For KYOU, the first podcast radio statation in San Francisco
“A Morning Coffee Notes for broadcast on KYOU in San Francisco. Notes about blogs and podcasts, the origins of podcasting, how it relates to professional reporting.”
Dave’s thoughts on the differences between traditional journalism and blogging/podcasting. He discusses how bloggers and podcasters can provide a more personal and unfiltered perspective compared to mainstream media, which often tries to appear objective but ends up being narrow in its coverage and political leanings. Dave’s argues that transparency about one’s biases and beliefs is more important than strict objectivity, as it allows the audience to better understand the context and interpret the information. He also touches on his experience covering the 2004 Democratic National Convention as a blogger, and the criticism he faced for not sounding like traditional journalists. Overall, he advocates for a more diverse and authentic media landscape enabled by new technologies like podcasting.
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Transcript
This transcript was automatically generated.
Good morning ladies and
gentlemen boys and girls. This
is the morning coffee notes
podcast for me
May 15th 2005
This podcast is also going to
be broadcast on KYOU AM in San
Francisco
Twice first at midnight tonight
and then at noon tomorrow
Today being Sunday and of
course tomorrow being Monday
What am I saying everybody good
God?
He’s got me so nervous and so
in my head that
I’ve actually like done five
different takes on this podcast
and that’s very
Unusual unusual for me even
unprecedented
And I guess that tells you
something about the about the
broadcast medium. It’s sort of
has this ominous sort of dread
ful feel to it and
Podcasting has well the first
podcast that I did you listen
to it. It’s really awkward
You know I get going and then I
say oh well
I’ve never haven’t even
explained what I’m doing here
and
and then I sort of very stiffly
explain what I’m doing and
This feels like a loop back to
that again even though
You know the idea of podcasting
Over broadcast is not you know,
it’s kind of interesting thing.
It’s and it is definitely new You know so What is a podcast? I mean if you’re listening to this on the radio And one of the things I try to figure out is how many people were going to actually just be sort of flipping the dial on the AM Band at midnight and then at noon and happened to run into this and not know what a podcast is and and not know what they’re listening to And I decided there’ll be enough people there that it probably is a good idea to say what a podcast is And if you think about it, it’s sort of like well if you know what a blog is a blog is a Personally edited website that sort of changes every day where people link to each other and They write their own opinions about things. They’re sort of interpretation of Events they’re not mass media Although some people would disagree and say that they are there really aren’t any blogs that have more than say a hundred thousand readers On a given day and that that makes it the size of a of a small town Newspaper the biggest ones are the size of a small town newspaper and many of those actually operate more like a newspaper than they do Like a blog, you know, whenever there’s multiple authors and there’s an editorial process and a review process It’s really hard to say that that’s a blog the same way this you know and this podcasting differs from radio in that There really aren’t very many if any restrictions on what you can say on a podcast and and there are many more podcasts and there are radio stations just like there are many more blogs than there are newspapers or magazines and you know by some estimates there are like 20 million web logs today and That’s up from basically zero in the mid 90s. So it’s all come together quite quickly Podcasts, you know current Conventional wisdom says that there are 5,000 podcasts actually think that there are more I have a site called audio web logs comm Which basically tracks all the new podcasts as they come on the database there has quite a few more than 5,000 entries in it Some of them if not many of them aren’t actually podcasts.
So there’s no And I one of these days, huh? One of these days I hope to actually write a script that validates them and figures out which ones are real which ones aren’t and then sort of keeps a Running tally of how many there are But so what is a podcast well podcast then you know is something small It’s something that has a few listeners of you know I don’t know a lot of people download my podcast because it was one of the earliest ones But how many people actually listen to it? Well, I get a lot more email from from my web log than I do for my podcast And so that’s sort of one rough measure of it It’s easier to read a blog than it is to listen to a podcast because a podcast is a Serial thing, you know, you kind of listen from beginning to end Whereas you can sort of skim a blog which one of the reasons why I like podcasts is that you know You can’t skim them. It’s or if you can it’s really hard to do that to know Well, you know what you missed.
Maybe you missed the thing that you really came for and So that makes it a smaller medium They’re just you know for every minute of a podcast you need to have a minute to listen to it.
