Zoe Michelle Shapiro
and
Maksim Samuel Shapiro
were born exactly one week ago on December 30, 2008 at 2:21 and 2:22 pm
weighing in at 7 lbs 11 oz and 8 lbs 2 oz – big twins!
Zoe and Max and Mom and Dad are doing great, amazed and happy to be together at last.
Dad, who was not a good blogger in 2008, will be an even worse one in 2009…
JMS
(disclosure: I’m on the Echonest advisory board and am also a big fan and friend of the gang).
Congratulations to my friends Jim, Brian, Tristan and the crew at EchoNest on some new funding and the launch of their developer platform.
These guys are cooking up something unique with the Musical Brain, and it goes well beyond the LastFM and Pandora experiences most digital music fans have been gravitating towards. I can’t wait to see what developers do with the new APIs and the ones to come, we’ll certainly be playing with it over at PRX.
Financial Times, Mashable, and Ars Technica cover the launch.
Watch Jim and Tristan wow the crowd at Demo ‘08:
And then go try More Cowbell for yourself.
Wow am I behind on blogging. A month or so ago I was part of a “new media brain trust” at the Zanzibar International Film Festival, on the island of Zanzibar off the coast of Tanzania in East Africa. Other than a trip to Morocco in the early 90s I’ve never traveled to Africa and had been hoping to some day, and now hope to again soon.
This trip was part of the New Media Institute (NMI), an evolving project of the National Black Programming Consortium, one of public television’s five minority production centers. NMI is becoming a real nexus of training, discussion and networking for minority multimedia producers here in the U.S. and now also in Africa (see short overview video at the end of the post). PRX has looked for ways to partner with NBPC (most recently on their Masculinity Project) and joined in several NMI sessions in Boston and Jackson, MI. So I was thrilled to be invited to join the Zanzibar voyage.
Stone Town is a maze
The workshop itself was a two-day conversation (in English, with a bit of Swahili) with 40 or so participants on public service media’s transition to a digital age in both North America and Africa. The focus was on how Africa could use new media to tell stories in a new way, to connect to each other within and between countries on the continent, and to reach beyond on a global scale. Although the majority of the African attendees were broadcasters of one kind or another, the workshop started off with a blogger panel featuring Kenyan blogger Daudi Were and Tanzanian blogger Issa Michuzi who really set the pace for the rest of the discussion. Daudi talked about the complicated role of blogs and SMS in the turbulent aftermath of the recent Kenyan elections and drove home the theme of a power shift in media authority.
Later panels such as “All Politics is Local, All Conflict is Global” and “The Online Space and the Marginalized Voice” took us further into discussion of the tension between institutions and individuals as media roles start to shift. In particular the story of SMS during the post-election violence in Kenya was striking. The viral and direct potential of misinformation or incitement via SMS when mass media is unreliable or unavailable is leading to a new law banning the use of messaging that targets people by ethnicity no matter what the cause. On my panel I talked about PRX, a bit on the long tail (complete with self-serving segue to my rock star status in South Korea), and how U.S. public media is handling the transition to digital.
Wambui Mwangi and Jake Shapiro
Feeling like we’d only scratched the surface, it was already time to head home but not without a trip around the island, catching some time at a spice farm, a spectacular beach on the eastern shore (and my first swim in the Indian Ocean), a visit with the endangered Red Colobus Monkey (I got some video of a funny encounter here on YouTube), and even a chance to jam on guitar with a Tanzanian reggae band.
I was profoundly grateful for the chance to visit Zanzibar and in such a provocative way – would that all introductions to new places mix in a film and music festival, an intensive workshop, and a taste of five different flavors from a cinnamon tree.
