A Conversation with two Visionaries

A recording of a talk at The Public Media Conference in Boston, February 20-24, 2007.

Entitled “A Conversation with two Visionaries”, the session was with Dave and Doc Searls.

two or something I’m sure he doesn’t remember I was just another face in the crowd when he was introducing something called outlining to the world this is the outlining you now find in PowerPoint and you now find in in word not nearly as well executed as Dave did it with with think tank which is his original product there his fingerprints are on all kinds of things that we do today and he hasn’t asserted any intellectual property rights over them which I think is just a heroic thing to do and that’s one reason that spread as well as it has but he was not just a technologist but a publisher and comes in the publishing world that’s one reason why why outlining and and and his approach to the publishing that we do on the web is a rewrite thing as Tim burgers Lee described it in the first place has gone as far as it has it was instrumental getting the New York Times to do RSS and getting other major publishers to do RSS and and help start the fire that that became he was a fellow for I think two years with the Burtman Center at Harvard University at the law school there where I’m also a fellow now and and it was there that held the first blogger con which I think may have been the first unconference which we’d like to make this if we possibly can so Dave’s fingerprints are on unconference as well and I’d like to start out by talking about or having Dave talk about subjects that matter there’s a and I maybe you just take it from here to I there are two big ones that I just in the outline sense on to put up front war and the elections right um well thanks doc we discussed how he would introduce me before and I suggested that he put a paper bag over my head and as he’s doing it there’s a secret thing over here and then here’s Dave take the bag off so this would be that moment I really asked to come speak to this conference and because when I found out that and I mean I think of this is the NPR conference the guy in this this morning said it was the PBS but I think of NPR as being over encompass ing and I’m a total NPR fan have been for virtually my entire life and I wanted to come first to thank you all for the support of podcasting and I’m not sure that anybody has actually done that and so I figured somebody ought to do that because and Tony Khan here Tony want to raise your hand he was one of the early pioneers of podcast ing and he worked I worked with Tony when he was it well he still is at WGBH and and I got through Tony a sense of what the political environment is but in public broadcasting not that Harvard University which is where I was didn’t have its own political environment big organizations always do and so to me it’s a miracle that podcasting has taken root so thoroughly inside of inside of NPR and like I wrote on my blog a few days ago I said you know cheese we’ll know it’s really over the top when fresh air has a podcast and within five minutes I had an email saying you know get with it fresh air does have a podcast so and that created a problem for me because I only have so many hours in the day to listen to NPR podcasts and now I had to make room for fresh air but honestly I don’t think podcasting would be let me just put it this way I don’t have any numbers to back this up but I can say for me personally podcasting would be nowhere near as valuable to me if it weren’t for the support that we got from from the public broadcast from NPR so that was my first thing I wanted to say job well done thank you very much and also to the thing that the guy was saying this morning I was at the keynote this morning and he was giving you a hard time about how do you get onto the internet well I wanted to raise my hand and say wait a minute there are they are on the internet and they’re doing it in the way that makes sense for them and podcasting is very much where you ought to be so I’m very happy you’re there now I’m also coming from some I like to think of myself as coming from the publishing industry but I also have one foot very deeply planted in the tech industry and I think it’s kind of really where I come from although I’m not happy with the tech industry and haven’t been for quite some time and I think that we have to do a lot better in the tech industry at producing a device that plays podcasts in order to get podcasting to really deliver on the promise that that justifies the investment that NPR is made in it I outlined on my blog a few days ago what I felt was missing there the device that we play this stuff on mostly I guess iPods and similar devices we’re not designed to play the content that comes from NPR it was designed to play albums of music and while that’s very valuable and you know I wouldn’t ever diminish the value of being able to listen to music on a portable device it’s very very very different activity a piece of music something that you buy right and it’s something that you cherish you hold on to you buy a song you might listen to it ten a hundred a thousand times a podcast you listen to once and it’s gone you might if there was something special about it like if your child was in the podcast you might keep it right if it had some personal value to you but it’s not designed to be kept around so the device that plays it would be seem to be very different also I think a podcast player should be a two-way thing I should be able to record a pot a podcast on my player and that goes to a sort of background discussion that’s been going on in the hallways here I hear it loud and clear that the future of public media is going to be is gonna embrace more the contribution of the individual the the idea of an audience is kind of an absolute concept today it’s not it does it’s not about audience now it’s about community it’s about the you know my doc mentioned unconferences and the concept of an unconference we observe that the people we used to call the audience have a lot of intelligence have a lot of information have a lot of experience and that if we can find a way to tap into that we can have a much more informed and much wiser and valuable flow of information it’s got to be two- way and the pod player the things we use to play podcasts today are not two-way they were very very much one way and the third it’s not to say that there aren ’t small features that we need to but there’s the third really big thing that we need from a podcast player is that it be possible to add software to it once you’ve purchased it so today when you buy an iPod basically you’re stuck with the software Apple gave you if you couldn’t have a software development community develop around an iPod because there’s only one vendor that has the right to actually put software onto this machine and that’s fine but you can see that all successful platforms that have ever come along out of the tech industry don’t have that property they all have the property that and the more successful they are the more open to other software they’ve been the Apple to was open CPM open of the MS-DOS wide open windows the internet is the most open thing we’ve ever produced these were all raging successes I think the iPod has been successful because really because it’s had no open competition said nobody coming at it with the sort of wild and crazy world that comes about when you have an open platform and you know they have some I the issue came up with the iPhone and job says well you wouldn’t want your phone to be open would you power phrasing and the answer is yeah I would like it to be open not only that I’d like the iPod to be open as well so those are ways I think we get to once we have all that oh there was one other thing it has to also be able to receive new programming without tethering to a computer too many levels of synchronization it’s too complicated in other words I want Wi-Fi on the podcast player itself when I come within range of a Wi-Fi signal a light would go on I press a button it automatically syncs up and that ’s it it should