So So, you know one of the slogans that I use for for blogging and it works equally well for podcasting is come as you are and We’re just folks and those are two things come together sort of like if you’re having a party You know podcasting says basically Anybody can podcast and it should be easy to podcast and I know a lot of people try to make it sound like it’s complicated It’s hard and I think they’re Oftentimes are serving their own sort of interest and that they want to keep it kind of an exclusive thing And and that just isn’t gonna work. I mean basically the best podcasts are the ones that are by people who have something interesting on their minds or something interesting to say and And that they sound real that they you know I don’t really like things that sound too polished because you know, it’s like the more polished there is I think the more somebody’s hiding, you know, they don’t want to show you their imperfections, but hey, you know, I know you have them It’s not news to me that that you’re a human being but when you try to make it sound in human You’re not actually fooling anybody. It still is human But but it’s kind of hard to say what your humanity is and what your beliefs are and and so forth which reminds me of a interesting little anecdote One of the first places that you know, we podcasters like to podcast events It’s kind of nice to bring your laptop with you or I have a little PDA made by a company called Arcos ARCHOS and it’s a really nice little device and one of the things that it can do is record an mp3 and So I bring it with me now. We ’re pretty much wherever I go.
And so I can do a podcast pretty much anywhere I did one in a restaurant a few days ago with a Iranian blogger whose name is Hodor and it was so it was so interesting that The TV crew came this was at a blogging conference and TV crew came in and they wanted to interview me and I said well Well, you’re interrupting my podcast and I don’t think they understood that I was doing pretty much what they do We weren’t doing with video. We were just doing with audio, but it was still was the same activity But the recording equipment was like sitting on the table kind of looking like a radio And there was no like visible microphone. I wasn’t on a headset yet the quality that came out of it was pretty much radio quality stuff and You know Hodor is a very interesting guy. So it was really an interesting story also Brendan Greeley from from radio open source or who was there as well and he joined in the conversation and If you want to find any of my podcasts, by the way, here’s a little plug for where you you know go for my site for where you go to that It’s www. morningcoffinotes. com and you’ll see that there’s a little white on orange xml button there sort of like a chiclet and that’s the sort of standard weight that Sites have to inform you that this is how you can subscribe to the site and what you would do there is Is you you know add that URL to your iPod application, whether it be iPod or iPod or X Doppler Blackmatrix There’s a whole host of them.
We’re also going to there’s a community site that I maintain called podcatch. com pod catch. com and You can go there for sort of the latest gossip and news on podcasts And we’re gonna have a directory there of all the different tools you can use to access podcasts So anyway, I was going to tell you a story before I interrupted myself about the Democratic National Convention I was at a blog I went to the DNC To cover it as a blogger. You know they did something that was pretty interesting and kind of new is they said in addition to Professional reporters that they would allow a certain number of amateurs That they would allow a certain number of amateurs to cover the Democratic Convention and I applied and was accepted and And I went to cover it and they had a breakfast for us and at the breakfast they had a speaker Who was a guy who had been a reporter for many years at the Associated Press and Yeah, I’m gonna forget if I can ’t remember his name. It’ll come to me. I’m sure but So he’s giving a talk and as you know About what it was like to cover the convention before when he was a reporter for AP And what it’s like to cover it as a blogger now And of course the room was filled with bloggers and we wanted to find out you know Like if he’s a real blogger or not and so David Weinberger who is has a blog called Jo Ho Jo H. Oh He asked him well, who are you voting for for president and The reporter said I can’t tell you that because if I did that would screw with my objectivity and And we sort of had a little disagreement with him about that and said well if you you ’re a blogger We need to know where you’re coming from and That’s sort of a fundamental difference between Reporting and blogging and therefore between radio and podcasting is that We want to know where you’re coming from and that way we know how to we feel we know how to interpret what you’re saying And this is a technique that we call triangulation What it means is that if I know where you’re coming from and I listen to your account of an event And I listen to somebody else’s report of the same event And they tell me where they’re coming from whether they’re Republican or Democrat pro-life pro-choice Whether black or white or male or female or you know the theory of professional journalism is that none of that matters And that you’re going to get the same report from you know two different reporters no matter what their background is Now if you say that to a reporter they disagree they say well you know there’s an art to what I do and You know you won’t get the same report from two different reporters And I say well why is that if you put the same event in front of two objective reporters Why do you get a different report what is it that accounts for that and I think that’s kind of a contradiction Sort of because I think the truth is they do color their their own personal beliefs do color their Reporting and it’s just strictly unavoidable You know to ask a A reporter to report objectively would be like asking a fish to describe water a fish can’t describe water fish doesn’t even know water exists It’s kind of like you know ask a human being to describe air to us air is just the environment it’s like that the air is nothing But try take a fit taking a fish out of the water and putting him in the air and ask the fish to describe the air The fish can tell you exactly what the air feels like because it’s not the fish is natural environment So a Republican is going to look at a set of events in a certain way and see them objectively differently from the way a Democrat would look at the same events And again feel that they’re saying objectively what actually happened so which is why we need to get multiple points of view on things It’s why the striving to provide one point of view which actually in the end The professional journalists have actually kind of succeeded at doing that and it isn’t so much the objective objectivity of journalism That accounts for that. It’s the fact