I’ve mainly and only haphazardly followed a variety of African developments through Global Voices and my friend and fellow Berkman Fellow Ethan Zuckerman’s outstanding blog My Heart’s in Accra. Thinking about Ethan’s post “Homophily, serendipity, xenophilia” brought home again the simple realization that in part drove my interest in this trip to begin with: being there matters, being there changes something. It’s not one single thing, like breathing the distinctive air or the huge distance traveled, but the complete experience of being in a place has the ability to connect you with it and with people there in a way that even powerful stories – never mind news reports – can’t match. Kind of obvious, I know. Of course, this approach doesn’t scale to meet Ethan’s goal of bridging the global empathy and attention gap, but perhaps there is a strategy that makes the most of folks who serendipitously get inspired through a trip like NMI Zanzibar. I’m an aspiring xenophile.
Here’s a short video overview of NMI: Mississippi:
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society (where I’m a fellow among a great group of folks) is marking its 10th year with a big conference/gala/bash that’s shaping up to be a great event.
And you can download the slick PDF of the Berkman@10 Special Report.
Since I first landed at Berkman back in 2001 the Center has really blossomed into a remarkable community and hive of activity, really pushing the edge of what’s being learned and taught and demonstrated about the Internet. I can’t wait to see and be part of what comes next.
Last week I went to a meeting about Apple’s new “iTunes U” initiative. iTunes U got started about a year ago and now seems to be gaining more momentum and a bigger presence in iTunes overall. The basic idea is to create a platform for colleges, universities and selected other “beyond campus” providers of educational content to offer lectures, presentations, classes and other content for free download by students and/or the public at large.
It’s a free service and I’m sure it’s a compelling one for many universities. We may experiment with it for PRX as well. iTunes does all the hosting and helps you with the setup and, of course, puts you on a platform that now has 500 million potential users. The list of participants is getting longer and includes Stanford, MIT, Duke, Carnegie Mellon and a few dozen more. The “beyond campus” providers include American Public Media, MoMA, New York Public Library, and PBS.
Between iTunes U and the iTunes podcasting directory, which offers something like 120,000 podcasts, there is a ton of free content available. It’s clear that Apple likes the idea of recruiting more high-quality free non-music content to offer to users (who presumably will want to fill new iPods, iPhones and laptops with it all), and no doubt it’s a boon to lifelong learners and media seekers worldwide.
It’s interesting to see some crossover items in both categories, such as a radio documentary I found for sale in the Audiobooks section ($7.95 for 52 minutes) and for free in iTunes U. You’d have to be a discriminating searcher to figure that out, however, and it’s entirely likely that these sections are serving distinct if overlapping subsets of the iTunes audience.
But now that iTunes is the world’s biggest music retailer and generates billions of dollars of revenue for Apple and the content providers to the music store, what about enabling a la carte, subscription or volunteer payments for the long tail in podcasts and the educational content in iTunes U?
I’m intrigued by the voluntary model and certainly it’s one that public media needs to redefine as it moves to digital platforms (keep an eye on Project VRM as it continues to spell out the solutions and implications of more user-centric approaches). Right now I have $9.06 in my iTunes account left over from a gift card, and after enjoying a 90-minute video lecture from MIT I might be quite willing to ding it over to them, especially if they reminded me with a short and sweet appeal before/during or after the talk and on the site. I think a decent percentage of the 500 million iTunes users out there might respond similarly.
One can imagine lots of reasons why Apple hasn’t and probably won’t enable this in iTunes, but it’s worth pondering and pointing out, particularly as most of the energy and attention goes to ad-supported models for content syndication.
This is big.
The MacArthur Foundation has selected PRX as one of its 2008 recipients of the MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions.
“Public Radio Exchange (PRX)/Station Resource Group – Cambridge, Massachusetts: By gathering and distributing new programming and using technological innovation to expand content choices, PRX is leading public radio to become more interactive, diverse, and participatory.
PRX is taking public radio in new and stimulating directions, giving a larger dimension to one of America’s most important intellectual resources.
PRX will use their $500,000 grant to establish a cash reserve fund, a content venture fund, and to develop new technologies.”
Read the full press release here.
MacArthur Announces 2008 Winners of Award for Creative and Effective Institutions
Chicago, IL (April 10, 2008) – Continuing its tradition of encouraging creativity and building effective institutions to help address some of the world’s most challenging problems, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced today that eight organizations in six countries will receive the MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions.