be more like radio I guess is the point yeah right I mean it’s kind of what we’re doing right you know and now it’s more like playing music right well that’s wonderful but that’s not really what we’re doing okay so I think that once we get there and I’m I’m giving this talk at in a lot of different places about the technology of it I’m writing it I have a few articles in the loop I’m gonna be pushing this now with every ounce of my ability to promote this idea that we have not yet reached the point where we can sort of sit back and rest on our worlds the tech industry has not reached that point this is not a to-do list item for you guys now I do have one for you all right which I think is very much in sync and Doc mentioned the war and the war and so we’re gonna flip gear it flips all the way out okay that’s technology it’s wonderful to talk about technology in a vacuum of well if we were living in a time of peace which we are not living in a time of peace and it looks like it might get worse and and if we look at how we got here the first time around when we were contempl ating going to war in Iraq what kind of a discussion did we have in the United States and I would I would volunteer that we didn’t have a discussion we didn’t have a democracy at that moment either we may have had it in a legal sense but we didn’t exercise that democracy and had we done it I think we would have found that a lot of people had a lot of reservations about going into this war and that maybe we really didn’t want didn’t want to do it and I see that as a failing of well let’s say that it’s a systematic failing it’s the whole system failing but I think and and we had to go through a lot of steps I think to get to the point where I mean what what’s the problem I’ll try to put my finger on what is if there is a failing where is that failing and I think it’s that we didn’t want to listen to each other there was a there was no mechanism for it if we spoke up we didn’t feel people would listen to what we had to say and the blogging world actually did discuss this as the as we ramped up to war with some trepidation because there’s a lot of brutality in the blogging world it’s not a very friendly place to express a contrary opinion but yet there was discussion if you go back and read the archives of Doc’s blog you’ll see that he raised a lot of questions about the war the New York Times it’s not exclusively the blogging for the New York Times ran editorial thing was the day before the war started they said maybe we ought to take a look at why we’re actually going to war but did we learn the lessons and I you look at the front page of the New York Times cup last week they had that article about the Iran weapons and you know Iran importing weapons into Iraq and they didn’t put the caveat in there that I feel they should have had in 2003 which is this may be government propaganda okay well after what happened in 2003 here we are in 2007 that the article again didn’t question even in the slightest whether or not we ’re being fed propaganda now everybody whether you live in a blue state or a red state has that intuition now that maybe we are being lied to okay it’s not a hard thing to sell in the United States or in Great Britain for that matter people are suspicious of the government and how they get us ramped up to go into war and there was a wonderful segment and on the media I think it’s the current it’s last Friday’s on the media with the author of that New York Times article and Brooke Gladstone was pressing him on that exact issue you know what what’s going on here and I was aston ished this is I mean I have the like growing up with NPR I grew up with the New York Times I’m from New York originally and we always had the New York Times in the house read at the kitchen table discussed it over dinner it was a part of our life you know I look up to the New York Times this guy didn’t understand the question that he was being asked he said why should I raise it doesn’t seem germane to the subject you know well you should raise it because you’re talking to intelligent people who deserve to know that you’re not owned by the government because in the past it really looked to us like you were owned by the government so and I understand in saying this that there are probably people in the room that disagree with a lot of what I’ve said because I’m expressing a political idea right but probably not so much here as would if I were giving this talk in say natural fantasy right there’s gonna be a different kind of discourse in each place but where I would like us to get is to a place where we can have discourse and listen to each other respectfully and hear ideas we disagree with and actually consider whether or not they’re making a valid point and where if a journalist like this guy in the New York Times makes that kind of an error which I consider an absolute error and not just the reporters error by the way one of the selling points of the mainstream media to us in the blogosphere is that there is this process that the editorial stuff goes through that there are a lot of eyes that look at this stuff and a lot of brains and well educated and honest high integrity people I think this is a systematic failure there and that I don’t think the Times has done anything to correct the errors that good came up around the whole Judith Miller situation I don’t think they fixed it right and while there’s no equivalent statement to make about NPR the discussion didn’t really happen on NPR either and it isn’t really happening on NPR now so the challenge and the challenge isn’t how to revitalize NPR or make it more relevant in the age of the Internet that’s not the challenge I think the opportunity is to become highly relevant and political discourse in the United States so you’re looking at a vacuum here you’re finding that the commercial media is simply not doing it now they have their reasons for not wanting to do it but I don’t think those reasons apply to public media they have to try to go for a least common denominator each one of them is competing for this theoretic they want to get back to the place where the three major networks were before the explosion of different you know choices in media well that’s their problem but that’s not our problem right I see our joint problem as being how to inform people who are intellectually able and how to have that discussion that we’re not having I don’t know that this specifically is going to solve all of our problems but I strongly believe in an intuitive way that this is on the path to solving those problems that we have no excuse we there’s no apology that we can make that’s sufficient if we don’t do that this time because it looks to me like we’re going to war in Iran now and I think it looks to a lot of us like that’s what’s going on that by this summer we will be in a war in Iran was talking with Rob about this earlier and the former colleague of mine John Robb was telling him that that it’s not in our interest as a country and it’s not in Iran’s interest as a country but it is in the interest of our president and it is in the interest of their president so guess what seems pretty likely we’re gonna have it question is do we have the force of will and I think that we do to the red state people have to listen to the blue state people I’ve lived in red states I’m a blues did I get that right yeah sorry it’s so confused by this yes I I am very much a blue guy but I’ve lived in red states and I’ve met intelligent educated people I have very high regard for who just have a different political opinion on certain things I don’t think this is one of those things that we differ on and I think that we can broaden the reach of public media and in doing so revitalize the national discourse and I think that if NPR had a mission like that that the existential problems that NPR has would fade into the distance that there would be a purpose when people have a purpose the problems don’t get in your way anymore but when you lack the purpose when you’re stuck doing something that’s just that you don’t believe in or that we all know I think