Archive for March, 2007

Good things are happening in Del Norte County. Their airport is about to get free wireless service just as the Arcata/Eureka Airport now has. In addition, their cable provider, Charter, is extending its fiber connection from Southern Oregon in to Crescent City. This is a significant development for the region. The new fiber will open up many possibilities for the county. But just like here, the effort in Del Nort doesn’t end. They will be looking for redundancy that will assure consistent connection to the Internet backbone. Sound familiar?

The possibility will now exist for a North-South fiber connection between Del Norte and Humboldt counties. Once the East-West fiber is completed between Eureka and the I-5 corridor backbone we could have a fiber loop with real economic opportunities and security.

I finally had enough of playing around with WordPress widgets for offering subscriptions to this blog. I’ve switched to Feedburner. I’ve used this excellent service on other sites for other folks, but for some reason never bothered to put it on here. I recommend using Feedburner if you have a blog. It has great features for publicizing and tracking. It’s easy to use and install. Best of all it’s free! (although you can upgrade to a paid version)

I am a big fan of NPR. I listen to KHSU every morning and evening, and sometimes during the day. Saturday is a big KHSU listening day. And when I can’t catch the my favorite shows during broadcast, then I often listen to them on my IPod. Some of my favorite shows are not offered on KHSU (Open Source, Left, Right and Center) so I have to get them on the IPod anyway.

NPR has become a big player in the radio industry in recent years. Its audience and influence is growing unlike most radio networks. So its nice to see this robust radio organization use some of its power to take on the music industry.

If you weren’t aware of what’s going on Ann Johnson-Stromberg has a good article in the Times-Standardsummarizing the issue. An entity called the Copyright Royalty Board has decided to up the fees for music played over the Internet. Not only that, but the increasse is retroactive back to the January 1, 2006. If this decision holds it could be the death of Internet Radio. So NPR is actually teaming up with Clear Channel, the big gorilla of commercial radio to challenge this decision in court. Strange bedfellows.

In the meantime, KHSU is facing potentially severe cuts in the support it receives from the university due to HSU’s own budget cuts. The station begins its Spring pledge drive tomorrow and I will be on the air during one of my favorite shows, Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! from 10 AM to 11 AM. I’ll be urging folks to pledge their support (contribute $$) to the station. So call in and lend you support to this great community resource. (I”ll be on again Monday from 6 AM to 8 AM…why did I agree to that?)

Tomorrow morning we are unveiling a free wireless network for the Arcata/Eureka Airport in McKinleyville (I always find that the funniest thing to say, Arcata/Eureka Airport in McKinleyville…OK, so I don’t get out much).

This new service is the product of the Redwood Technology Consortium working with the airport management. The RTC helped define the service, search for a vendor and provided funding for the initial installation. The airport, managed by the County will pay for monthly access fees. The service was installed and will be supported by C4I a local networking and security company.  From what I understan, C4I has done a great job.

One more pebble in the pond.

A founding member of the Redwood Technology Consortium, a great supporter of technology and folk music, a systems administrator for Humboldt State University, the long time host of the Bayside Hayride on KHSU, a loving father and husband and all around sweet soul died peacefully at his home early this morning.

He will be missed.  Be in peace, Don.

There’s been some nice discussion in the comments section for my most recent Tech Tuesday article. I think that people being able to comment on articles on the Times-Standard web site is a great step forward toward media becoming more fully integrated in to its community and acknowledging the impact of the Internet on that community. It’s too bad that I have to continually check back with the web site to know that anything has been posted. It should be a simple enhancement to provide either an email notification or an RSS feed for comments. Do any of the reporters read those comments? Do they even know when someone comments? Or are the comments only for readers to talk to one another?

Speaking of RSS, when will a local paper provide RSS feeds for their sites in general? I’ve approached both dailies about this a few times and so far neither has seemed interested or capable. Instead of extending the interactive features of the Times-Standard web site, they are putting resources into a proprietary ‘E-edition’ platform. I signed up for a trial subscription to the E-edition when it first appeared. But I never use it. I can’t find any reason to leave the web site for that format. Anyone else have a different opinion of the T-S E-edition? I’d love to hear it.

Update: Related to my article and the general trend in news, news gathering, reader participation, budgets, etc. is an interesting article in the LA Times about the political blog Talking Points Memo. TPM is an example of how this new new journalism works. The blog has been on the forefront of the firings of the U.S. Attorneys.  I believe, traditional publications of all sizes must find a way to embrace this trend or they will die. From the article:

All of this from an enterprise whose annual budget probably wouldn’t cover the janitorial costs incurred by a metropolitan daily newspaper.

“Hundreds of people out there send clips and other tips,” Marshall said. “There is some real information out there, some real expertise. If you’re not in politics and you know something, you’re not going to call David Broder. With the blog, you develop an intimacy with people. Some of it is perceived, but some of it is real.”