These nonprofit organizations have diverse missions – from helping public radio thrive in the digital age to defending human rights in Nigeria to seeking a more fair juvenile justice system in the United States. Still, they have much in common. All are highly creative and effective organizations that have made an extraordinary impact in their fields, while driving significant change on a modest budget. Each organization will receive up to $500,000, a large sum considering their annual budgets are under $2.5 million. The organizations will use their new funding for a range of purposes, including purchasing new office space, developing training and research facilities, upgrading technology, and undertaking new research.
“From its founding, the MacArthur Foundation has sought out people and organizations that have the creativity, energy and breadth of vision to change the world for the better,” said MacArthur President Jonathan Fanton. “These imaginative and influential small organizations have an impact altogether disproportionate to their size. They are addressing problems and injustices, finding fresh solutions, and proving themselves as leaders and innovators.
Make sure to read about the other remarkable recipients of this award here.
How is PRX planning to use the award?
UPDATE: The Boston Globe ran a piece about PRX and the MacArthur Award
With a big helping hand from John Barth I wrote a piece for Current, the public broadcasting publication, taking a look back at the Talent Quest for some lessons learned.
Nearly two years ago CPB issued an intriguing challenge called “The Public Radio Talent Quest”: find three new on-air hosts and develop pilot shows that showcase their talent.
PRX proposed an online contest, inviting anyone to submit a two minute audio audition and giving the audience a voice in choosing the winners. Basically it would be This American Idol.
We had two main goals: (a) find truly exciting new hosts for public radio and (b) create an open, participatory way for public radio to identify and nurture talent—with help from listeners.Last spring we launched PublicRadioQuest.com, an online audio contest application combined with a social network (built by PRX developers on the open-source Drupal platform). The online community has grown to more than 20,000 members, with a talent pool of hundreds of aspiring hosts from all across the country.
We took a calculated risk that the way to find outstanding individuals is to throw the doors wide open, attract the broadest and most diverse group possible, and encourage public participation throughout.
Ultimately it was a risk that paid off—as you can hear in the strikingly original pilots from our winners Al Letson, Rebecca Watson and Glynn Washington (all now available on PRX.org)—but for the organizers as well as the contestants it was an adventure every step of the way.
So what makes a great host? Of course, all the usual qualities have to be there: A host has to be engaging, empathic, interesting, knowledgeable, compelling. But anyone who hires people knows that there is a difference between highly competent performers and those with a special something else. You know it when you hear their spark, that secret sauce, the thing that makes you lean in closer to the radio.
It is also a judgment call, and no matter how many criteria or scorecards you create, everyone has a highly personal take on the elusive quality that we called “hostiness.”
We sensed a tension at the heart of the project: Were we looking for fresh talent that breaks new ground for public radio, or for great hosts who fit right into the mix alongside Terry and Robert and Ira and Krista and other established voices? What would be more likely to succeed on the air today and tomorrow? What expansions of sound would help public radio grow and reach new audiences?
Fortunately we had a remarkable team and group of judges to help debate and deliberate, and thousands of people weighed in online with their own thoughts about the future of public radio.
You know that anxious feeling when you throw a party and no one comes? We truly had no idea what to expect when we started accepting submissions for the contest’s first round. Would we get 50 entries? 250? Would they all be lousy? After all, we were asking a lot from participants: Tell us who you are in two minutes or less, create an account and upload a digital audio file to a website, even if you have never worked a mic before.
With promotional help from stations, good press coverage, a viral word-of-mouth campaign in the blogosphere and the incentives of pilot funding and public radio “stardom,” we ended up with more than 1,400 first-round entries.
We clearly had tapped into something extraordinary. In the contestants’ passion and the online community’s enthusiastic online comments,– we could hear people were thrilled that public radio was inviting them in—this time, not for their financial support but for their ideas, creativity and talent.
Entries came from all 50 states, from teenagers and senior citizens, professionals and amateurs, indie producers and station staff, podcasters, public radio fans, contest junkies and a legion of Ira Glass acolytes.