in our heart that we have to do better at this this thing we have to discuss these things we have to expose facts we have to say when we think they’re lying you have to say that I read a wonderful Krugman editorial in the run-up to the war you know he said that the typical way the reporter works is that they look for two sides and say the truth lies somewhere in between well if somebody says the earth is flat and somebody says the earth is round this is what Krugman said it isn’t true that there are two sides and the truth lies somewhere in between the reporter has to take a stand when you know something for a fact you can’t present it as a difference of opinion when somebody says the earth is flat the story is this dude is lying or wrong or it could be wrong but in case of everybody says Bush is really stupid he’s not stupid he’s not wrong he’s lying my belief my opinion now put me on NPR or somebody was willing to say that and put somebody else on NPR that’s willing to say Bush is not lying but not somebody who says it through ad hominem attacks through talking stupid to the audience in other words there are eloquent educated interested accurate voices on two sides of everything and that’s what you guys ought to be doing as actors curators for people who have passion for their ideas and and a brace discourse would be my I guess it’s more than a request it’s a plea I flew cross-country to ask you to do that so that’s what I wanted to say as a I’m done yeah well they’re not wait to me get you a microphone there’s a microphone right what about 2008 Rob says what about the mind before we jump into it I just wanted to say about what in looking for those people John Robb that Dave mentioned earlier is a blogger but he’s a retired Air Force Colonel who flew black ops helicopters on 70 some missions he’s a probably the leading authority on the subject of his law which is global guerrillas he’s got a book coming out and he’s saying and I believe John more than I believe anybody else I read that we are going to war this is not it the feeling he has now the knowledge he has now is the same as we had before we knew we were gonna go to war in Iraq we didn’t even need the weapons of mass destruction excuse it was going to happen and we knew it was going to happen and it’s going to happen with Iraq Iran according to John so it’s this isn’t he said she said so this is a guy who knows his stuff saying so on to the elections right well 2008 and that was good I knew I’d forget something that something is important I think that we have a huge opportunity with the election 2008 approaching I was around peripherally I’m not a I was not a supporter Howard Dean but I made it my business to be inside that campaign enough and and I was lobbying them much like I’m lobbying you guys right now my request for them and this was 2003 was that they should take some of the money that they raised and they were raising they’d raised 40 million dollars and had a machine that was generating huge amounts of money and that they should put some of that money into blogging infrastructure because this was a problem we had at the time is that if an ordinary person wanted to start a web log there really wasn’t a way for them to do that and it’s hard to imagine that that world ever existed today because now you’ve got a plethora of choices you know any number of different places so the opportunity that existed in 2003 to simply doesn’t exist in 2007 and for the 2008 election but this is the opportunity for the 2008 election which is how can we well I let me let me back up for a second I think the process is that instead of presenting us with an array of choices of people to vote for that that’s put in the cart before the horse I think before we make the choice about who we want to vote for because if we do it that way we ’re going to do it the same superficial way we always do it which is going to be on how the Z part is here on the left or the right how does he look you know what is Chris Leiden friend of mine from who was at Harvard obviously also an MPR guy you say when you put somebody on TV the only thing anybody never looks at is their hair right and that’s what we tend to look at in our candidates is we’ll kind of hear it as the guy have you know or in the case of Hillary Clinton the woman we don’t know anything about these people we end up electing a guy who says no nation building who then proceeds to go and build nations right so flip it around let’s say okay electorate what do we want what do we want for a president in 2008 and then let them reconfig ure themselves to try to appeal to us well that is the opportunity I mean you see the candidates you know the only one I’ve met with so far is Edwards Edwards really did does want to get into the boggles here so he’s you know spent the years leading up to the election building his roots there I’m not a supporter of Edwards but he’s he really tried you see them all Barack Obama by the way I would put the video from PBS on YouTube and I would forget about trying to make create a website that does what YouTube does it’s silly YouTube is wonderful that’s where everybody’s gonna be looking for the damn video save yourself some money focus on what you do really well I’m putting up on YouTube it’s a no -brainer I think I just saved you twenty thirty million dollars too and you give me some of that too you know or use that for another project which is you know use YouTube use flicker use the tools that are sitting out there oh doc had a wonderful idea let’s come back to that we won’t forget we’ll come back and stay on the right the election right so you don’t you don’t try to do what was done in 2003 and 2004 in 2007 and 2008 because those are no longer the opportunities there already needs that have been fulfilled Edwards fell flat on his face with all the stuff he did as earnest as Edwards is and he’s very very earnest it that’s not what the world demands of you today if you want to do what Dean did in 2003 well first of all why would you want to do what Dean did okay let’s look into exactly what Dean did he raised 40 million dollars from the public and then turned it over to Turner and NBC he bought ads with it I mean for Christ’s sake is that really what we thought we were giving him the money for to go spend the money on putting ads in mainstream media and look at how corrupt the whole system is okay it is an unbelievable corrupt the mainstream media decides who’s going to get the money how do they decide look my they they present a candidate in a positive light they make them look good on TV right so the people who give money to the campaign say oh this person’s electable electability means the TV likes him right and so they give him money and then that guy turns around and gives the money back to the TV networks right so basically their sales reps for the TV networks that’s the job of a political candidate in our and that’s got to change that’s sort of core right to the core of the problem now the that’s the bad news the good news is you guys don’t have that conflict of interest here you are mainstream media okay and you are mainstream media but you’re not participating in that system you’re not if you ’re getting the money you’re getting a tiny little piece of that money you get so little of that money that you can afford to zig to that zag where the mainstream guys can’t afford to do it they have to stay in this loop they can’t the commercial guys I mean commercial mainstream they have to stay in this loop or else they’re out of business these guys are raising a billion dollars each in their campaigns if they don’t have that billion dollars in revenue this stock price goes down and they get fired right so the challenges to bring the constituency in and give them what they want so the question is what did the people who gave the money to Dean what were they asking for what did they want I I mean that’s kind of where I stop you know I think that each of us why did I give a hundred dollars to WNYC because I love the on the media podcast I gave it because I want them to keep doing it I don’t want them to stop