that they’re serving the same Sort of they’re competing for the same ad dollar for the same sponsorships You know for they’re they’re trying to so hard to be the same that in some sense they in some sense they do succeed You know give you a case in point and CNN used to be sort of the shining light I thought of of news coverage I mean it was a magnet we used to go there like for example if you ask somebody today Or if you ask somebody in the early 90s where do you go for your news and their instant answer would be CNN That would just be where people go for news especially in time of a crisis like the Gulf War was a pretty the first Gulf War was a good example I mean basically everybody was glued to CNN then and today is no longer true and in fact you know one by one the TV shows News shows on CNN have turned into basically into entertainment shows There you generally one issue things like Lou Dobbs for example practically fascist coverage of sort of a crisis that he’s created That in everyday life it just really is hard to find that crisis And so what’s his motive and what’s their thinking at CNN you kind of have to shake their head that they call that journalism It’s ridiculous and same things true with Anderson Cooper with Paula’s on all the major Larry King They all have a point of view and they and the point of view is remarkably narrow and the kind of news stories that they actually will cover Are remarkably also remarkably narrow and there was one last bastion of news on CNN that was worth watching And I would tune in every night to Aaron Brown’s news night and you know they were trying to cover news and they gave you some variety And you know they gave you things to think about which is kind of why I watch news is to sort of set my agenda to give me things that I need to think about You know test my morals and my beliefs and give me something to think about basically and the early May on May 2nd in fact I remember the date because that was my birthday on May 2nd I was in New York and I was tuned into Anderson Cooper and the whole show was about this runaway bride This woman who basically George somebody who lives in Georgia and she was going to get married and she sort of didn’t show up at her own wedding And that’s not news I’m afraid I just don’t you know that happens every day and it’s not even I mean you just wonder how the hell do they justify it to themselves And how does Aaron Brown sleep at night because Aaron Brown is a journalist I thought or so I thought you know and and I love I’d love to hear what Jeff Greenfield would have to say about this you know and you know and I imagine basically he stays there because he gets paid really well to stay there But I think of him as a journalist but I can’t believe that he stays at CNN after they ’ve completely trashed their whole all their credibility is completely gone But their production values are very high at CNN in other words you won’t really hear too many you know on air mistakes Their voices are very professional Lou Dobbs knows exactly how to look into the camera so does Anderson Cooper while he’s being a complete fucking jerk They’re gonna have to oh sorry you have to bleep that one out you know just an aside I did so many takes on this to get started and I think the problem was you know I found myself talking about well how different is this from my normal podcast And I and my challenge was to make it not different from my normal podcast yet still try to say something relevant to a radio audience And there I use the F word and that sort of that sort of tells you that I have gotten out of my head because normally if you were like if we went out to dinner and we were just talking I probably would use that word in conversation when I felt you know like embellishing something or making it more colorful but you’re not allowed to use that word on the radio so And you’re also how many different masters are you serving when you talk on the radio think about it there’s the advertisers right There’s the station management there’s the owners of the station in this case infinity broadcasting there’s the owners of the owners which in this case is Viacom so it’s a congl omerate that owns many entertainment companies There’s the FCC that has a lot of say in what you can and can ’t say and then there’s the music industry so you know now they have been really good I just want to say this first of all I’m not being paid to do this This is a completely and this will be distributed through my normal channels and much the same way by the way I was a columnist at Wired magazine in the mid 90s And I had I did it the same way I mean they did pay me but it wasn’t very much and and I insisted that I’d be able to distribute my written work on the web and through email before You know when it was ready basically and that they could sort of pick whatever they wanted to out of that stream and run it in the magazine and that it be kind of an independent process And that was when it really worked when it really was independent but then as they hired more people and and the editorial my editors and the management at the magazine at first were just wonderful they were really great to work with They never interfered really never interfered with what I wanted to say and in fact encouraged me to be more original but as the publication grew and became more important and hired more people it became more difficult to say You know what I wanted to say and I was seeing more as a as a problem for them because well because I think they were mis interpreting things that I was saying but you know because political correctness drives communication And podcasting at its best really isn’t very politically correct let me just be really straight about that it also isn ’t really highly produced so you know I have what I think is a reasonably good radio voice But I’d like to think that this would still work even if I didn ’t have sort of a really good voice or sorry see that’s not politically correct you’re not supposed to praise yourself but frankly I think I’ve got a good voice so anyway Right it’s not about how good it is how polished it is how you’re the best at what you do that’s really important it’s a really important point of podcasting so if you’re flipping through the channels here on the radio dial as you ’re driving around in San Francisco And you happen to come across this and you know maybe you find it intriguing and if you do why do you find it intriguing and if you want to like answer that question You can send me an email at Dave. winer@gmail. com or you could go to podcatch. com and post a comment there because I ’ll put a place for you know for people to comment on this You may have to scroll down a little bit but you know at midnight it will be the top item there and it may not be the top item at noon when this is played later played the second time But what was I going to say? Right it may sound intriguing and then again it may sound like it doesn’t belong on the radio and I’ve had that kind of criticism a columnist at news.
