an image of the Big Triangle, I came across Scott McCloud’s terrific TED talk, in which he explains his entire model:

The whole thing is good, but if you’re looking for to compare and contrast Jad’s sonic model with Scott’s visual one, skip ahead to 7:47.

Everything old is new (again)

Cyrus has a piece up at Ars Technica about Boxfish, a search engine for closed captions scraped from broadcast television:

Boxfish captures all closed-captioning information, indexes it, then makes that data searchable in a Twitter-style interface. All in real-time.

If this technique sounds familiar, perhaps it’s because Google did something very similar way back in 2005:

The service, Google Video beta, searches closed caption information that comes with programmes. It only searches US channel content currently.

Results list programmes with still images and text from the point where the search phrase was spoken.

A very fussy morning coffee ritual

One of the great luxuries of a sabbatical year in France is time.

I have time now like I’ve never had it before. Time to go for a stroll, time to sit in a cafe for hours on end practicing French…

Most notably though, I now have time to make coffee in a very fussy way.

Back in January, based on a recommendation from the fine folks at Cafe Mokxa, Jenna and I bought an Aeropress. That was fussy enough on its own. But then, last week, Jenna brought home a hand-crank coffee grinder. Now it’s just ridiculous.

This morning, simply to document my current coffee setup, I shot and edited a quick video:

It’s a simple thing. A small pleasure.

I consider myself very lucky to be able to indulge in it.