and they asked me to give them some money so I gave them the money it’s a no-brainer to me so if N PR is helping reform the political process so that it is more intelligent and makes more sense think it goes without saying that if we like what you ’re doing we’re not gonna let you go away right and I think that’s ultimately where you have to that’s where you have to appeal and I think it’s a delicate little thing but to get people to believe in you and what you’re doing on the 2008 election you have to get reality into what you do it can’t be playing that Washington game anymore I want to hear what the pundits say over dinner I don’t want to hear what they say when they’re on the air I want to hear what they say to each other when the microphone isn’t on I want your interviewers to cut to the chase and say hold on a minute what you ’re saying is bullshit tell me what you really think okay because how many times do you listen to the radio and you think to yourself like every time this I ’m just getting a bunch of BS here right I think you have to bring that into your product and do it with class because you guys have class you don’t want to throw that out so you don’t want to use the word I just used okay but you kind of can Terry gross put that into her voice I think so you know Brooke Gladstone go listen to that segment with Brooke Gladstone she was on fire she was wonderful that was absolutely the kind of radio I want I want a lot more that I want people saying to people who are coming on and either being dumb or lying I want you to communicate to the listener I know that you’re being done or lying and then bring that bring the people in let’s find out what they want and it can’t be done in man on the street interviews you need to bring them in with their own voice I guess one more thing is this I believe is the is the prototype prototype show that’s the one that’s the idea that’s the one that I feel is the furthest out along this curve in the in the entire repertoire that I ’m aware of it could be that there are other shows like that so yeah okay that’s good yeah well we won’t forget the no that’s right I’m really appreciate your patience by the way I’m really I’m getting the ideas across that I wanted to good and I first of all I’m of course I’m a giant fan of blogs and podcasts and I recognize that they are really important to future discourse but I want to play devil’s advocate for a second and and have us discuss kind of a con undrum that’s built into the concept of blogs which is the great thing about most blogs that are particularly that are politically oriented is that the blogger makes their bias explicit by way by way of developing some integrity with the audience this is my viewpoint I’m saying this as my viewpoint it’s personal but it’s it’s not journalism necessarily some blogs are but but the blogs that are about political opinion and about discourse tend to be sort of more column this is my explicit viewpoint but the bad thing about blogs or about expressing it an explicit viewpoint is that it tends the reader to seek out the blogs that reflect the readers viewpoint to the exclusion of blogs that don ’t reflect the readers viewpoint meaning so it I and I suspect it it is happening already for most readers are kind of creating blog readers are kind of creating a hall of mirrors with their series of blogs that they read on a daily basis so they don’t seek out and on a regular basis spend time reading the blogs of viewpoints that are on the opposite end of the spectrum I imagine the hardcore blog readers such as yourselves probably do read a wider spectrum but the average blogger the average blog reader may just stick to kind of the hall of mirrors these are and believe in in a sense that that’s actually the viewpoint of the entire country even though it’s really just their subset of of particular viewpoints sort of collected together I think that that that kind of goes against the idea of the blogosphere increasing the discussion increasing the discourse in a way I think it makes a case for the ongoing need for broadcast programming at least from the NPR perspective that is trying concert you know concertedly to create a balanced viewpoint at some level and I agree I I think there is a role for public radio I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t I didn’t come here to tell you you know there’s been a big misunderstanding in the conversation we’re having that not between you and me but but overall between mainstream and bloggers okay I for one and I’m not against mainstream media I I want mainstream media to be great so I’m not saying replace you with me I’m saying but but you got to do your job better okay you got to stimulate us with find a way to stimulate I want to hear an eloquent representative of the other point of view but I do watch Keith Olerman okay because I’m tired of because I do find it relaxing to hear my point of view expressed in a humorous way and because I’m so fed up with with I mean God there are some some nights when you want to get the news and you go through the cable TV network and all the flip the channels over there and there’s nothing that ’s happening right now there’s nothing but Adam and Cole Smith on there and this is an abrogation of their of their duty you know a guy like Keith Olerman makes jokes about it while he’s doing it like I can’t believe they insist that I have to do this all the time so there’s your opportunity okay can you okay I flip it back to you can you present can you take me out of the hall of mirrors and then but without me losing my self-respect in other words what I want to hear is intelligent points of view from the other side I you know there are some issues like oh you know what’s the classic one is abortion right I mean nobody is pro-abortion that I know okay I mean yet the rhetoric comes out so somebody comes on the radio and says well you know I’m pro-life and he’s pro-abortion somebody ought to stop and say well show me somebody who’s pro well first of all do you agree you’re being characterized as pro-abortion let’s stop right now do you agree with that characterization probably wouldn’t agree with it so you know there ’s a respectful way to do this you know but and if you do it respectfully how the hell can you question somebody’s belief you know I can see that maybe some people think abortion is bad and should be illegal that makes some sense to me because I don’t see it as a black and white issue right we have black and white we have these issues that are not black and white so start there give us discourse on things where reasonable people can disagree and present them as being reasonable and let them make the reasonable arguments but when it starts becoming in other words you shouldn’t become a whole of mirrors right NPR I’m not advocating in any way the NPR become all mirrors I want if anything I want dissonance to become an art that’s practiced in our country and I want to be an art I want us to appreciate each other even especially when we disagree on things you know let ’s go back to to the founding fathers and what were they thinking about this country would be can we be more like that unless so yeah when I see a blogger doing that you know it bothers me every I don’t see there’s this huge line between what we do and what you guys do I just don’t see it and I think that that line is getting more and more I think as understanding increases you know as you find more mainstream people who are blog ging I think that they understand it’s like you know I’m a blogger means like I have a cell phone in my pocket you know I mean so what I have a blog okay you know that doesn’t mean I’m any different from anybody else because given in a few more years yeah everybody’s gonna have one right I think so but thank you let me add a few things it does say Doc Searls and Dave Warner out there yeah but this was our deal this is our deal doc and I can finish each other ’s sentences yeah I often try to yeah very well there blogs or journals okay this thing about what’s journalism and what isn’t is very often an excuse for not talking to the