As you might expect, their quality followed a bell curve. We got a few truly wacky and off-the-wall entries (search the site for “Garrison Keillor is Going to Die”), a lot of mostly mediocre attempts in the middle, and a few hundred truly entertaining and compelling entries that made you want to listen again.
We decided early on that audience participation would truly count: Online public votes would determine one of the contestants advancing to each round, including one of the final three winners. In the end, more than 120,000 votes were cast (more than in the Fox contest to which state would be the site of The Simpsons’ town of Springfield!).
For ideas about how to vet the hosts, we consulted with producers of national shows and program directors. The initial 2-minute audio entries were extremely revealing, but how would we test hosting skills in a virtual and very public setting?
The skill tests eventually included a live script read (try pronouncing Inca emperor “Atahualpa” with no time to prepare), a free-association exercise, composing a 60-second billboard and conducting a classic host-guest interview. These kinds of tests normally are conducted in a windowless room somewhere, but the Talent Quest posted all entries on the site for tens of thousands of people to hear, comment and rate. Feeling a little sweaty?
At the same time, we struggled with the nature of the online experience. Should we allow or encourage contestants to post their photos? Should we allow them to blog about the competition, or would it unfairly sway votes or judges’ opinions? Does it matter if they responded to comments about their entries? After all, this is radio. Shouldn’t we tolerate or even prefer people who remain disembodied voices in the dark?
The answers came naturally. The site itself became an online community where contestants and voters established their own rules of engagement and styles of communication. Contestants commented on each other’s entries (partly to promote their own); people with their own blogs wrote about the process and linked to pages on the site; entire discussions launched on topics such as “your worst job ever.” For the most part,we simply stayed out of the way, reading everything the partipants wrote, only occasionally stepping in to nudge things back on track.
In today’s media, even public radio hosts have to be more than voices in the ether. The surge in online video, the sharing of photos, the searchability of text, the instant feedback of forums—there are many great opportunities for engagement we couldn’t pass up.
Once we had narrowed the field to the final ten contestants, we asked them to blog about their contest experience, chronicling the process and rounding out their own personal stories. Al, Rebecca, Glynn, April, Chuck, Anne, Chris, Bee, Carrie, and Komal became more than usernames and audio files. These were fascinating folks on the verge of a potential career break.
We were biting our nails along with everyone else as the votes came in and the stakes got higher. The judges’ conference calls in the early rounds were relaxed and congenial, but they became more tense and impassioned as we debated varying visions for the public radio sound each contestant represented.
Each deadline had genuine drama and hardship. (Tip: don’t set contest deadlines at midnight unless you are ready to answer technical questions by e-mail in the wee hours.) And there was real joy when we called the three final winners to say had each won $10,000, a chance to produce a pilot show, and a plane ticket to the PRPD, where they’d appear onstage in a gala event.
A few weeks ago we submitted the three final pilots to CPB, which will decide soon whether to give them further funding. The PublicRadioQuest.com site, the talent database, and the community of voters and participants remain an active resource that we are integrating into the broader PRX services.
We invite stations and others to get in touch if you are interested in using the technology or the talent pool for your own needs.
Public radio has a unique opportunity to tap into the talents of its audience, and we’re seeing more ambitious experiments in that vein, such as PRX, Radio Open Source, Public Insight Journalism and Vocalo.org.
The Public Radio Talent Quest gave us a glimpse of what a much more open system might look like, and it sounds profoundly encouraging. Please come judge for yourself: The pilots are on PRX and all the original entries are still available on PublicRadioQuest.com.
We ran a full-page ad in Current for the Public Radio Talent Quest winners, showcasing Al, Rebecca and Glynn and their new pilots on PRX. Current also published my retrospective look at the whole project in the last issue.
Public radio has a unique opportunity to tap into the talents of its audience, and we’re seeing more ambitious experiments in that vein, such as PRX, Radio Open Source, Public Insight Journalism and Vocalo.org.
The Public Radio Talent Quest gave us a glimpse of what a much more open system might look like, and it sounds profoundly encouraging. Please come judge for yourself: The pilots are on PRX and all the original entries are still available on PublicRadioQuest.com.
