Blog Talk Radio

I enjoy listening to Farai Chideya's radio program News & Notes. While listening to her Blogger's Roundtable discussion last Wednesday evening I learned about Blog Talk Radio (BTR), a web-based service that provides a free solution for hosting and listening to live radio-style interactive talk shows. This appears to be a very effective union of old & new media formats that allows anyone with a phone and a computer to create an interactive call-in talk show. To quote the BTR site, Blog Talk Radio is:

"Internet Radio, Citizen Broadcasting, Social Media Podcasts" ... "Empowering citizen broadcasters to create and share their original content, we can now access a richly diverse, sometimes balanced, often peculiar, mosaic of the Global Human Voice."

The site includes a number of features to support live interactive broadcasts, including web controls to allow the host to activate or deactivate up to 4 call-in guests (via telephone or Skype), a chatroom feature, and music, sound effects or commercials to be played during broadcast. Once completed the programs are subsequently made available as MP3 podcasts, RSS feeds, or via iTunes. Programs are broadcast as Windows Media streaming audio (so on a mac you may need a Windows Media Player program or browser plugin such as Flip4Mac to tune in live). In addition to the live broadcast features, the site also provides profiles and blog spaces for both hosts and listeners. They also offer a flash player widget that hosts can embed within their own blog or web page so listeners don't have to navigate to www.blogtalkradio.com.

The site is free for listeners and hosts, because it is ad revenue driven. BTR offers a revenue sharing program to split the revenues between BTR and program hosts, with rates that depend on who brought in the advertiser. They also provide reporting tools to measure the listening audience and ad revenues.

In my own quick review there appeared to be many interesting programs offered with tremendous diversity, exhibiting a range of production quality. Blogs are reasonable for exchanging ideas casually (asynchronously), but when you really want to immerse yourself in a topic, multi-party interactive programming is even more fun. BTR seems to me to be one of those natural solutions that appears obvious in retrospect, because it makes a lot of sense. For modern, interactive and engaging information sharing, what could possibly beat BTR? (Hmmm... Now I will have to dig deeper into Interactive TV which I learned about at BTR!).

Pandora.com social features

Andrew wrote a post back in February describing Last.fm's social features that sounded interesting. I wanted to learn what was going on, socially speaking, at Pandora.com, the web-based customizable streaming audio service. Since I last used them they've added a number of worthwhile social features, including sharing of stations with pre-defined networks of friends, and publishing RSS feeds of your favorite stations and bookmarked songs. They don't seem to be up-to-speed yet with APIs for importing/exporting social network information (maybe soon?). But I did appreciate the 'find other listeners' feature that lets you search for other relevant profiles, stations, and artists.

Knoodl

Revelytix is a company based in Hunt Valley, MD that has created Knoodl, a web-based solution for ontology and/or controlled vocabulary editing. It combines features of vocabulary and ontology editing, interactive visualization, and wikis (which would be useful for annotating ontology elements). They have a community site for maintaining a variety of special topic ontologies and supporting documentation, although the communities vary widely in degree of completeness (many are test stubs, but the Tutorial community provides useful examples). You can also subscribe to RSS feeds to track changes to your favorite ontology. Because ontology editing is typically a community process, it's nice to see progress in establishing tools that provide an improved level of support to the community editing process.

Empowering community activism

I read an interesting article today in Wired about a community of sex industry workers, that has been empowered by standard Web 2.0 and mobile networking technologies.

"Using mobile gadgets and Web 2.0 apps, sex workers mounted an internet-enabled campaign to spin the story. Smartphones, RSS feeds and mobile social networks enabled them to pounce on stories as soon as they appeared in the mainstream media, posting comments on news websites and blogging the good, the bad and the even worse coverage as it appeared."

I am curious whether this community uses anonymity features available with certain technologies, or whether they use traditional personal networking to keep employees identities private. The article did not make that clear, but I believe they used a little of both approaches.