people who do not have the orthodox credentials there there has been for a long time and we talked about it in NPR last week a a tendency to do the safe thing right and the safe thing is often who you talk to his sources right there are I gave a speech like five years ago maybe more than that like seven it’s not long after Clutrin came out which is a book I co-wrote and the speaker right after me was Robert Siegel of NPR and he was lamenting that the it was we were getting to the point where there’s so that were Reuters and AP were contracting and the number of sources the number of first sources in so much of the world was contracting and what on earth are we going to do well the answer has come there are just a zillion sources out there that and Dave ’s point basically is there are lots of sources and a lot of them we mentioned John Robbie for are highly credentialed they just but they may not be you know like Jeff Jarvis as a friend of ours is a great blog ger is on CNN and places like that all the time why he looks good on TV he talks well he speaks in final draft you go right down immediately what he says you know he looks good yeah he’s tall he looks like Lincoln sort of he speaks emph atically you know there’s no doubt in what he says and so he’s telegenic and he’s audiogenic and and it’s great but there are a lot of people like John so maybe I don’t I’ve never seen John quoted anywhere that often I I think he’s a good-looking guy but he may not be comfortable in front of a microphone he may not be he may meant to be the most obvious choice in the usual way but he has the goods and and there are an awful lot of people out there who have the goods there are a lot of people that of another friend of ours Phil Windley is the former CIO of Utah and he’s a he runs IT Conversations now to go over from Doug Kay who’s a few doors away calls one one person NGOs there are a lot of obsessives out there that are one person that are one-man NGOs on some subject that you know more about water quality they know more about roads they know more about religion you know some religion some other subject and the wonderful thing about Google and about techno Roddy and about some of these other search engines is you can find these people pretty easily even techno Roddy though I don’t like their the way they do this all the time they have you can sort by authority meaning number of inbound links you can look at them one time and tell whether or not they’re proselytizers for point of view or if they really do have the goods the point is the sources are out there they’re speaking and there and those and they’re not all loops I mean Andrew Sullivan is struggling publicly as a conservative as a Catholic as a gay guy as a journalist a whole lot of other as a supporter of the war you know with how screwed up this thing is and how we’re going to go to war and what there you go that ’s a good example of somebody who’s politics and doesn’t I don’t agree with but I can respect the hell out of right yeah yes yeah that’s a good example right so there’s a rich that there’s an enormous there’s an embarrassment of rich I’m not sure that ducks point is actually you know the point is is that the the blogosphere is the unbund ling of all the sources anybody that hasn’t been able to get their ideas out there through mainstream media over the last whatever it’s been it my blog will be 10 years old in April so it’s been a long time already so all these people that have been sort of stifled in getting their ideas out there that’s the people you hear from unbiased there they ’re not all gadflies and they’re not all flaky some of them are scientists economists professors you know ex captains in the Air Force they’re they they can be knowledgeable people but you have to separate you know you have to figure out how to qualify them but they’re they’re now making themselves known so that’s maybe another way to connect up with the blogosphere I just thought of a great story okay there’s a story that you guys need to cover there’s a a a blogger in the state of Utah who I think he’s a former speaker in the house in Utah now I think he runs the equivalent of the Utah State House of Ways and Means Committee his name is Steve Urquhart he has a blog a site called Polytopia he is a I don’t know if he’s more or not but he’s certainly Republican in a pretty much a one-party state he’s collaborating with a bunch of lefties from New York City Britt Blazer was probably the biggest and most hardcore Democratic volunteer supporter of Howard Dean Mika Sifry writer for the nation and a bunch of other people on this Polytopia project the whole purpose of which is to connect citizens with governance and the very first thing that got passed as a because of the way Polytopia worked was school vouchers it was essentially a a a Republican issue but then the next thing that I don’t know what happened exactly but the next thing kind of went a little bit on the left side and it didn’t go the way everybody expected it to but what happened were a bunch of people who want to get out of the echo chambers who were engaged in government or engaged in journalism or engaged in other things on their own using this is a very important point tools laying around on the ground okay the world is full of tools Dave’s created a bunch of them with with RSS and with OPM L many other things the there are tools growing on trees that are easy this is a slight subject change but it’s an important one I heard somebody say earlier we have to pick a player like one platform for our for our for our streams that’s a really bad idea there there are so many ways to cheap out that work for everybody in tools right now if you look at the people are actually producing them and putting to be putting the use the cost of whatever Polytopia was is approximately nothing you know and a really interested caring people who come from all over the political spectrum are making that thing where that says one project that’s going on now and they’re trying to do it for really good and healthy reasons but it doesn’t sort into right versus left it doesn’t sort into stories that are who’s fighting whom you know I got one I got one it’s in it actually was in today’s New York Times a neighbor of mine in Berkeley Joan Blades who’s one of the founders of move on dot org is partnering with a woman on from the Christian Coalition on a mother in a mother’s organization called mom’s rising dot org so I mean and part of it is well they want to support the political issues of mother hood but I thought they know this obviously the incredible part is is that move on dot org is obviously very left-wing and Christian Coalition is very right-wing so putting those two people in the same organization and sending them out on a press tour together makes for a pretty interesting story yeah but mom ’s rising will be speaking tomorrow morning up well mom’s rising will be speaking tomorrow yeah cool who ’s next so there are questions so we don’t comments are okay too by the way it’s not just questions over there yeah how much time do we have left mark will tell us how much time 20 minutes my goodness so what would you say to those that would say that time shifted content as well as kind of the personal aggregation that comes along with podcasting and and and feeds and everything kind of is more divisive in mainstream media because it eliminates kind of that collective civic moment or historic moment of gathering around the TV or things like that does that make sense I think it’s like that today I mean why why call out single out podcasting and stuff I mean what about video games and I mean you know what about people walking down the street listening to iPods I mean you know I mean it these are the times we live in you know you may not we may not like it or may think there are negative sides to it that’s that’s like fighting city law I mean you know I like to say I mean basically I can walk down the street with my own soundtrack now you know and sometimes I feel like John Travolta in I don’t know if you ’ve seen the scene this Saturday night live it’s like the opening