Integrated Media Association 2007

Great conference as usual, and more to digest than can be done at one sitting. I’d like to chime in on the metaconversation that has run through the last three conferences on the possibility and desirability of a unified platform for public broadcasting. I am one of those who feel that such a move is both impossible and undesirable.

Impossible for a number of reasons; here are a few:

1. Too broad a variety of players with too diverse a set of needs and too great a disparity of resources and capabilities.
2. Too decentralized an organizational structure for there to be a central authority to mandate and enforce adoption of a non-binding resolution, let alone a content management system and accompanying business model.
3. If one could reach agreement on a unified approach, that process, plus the infrastructure development and deployment process would likely take so long that the final result would be already obsolete on rollout.

And it would be undesirable for a number of reasons; here are a few:

1. It would build inflexibility into the system–the platform would have to be renogotiated and reinvented every time a technological surprise comes along.
2. It would enforce a least common demoninator set of features
3. It would discourage the lively development of new media literacy and expertise at the station and producer levels.
4. Where unified platforms exist, as at cbc.ca, the region level (or station-level in the US model) almost disappears. I recall from 2 years ago that CBC presented numbers showing that 95% of traffic went to the national level, while the 16 region sites split the remaining 5%. While this may be less important in a centrally funded service, it would be a killer in a system like ours where most revenue in the system is derived from the station.org level.

The question then becomes, how do we gain for the system the benefits that could come from a centralized platform, without actually having to build one. I propose that we take the focus off how stations and other entities get content into their websites, and put the focus on how to get content out of their websites, i.e. syndication.

I think this is a more fruitful approach because it bypasses the steep hurdles presented by organizational politics, and also because it would be be a necessary process even if we were to create a common platform. The obvious candidate is RSS syndication, since it is already widely understood and adopted. Most of the platforms used for citizen journalism and UGC already have some RSS capability and provide features that can put organizations of very limited technical capability into the game. A wide variety of the content management systems developed or adopted by stations for site management can already use RSS, or could be tweaked to produce RSS for small investments.

Once at the point where all (or at least most) stations can export their content in a common form, exploiting, aggregating and monetizing the result becomes a task divorced from how the content was created. It seems that this is a place where a more centralized approach becomes both practical and desirable.

As a model, I point to the NPR podcast project, which brings in content from a truly wide variety of sources with varying capabilities, and bundles it with national branding, national underwriting, traffic reporting and revenue sharing, and can still accomodate a regional underwriter segment, and doesn’t prevent producers from also distributing the same core content via their own station.org or program.org addresses. With a limited investment in export standards, a similar portal-style approach could be applied to the whole of the system’s output without having to pry station’s longstanding approaches to the web from their cold, dead hands.

Doc speaking to the Public Media conf [scriptingnews]

Blogger Dave Winer took this picture of Doc Searls. Dave is, in fact, somewhere else in the room right now, ’cause he just took this picture and I’m sitting watching Doc, too. Doc is talking about the metaphors we use to understand the web; they all lead us back to property, to architecture. We have web sites, we find them at addresses, we build home pages. When we go to the web, we think of moving from site to site, from place to place.

But the metaphor is insufficient. The web moves. All of these houses we build on the web have mail now; they can send things back and forth. Dave’s picture there provides a simple example; Dave and I both belong to the same photo-sharing service, Flickr. Because I have Dave listed as a “friend” on the service, his pictures show up in my account, like this one of Doc just did while I was idly poking around.

My point is, Dave didn’t have to tap me on the shoulder and say “Hey, I just took a great picture of Doc; you should put it on your blog.” And I didn’t have to go to his website to find it. The picture just showed up, here for me to use. The things you make — what you write, what you record — don’t just sit, static, in the houses you build. They move, they travel on RSS feeds and show up elsewhere: displayed on other websites, crowding into personal RSS readers, getting sucked into iTunes as a podcast.

For us, in public media, it means that not only do we have to build a website, but we have to know that often our audience reads our prose in ways completely removed from the websites we so carefully build. Your website is not a house; it is a source of information, of audio and video clips, constantly making their way out into the world.

You know, like you’re an Irish family, and podcasts are your children. I don’t know. I gotta go to the PRI reception on the mezzanine and get a drink.

World Have Your Say [greeley]

The host is running around the room with a mic in his hand; this is an amazing performance, flexible but choreographed. Producers walk from commenter to commenter; some commenters speak for themselves, some read emails that have been sent to the show’s website. The host talks and gestures; it feels like the flight deck of a carrier.

I sat in this morning on the show’s editorial meeting here in Boston, crowded around a conference phone linked to the BBC office in London and a listener in Nairobi. The meeting’s first question: “What was the most emailed story on the BBC’s web site?” Today it was the jailing of an Egyptian Blogger, but it occurred to me that traffic can be a conversation, every bit as valid as a comment or an email.

When listeners spend time on the BBC web site and email each other stories, they’re actually talking to the BBC, they’re saying “This is important and worth digging into.” Everyone who runs a website and has access to a page hit counter is having a conversation.