Marshall’s use of his readers to gather information takes advantage of the interactivity that is at the heart of the Internet revolution. The amount of discourse between writers and readers on the Web makes traditional journalists look like hermetic monks.

According to John Mcbrearty from College of the Redwoods and RTC board member, the problem that Suddenlink was having with certain file uploads failing has been fixed. (See this previous post.)

According to John via the RTC mailing list:

Suddenlink finally traced the problem to an interface processor card on a router in San Jose that connects their North Coast region to the rest of the Suddenlink backbone. They announced the resolution to us yesterday and our own testing last night confirmed that the problem is solved.

This is good news for those of us still using Suddenlink for Internet access. Now what are they going to do about the cable glitches? Was I the only one who had most of Tuesday night’s episode of ‘24′ garbled? I mean, talk about torture!

I finally got around to reading Hank Sim’s generally excellent article on the Sacred Grounds/Bayside Roasters Internet debacle. Hank had the dubious privilege of sitting in court each day so he got a clear picture of the muddled information that passed for evidence, especially surrounding the issue of how the baysideroasters.com domain became associated with porn sites in Google searches. It’s clear from Hank’s article that few in the courtroom, from lawyers to witnesses to defendant and plaintiffs were very sophisticated about the Internet. Unfortunately, the same can be said for the jurors who found the defendant guilty of a crime purely on very dubious circumstantial evidence. Thanks for the well written article, Hank.

But what was the purpose of that closing paragraph? According to Hank the libel suit and people’s comments for and against the combatants is illustrative of what the Internet is all about. To quote:

Schadenfreude: It’s the tendency to take pleasure in the misfortunes of others, and it’s reprehensible. As this case has demonstrated in more ways than one, it is also the backbone of the Internet.

I’ve been on the Internet for 15 years and this kind odd judgment crops up all the time. Like any technology that facilitates communication and manipulation of data, the Internet is a conduit for both good and bad behavior. I have seen no study that indicates that bad behavior far outweighs the good. It’s a place where people in pain can find connections and comfort. It’s a place where people can find like minds to build better societies. It’s also a place where terrorists can plot and pornographers can distribute material. Indeed, the Internet simply reflects what is good and bad in people. The global nature and the lightning speed (for some of us, annyway) just seems to magnify whatever side of human nature you happen to be looking at.

On Sunday, USA Today launched their new web site that incorporates many of the social networking features that have been all the buzz of the ‘netterati‘. According to the USA Today site, the new features include the ability of readers to:

• Scan other news sources directly on USATODAY.com;
• See how readers are reacting to stories;
• Recommend stories and comments to other readers;
• Comment directly on stories;
• Participate in discussion forums;
• Write reviews (of movies, music and more);
• Contribute photos;
• Better communicate with USA TODAY staff.

For those of us who have been participating in various aspects of user contributed content that makes Web 2.0 so exciting, these features don’t seem so revolutionary. But it’s the first time a major newspaper has opened itself up to so much reader input. Most other publication have only dabbled in these ideas and technologies.

None of the local papers (daily or weekly) have any of the openness and user participation that USA Today is offering. What’s important to note is that providing these kinds of features are not really a cost issue. It’s not that difficult to develop social networking features if the will is there. It’s really more of a mind set where newspapers continue to believe the Internet is a distribution system instead of a communication system. This is what the telecommunications giants (AT&T, Cable sytems, etc.) continue to push for. What do you think? Will the Internet become just another outlet for corporations to distribute their content like radio and TV?

A couple days ago we launched a new site that’s really kind of unique. Not the mechanics of the site so much, but the concept. The site, familywanted.org , is the brainchild of a friend and colleague of ours, Jenna MacFarlane. She is a designer who lived for a while in Humboldt County but now lives in North Carolina. She did the design work while we did the html/css implementation and the database applications that support the site.

The idea behind familywanted.org is based on Jenna’s own experiences of having become estranged from her birth family and then, later in life seeking and finding another family who adopted her and accepted her as one of their own. The whole experience, odd as it may sound on the surface, was transforming for Jenna. Her story, which has been picked up by a number of media outlets (an article in Glamor magazine, an appearance on Good Morning America - she even had an offer from Oprah which she has not accepted) has touched the hearts of many people who have had a similar feeling of loss from being estranged from their families.

When word first got out about the concept, all we had on the site was a brief summary of the ideas behind the site and a contact form. Jenna received nearly 1,000 messages from people expressing interest and many sharing their own stories. While the ultimate goal of the site will be to offer a service where families and individuals seeking families can connect to one another in a safe environment, this next stage is designed to allow others to share their personal stories publicly and to realize they are not alone.