scene staying alive you know so like I’m in my own world Dave is disco you’re too young you don ’t know what you do oh my goodness yeah so I don’t know I mean you know this there’s always the good with the bad I guess I mean yeah it’s lovely to sit around and hang out with your family and and experience that love it’s wonderful it’s barbecues and ice - you know let’s have more of those a couple thoughts what is prime time radio in the 30s killed off the front porch prime time television killed off prime time radio we’ll get back to it we’ll get back to a lot of you know you what’s gonna happen what’s gonna happen is a bit torrents gonna kill off the radio industry and then we’re all gonna have to make our own music and then you’re gonna have to sit around let’s play kumbaya for your family everybody’s gonna be happy so just wait a few more cycles I’m only joking although I have been crucified by the RIA I gave a talk in 2000 I thought I was gonna get crucified here today to be honest with you I gave a talk right around the turning point of the music industry when Napster was raging and I went to explain to them how wonderful it was being a music fan in 2000 because now I can program my own music they tolerated me for about 15 minutes before the bricks start getting hurled you know so I don’t know you guys are great so Rob yeah sorry I wonder today I think there is a community it’s not we’re all sitting it’s 7 o' clock and bonanza is on type of thing wrong but the community I’ve seen next to wonderful guy called Ben Rowe who knows more about music than I’ll ever know and there are whole I was talking to Jay Kurnes the other day and then we were saying how could we leave what we do and be gazillion aires and he’s thinking I’ll start a Broadway site you know it’ll just be Ethel Merman and stuff like that and people will you know come and see that site because there’s a whole community that loves Broadway shows or we’ve been and I was talking about I was a choir boy once or how many million 65 million people in America have sung in a choir now we’re not all going to necessarily meet up but you know I’d like to be part of that community and I’d like to talk online to other people who love you know choral music so I don’t think it’s going to be seven o’clock bonanza but it could be we all meet up in our own time to talk about bird or something like that I’d like to go back to the first part of Dave’s talk it occurs to me I’m a long time Apple user I have an iPod Apple got some traction with that because not only did they simplify the entire user experience but they notably integrated a hardware device a piece of software which is the iTunes music software and a service into one seamless relatively what they call seamless experience that if anything accounts for the popularity of the iPod in making some sense out of a very disconnected open non- standardized universe so you know I I think if you are willing to accept reality that ’s the times we live in that’s the problem they dealt with in doing that I would love to see the iPod be a more open device but I’m not sure that an awful lot of the people who use iPods really want that that’s one thing the other thing is the device you call for already exists it’s a cell phone you know I happen to have a trio 650 which is a palm device it’s an open platform you can add all the software you can stand to it it has it doesn’t have Wi-Fi mine doesn’t have Wi-Fi but it does have a network connection that you pay for a lot of money and so you know the kind of operation you anticipate with the addition of you have to manage it like a computer platform and I’m just saying that for the sophisticated users which includes you guys and a lot of us it’s not an issue but for you know the general public that we deal with as broadcasters it is more of an issue is there a pod catcher for the trio do you aware of that I’m not something that will download RSS feeds that have MP3 files attached to it or I mean you can imagine that it pretty much exists Nokia does have a device exactly right you ’re talking about yeah and they they’re getting there and you’re I don ’t have a it doesn’t have to be Wi-Fi I mean I I’m interested in the functionality I’m interested ease of use I mean yeah and and you know that you were absolutely right the design of the iPod is a selling point I mean I have bought probably a dozen different you know MP3 players and the one I carry with me is an iPod so you know I it’s it’s the best of a of a of a first generation I mean the iPod is I think there’s no doubt that we ’ll look back 10 years from now you know and look at the iPod and think that it was a good first effort but I don’t think it’s what we’re gonna I don’t I don’t I think we’re gonna see something much nicer and more tuned I hope we see something it’s more tuned for podcasting out of the box alright well let me ask you a question about that others that have argued that podcasting is itself an intermediate or transitional technology to the era of pervasive wireless networks at the point where you wireless what networks real cover in other words substantial coverage of urban and suburban America by wireless networks so that everybody who now has a broadband connection has a connection to a portable device at that point do we really care whether the thing is downloaded or streamed to us on demand wait a second I do think I care absolutely okay I went in I’m just saying why because there your functionality is more or less identical you’re then we’re arguing about the last question I need to pause for a moment to collect my thoughts but I do absolutely do care streaming has never been why do you care if it’s streaming I mean that’s why I care in other words the reason why broadcas ters care if it’s streaming because they want to retain some measure of control over the content I mean that’s why anybody wants streaming and I’m sorry I want control of it myself because I tell you in the past the reason why and the reason you say I don’t even know who you are who are you by the way a Steven Hill with hearts of space okay I don’t know what business you’re in I ’m a radio producer also why do you care why do you want streaming I assume you want streaming I can tell you why I want streaming is because we have a licensing regime I’m a music producer only the licensing regime that allows me to want music this isn’t about music podcasting to me isn’t about music podcasting is about the programming I mean there is music on NPR right okay but that’s not really I mean correct me if I’m wrong well actually of course there are shows that are primarily music that’s not what I’m talking about I’m talking about the news talk show type stuff right which is content that is proprietary to the producers and the networks right and you want to retain control over it and that’s no I don’t know I’m just I don’t want to interrupt I don ’t like doing that part of part of the circumstances is Stephen you brought up two different case cases essentially one is is the streaming case today the other is the ubiquitous Wi-Fi case tomorrow right in the streaming case today we do have a regime that has actually required that most podcasting by especially by large organizations cannot be done with music because of the because of the rights issues and it can be done with streaming because of the DMCA that came along in 1998 and the Carp so the carp decision in 2001 created a very clear regime that you as a broadcaster of live of live material operate inside of right and that’s a comfortable one for you and you have listeners new stations that play what you’re doing and that’s that’s that’s something I would like to see happen is for everybody in this room if they possibly can to work with their Congress people and so forth to get the insane copyright laws that came along that I’m not really so referring to that okay rotation which is restriction on music copyrighted music only I ’m talking about a service issue only which is once I have an on-demand stream that I can get when I want start stop and navigate within what’s the difference if I have an agile enough