com Charles Cooper wrote a piece He wrote a piece after the Democratic Convention which I mentioned before that I covered it along with I guess it was about 20 other bloggers I don’t remember the exact number but it was you know more than a handful And there was a lot of criticism of what we did and you know everybody has their own filters and of course I had mine too and this is what my filters told me they were saying was you guys don’t sound like Judy Woodruff or Wolf Bl itzer or Ted Koppel or Dan Rather or any of those people And you know they said it a little bit more like the quality sucks or these people don’t know what they’re doing or they’re only covering themselves or you know there’s no they’re not getting any news And to which I say a lot of different things it’s like well first of all it’s a convention so what happens at a convention everybody hangs out and schmoo zes with the people that are just like them that’s what they do And conventioneers from Ohio hang out with other convention delegates from Ohio. Duh. You know you might think well this is their opportunity to hang out with people from California but no they hang out with other delegates from Ohio because these are the people that they know Reporters hang out with other reporters. We saw that happen all over the place and I made an effort to work out of the working press room which I was allowed to do because I had a press pass and I made a point one day to work out of the working press room so that I could find out what it felt like to be a member of the working press And I sat next to people from the Washington Post and the Salt Lake City newspaper and A OL sent some people there who work on their website. They were there as well and the room was filled. It was interesting.
You know what was really interesting was to see how much what they do is exactly like what we do.
I mean they type stuff into web forms. They send emails out.
They have little mini recording booths that they carry around with them like us podcasters do . I was already podcasting. You can find some of those podcasts by the way at MorningCoffeeNot es. com. If you scroll down to the bottom you’ll see them there.
I just had a sip of coffee. By the way that’s another thing about a podcast. You’re allowed to drink coffee and everybody has to wait for you. I may actually go fill my coffee cup up too without even hitting pause. And guess what? At the radio station they won’t even edit that out because it’s part of the deal we have basically.
Anyway, where was I? Ding ding ding ding ding. Dave. Earth to Dave. Earth to Dave. What were we talking about? We were talking about the DNC and about getting around and well now would be a good time to go fill up my coffee cup then wouldn’t it? I guess I got distracted.
I’ll be right back. Yeah, I’m walking across the room now and there we go. There’s a coffee pot right now. I wonder if you can hear that. Yeah, now I’m going to open up the refrigerator and I’m going to take out a little bit of half a can because I like to have my coffee with some cream in it.
Yep. Right. Okay, so what’s another, sorry, I gotta remember where I was going. I remember that I went down to the broadcasters thing. Oh right, yeah, now I remember.
There we go. So the bloggers, right, we’re covering the blog gers. That’s what we were doing at the convention.
I like the Ohio delegates. We ’re hanging out with the Ohio delegates. We did get it out.
We did go to some parties. We did go to some breakfasts. We walked around places. We were allowed to walk around. We even walked around some places. We weren’t allowed to walk around.
We experienced the security, which was unbelievable. I mean, you know, it was really hot in Boston, so we told everybody how hot it was and how uncomfortable the whole climate was. We basically, what we did was we reported on what we saw, and that was the best we can do . That’s all we can do.
There’s no magic. We’re no better or no worse than the TV reporters are. They synthesize stories, but people sort of end up nodding off because their stories aren’t very interesting , and that’s just the way it is.