network connection the only difference I can see is a half a second of latency while a server catches up with what I want is that okay I don’t see what we have to get stuck on this okay I like podcasting I don’t know whether you do or don’t I don’t like or dislike it I’m asking what you think the impact will be of having this level of networking when it arrives okay I don’t have an opinion about that I do which is I don’t think we’re going to have it as long as we have the carrier duopoly that we do they have no interest in it no interest in what in a ubiquitous Wi-Fi cloud everywhere and I also don’t think I thought can we move on I don’t see why this stops this particular conversation in other words why do we have to stop here to discuss this okay I mean could you accept he has an opinion about it I said I don’t I don’t know how about everybody else feels about this okay I was not a real stop we have Mark we have another question back here right here no doc they could be a comment - it could be a comment and doesn’t have to be a question yeah it could be either one the point you raised the discussion of using the community that we’re creating is an open source base for journalism and in fact that is going on if I memory serves me right I’ve seen a presentation recently from Minnesota Public Radio where they’re doing something very very similar to that and it’s really quite exciting if somebody from here from Minnesota Public Radio might want to give it to you in more detail secondly as I’m in another lifetime of mine I spent 22 years in commercial television and as a part of mainstream media having to deal with candidates and the election scenario every two years at the local level never worked at a network but 22 years in local commercial television I can’t say that I disagree with you that it’s broken but I think you give us credit for being a shill far above what we are or what we were but I do think there was in this in two days ago or a day ago a glimmer that I hope you all saw which was a top 50 commercial affiliate who has created an open community on his website that is fundamentally opening the doors on a commercial television station a commercial network affiliate in the 30th ranked mark in the country can you see who that is just so we know yeah it’s in Nashville right yeah Terry Heaton’s client yeah WKRM thank you yeah WKRM and it’s an extraordinary expression of a commercial broadcaster looking out to try to accomplish the very things you’re saying that they should be doing now we may be late we may be slow but the environment around a commercial television station at the local level when the candidates come parading through your door that’s been created both by the law and the history and the candidates and their desire to get elected the amount of money that becomes at play is not a fun environment for any commercial broadcaster that I’ve ever had the pleasure to discuss this with I don’t think they would disagree with you that it’s broken but I do think they would have disagreed with you that they were playing some sort of role as a shill for anybody and certainly I think they would have wished as hard as you do that there was another way to do that stuff okay I didn’t I don’t think I okay I don’t think I called them exactly call I didn’t use the word shill for sure but I’d point taken well if the system has been that effective being that I mean whether it’s intentional or not I don’t know how much time do we have left I can turn this from a comment into a question depending upon how much time we have go for it well I just want to speak up for what I think may be an aspect to podcasting and its relationship to broadcasting that hasn’t been touched on because I get the sense that we’re sort of seeing them as being in a way forms that are trying to figure out how to mate how to breed or inter breed we’re not quite sure they ’re gonna have viable offspring what the you know what the hell the process is and I’ve heard podcasting referred to as a new technology or a variation of an old technology what I’d like to suggest is that it may not be so much a new technology as it is a new medium in the making and a new medium doesn’t yet have a clear anatomy until it’s created it doesn’t have a clear relationship to its audience or to the preced ing medium until it’s developed and one of the things that does not seem to be happening in at least two years that I’ve been involved in podcasting which is soon after you Dave you know made it possible is that public broadcasting has not been looking upon podcasting as a place where it can start to experience a different relationship with an audience and perhaps develop new programming almost nine I venture to say 98% of the podcast that are coming from public broadcasting are merely repackaged aspects of its broadcasting and you know they say or remember Marshall McLuhan he said that the content of every new medium is the old medium well that’s that’s true to with a vengeance in this case and for those who do decide to look on podcasting as a new field where relationships are just beginning to take place that this is really really early days there is so much to be learned about what your audience is what kind of relationship it wants with you what great ideas you may get from them what great new production technologies they may even be working with in their own kitchens that we don ’t know about but that we can find out about if we go there as good neighbors rather than as people who are trying to transport all of our content and values to this new space we have learned an enormous amount from our audience and the main difference people someone asked me they say what what’s the biggest thing you’ve learned from two years in podcasting probably it’s that the relationship that you have with the audience is very very different from the relationship that you have with a with an broadcast audience maybe because the internet that brings the programming to you is also the same tool that you can use to get back to somebody you hear from your audience immediately they are engaged in something as much more like a conversation and they are eager to participate into partner now I know Dave you feel that that it should be as much as possible two-way street you know that the podcasters everyone should be a podcaster maybe that’ll be you don’t understand you a lot of people say stuff like that but I don’t I think it should be whatever it is well one of the things that it could be is it could be sort of a place where people with common interest is one of the gentlemen before me said can go to share a common passion about something and it can be sort of moderated by the person who is running that popular podcast but I’m just praying that you ’re on a podcast right now by the way so is everybody else who’s spoken oh that’s nice you’re also on a live audio stream maybe I ’ll hear myself after I’ve heard the 800 other podcasts but anyway that’s the point I’m that’s the point I’m trying to make to public broadcasters I heard you on some game show on yes as you yeah yeah which unfortunately isn’t being podcast for reasons that totally escaped me well I totally agree that I’m I feel it’s sort of like a much state the mic it’s sort of like a we’re in a tenuous moment I almost don’t want to I almost thought maybe I shouldn’t call attention to the fact that NPR is even doing podcasts because by doing that maybe they’ll stop doing it you know because it feels like a gift to me even just getting the existing programming out through this channel it it feels like it feels like a gift and it feels like something that could be taken back so I’m happy with what’s been done so far but I think that the more that you could do Tony and people like yourself that are skilled in this art is you could help teach those of us who are not how you do what you do because I mean one of the things I pride myself in and one of the reasons why it gained traction was that when I did my podcasts they were sloppy they were you know there were gaps of an it there was a gap of ten minutes in one of the early ones I did you know yet it was and that was actually it wasn’t deliberate I would never do it deliberately but but it did show people that you don’t have to hit the you know NPR level quality in order to have your ideas have value and have the expression of those ideas have value but that said we’d like to I would like to see a podcast school you know I mean Doug Kaye who’s next door through an unfortunate I would love to have been in his session teaches how to do podcasting at a different level but how does a guy like you do a radio show that’s something I’d love to know more about I’d like CPB for one to consider that I’d like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for one to consider the fact that maybe they should put some money into encouraging people who are good and experienced producers to produce something that’s original podcast material that would mean they would have to venture out into that world and form relationships or teach us how and then we’ll create a thousand hours of maybe this isn’t a very popular idea but teach us how and in 20 hours worth of training will produce a thousand hours worth of programming you now have so many more hours if you take 24 times the number of public radio stations that give you a very finite number of programming hours that you have had I’m sure you’ve been through this story many many times well now you don’t have any limit on the number of hours of broadcasting you can do because podcasting doesn’t have that kind of a limit so can we broaden that that that would be a way to achieve the discourse of the for the 2008 election could I just make I’m sorry no actually you know maybe the takeaway is we could have a special seminar about this at some point you know maybe a half-day brainstorming session somewhere where we get together and we talk specifically about how we might do this you know that doesn’t require a lot of funding to do that you know I’ve got about a dollar seventy-five in my left pocket right now I have about a dollar seventy-five in my left pocket if you want to start collecting okay just one very quick point if I could doc I’ve heard it said that that the way broadcasting and you’re suggesting the way the broadcasting should get more honest in its news hard news coverage is that it should get better experts more honest people more forthcoming about where they’re really coming from or just hit the larger talent pool that’s all I I think that one very concrete model that podcasting may offer broadcasting for how to deal with controversial issues is to stay away from rhetoric completely away from what rhetoric completely the model that broadcasting basically operates with our talking heads who are engaged in a fight to see who wins the argument this polar izes and it doesn’t persuade anybody nor does it help explain why somebody feels the way that they do about a controversial issue podcasting provides much more of an opportunity for people to sit down and talk about what led them to the political conclusions the way they would around a dinner table and that means that the possibility of finding common ground for a solution is suddenly open something that broadcasting tends not to offer it so that’s one way in which podcasting might you know provide a model that broadcasting could adopt very good just to go back to a prior point about having a workshop or something the something that is requires almost zero revenue and it can be extraordinarily productive our our workshops like you just brought up like like Dave began with the with the blogger cons that the idea isn ’t that you you fund some big expensive thing is rather that you just get a room where the right people in it and tasked with moving the subject forward is incredible how well that works I just want to add what what I just told doc which is if the people in this room want to just continue feel free I’ll close the door so that the sound from outside is cut but we just don’t get to hear the quality of conversation you guys are having that often thank you continue as much I wanted to bring up the point that we were going to be bookmarked earlier yeah this morning somebody was talking I don’t know what but it came up that there’s a front line coming up on some subject rather and I just had this idea because I just only discovered BitTorrent in the last couple days in a in a useful way that what a PBS could do is at the same moment that they’re distributing a live program through the expensive system that’s out there that they could be the alpha seed and that’s what they’re called for a torrent that means you’re you have the one server that is a hundred percent uptime but what happens is as soon as you release that that piece of video everybody who’s downloading it also becomes an uploading source that’s how BitTorrent works that by the way is what blows away the need for transmitters entirely you distribute the cost and the zero revenue required other than the server upkeep on the first server so that’s a great way and it came out of something Dave said which is he would like to see the front line before it goes on the air right that’s so I could review it so I could help the same way you see the you know the reporters at the major newspapers who review the shows before they come off I mean I can read a review of today’s show tonight show in the paper in the morning so I got to conclude that he’s seen the show right and bloggers don’t get that kind of advance but to really do it right what Doc says why play favorites among bloggers let everybody on the web have the show 24 hours before it broadcasts it what would that do for the broadcast it would it couldn’t possibly hurt it because you don’t have commercials on it right and by the way if it’s your official distribution then you can leave the sponsorship messages in it my guess is that they get taken out when somebody else is doing the uploading I think we’ve more or less exhausted the point unless somebody else has anything else to say comments or anything do we uh I’m starting have we run out to talk I think I made every point I wanted to make so I’d like to make one more actually and it comes up with the with this distinction that we’re trying to make between what’s live and what’s stored and forwarded an interesting irony there is that the the stuff that’s stored in for this Tony just pointed out there’s a much more intimate relationship that happens with podcast what you’re doing with podcast and then happens when you’re talking through a transmitter and through radios and it’s and it’s and an interesting thing too is you as soon as you publish the RSS feed that your podcast is up techno writing Google blog search you found that within about a minute and there’s there is a and I’ve said this before in some of the and another session there was a a branching going on in the net between the static web that we that we build and construct and have designers for and heaven has an address in a location and we understand almost entirely in real estate language and the live web that is people interacting with people people publishing people writing people syndicating people feeding people seeding and other one of those words with the torrent torrent is live it may be that’s storing and forwarding there’s something out the word torrent that is inherently live and that’s radio radio is even if radio is stored and forwarded radio is live and Larry Joseph son walked in here and out earlier who’s one of my great heroes I’ve I’ve he’s one of the very few people for around who I am starstruck because I’m an awe of what he did in radio that made it personal long before Howard Stern got out of high school he once said in one of the only other conversation I had with him prior to this the radio is personal there’s something about radio that is personal now with podcasting it really is and it’s personal for everybody it’s not just personal for the people behind the microphones in the large buildings behind the towers with the big transmitters and what can we and you know what can we do with that thank you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you [BLANK_AUDIO]