What goes on in a convention isn’t really all that incredibly newsworthy. It’s a bunch of people going to a convention and hanging out with each other and doing what people do at a convention, and that’s the story.
So, we pretty much carried the story, and we took a lot of heat from people because we didn’t have the polish. We were bloggers because we didn’t understand how the convention worked.
That was really funny because I was there at the opening moment of the convention, and I wrote into my blog. I forget exactly what it was. This thing is unbelievably boring, or it can ’t even make out what they’re saying, and there’s nobody in the room.
That’s not exactly true. The bloggers were there, but otherwise the place was kind of empty. You’d have these speakers would get up, and they would talk to the room, and they would say absolutely nothing, you know, the speakers .
They were people you’d never heard of, and nobody was there, and you’d go, “What the hell is going on here?” It wasn’t until later that I fully got it that what happens is that while the floor opens at 4pm and the speeches start at 4pm, that the convention doesn’t get rolling until the TV cameras come on at prime time, and what people are doing at 4pm is they ’re having their breakfast.
Why? Because they stayed up till 4am last night, the night before, that the whole schedule of a convention is totally ske wed towards night, and whether that’s because TV is there or because it’s always been that way, it’s very different from a computer industry convention where, you know, you sort of burn the candles at both ends.
I guess they do that too, but we were new to this, so we didn ’t know. You know, so you could take two different views of this.
One is, you could really hate us for doing that, and see an opportunity, kick us in the ass , and say, “Well, these people aren’t doing anything, and, you know, let’s just, let’s just, like, put them down for whatever reason. " Because some people like to put people down, I guess. I don’t know. Like Charles Cooper did.
Charles said that. Basically, this reporting sucks.
There’s a lot of hullabaloo about this, and they, in the end, they didn’t do anything.
But, you know, I beg to differ.
I think we told you what we saw , and we couldn’t have done anything more than that. We weren’t trying to be supermen and superwomen.
We were simply just trying to do what we do. That’s it. We got our eyes, we got our ears, we’ve got our key pads, keyboards, and we’ve got our fingers, and we can write stuff and take some pictures, and maybe do a podcast, and that’s it.
And you have to choose the people that you want to listen to, and one thing we can guarantee you, though, is that what you’re hearing is what we see.
Because we can’t color it, because we don’t have editors, and we don’t have the RIAA to account to, and we don’t have, we’re not owned by anybody, we’re not owned by, and they’re not owned by anybody, and we’re unregulated by the FCC.
And, you know, we’re all together. We do have our strings. I mean, you know, the fact is that the podcasting world is becoming kind of click ish, like the blogging world is clickish, and I’ve never been one to sort of want to be too much part of those clicks, and that’s why I sort of have a reputation of being a difficult person.
And I kind of actually have come to like that reputation, because it means that I’m not playing ball with anybody, I’m not playing footsie.
I mean, I don’t do business, and I do, and when I’m doing business, I do honor conf idences. You’ve got to do that, okay? And, but, on the other hand, is I’m going to say what I think, and if somebody is my friend, and I have to not say what I think, if I want to maintain the friendship, then generally speaking, the friendship goes, and I do say what I think.
Not enough, though, and I want to do more of that, because I ’ve had situations happen where I had a, I won’t say a friend, see, I don’t want to do that, but I had an acquaintance say to me that he made a deal with somebody, and I’m not allowed to talk about this, I’m embargoed, I can’t talk about it until a certain time, which is fine, I’m happy to take the embargo.
But, the person that he made a deal with is somebody that I had had a problem with, and I said, you know, in a way I wish that I had written about that problem, because you might have asked me about this deal before doing that, and maybe I could have saved you some grief, and maybe the world would have been a better place.
So, very often we’ll avoid the trouble, and not say the thing that’s perceived to be negative , you know.
And I’ve got to stop doing that , I’ve got to do less of that.
Anyway, so, you know, we’re trying to bring humanity into this, and it may not be a good match for broadcast radio for that reason, because traditionally broadcast radio has been polished more and more, I mean I grew up listening to AM Radio, I know when I was a kid, I’m 50 years old, exactly 50, it was 50 earlier this month on May 2 nd, and which means I’m a baby boom er, and it means that I grew up in the time when centralized media was, you know, coming online in all of its glory, and when I was like 5 years old, my grandfather gave me a transistor radio, a handheld transistor radio, which was the miracle technology of the day.
It was something that took a battery, and you could fit it in your hand, it had a little ear plug you could stick in your ear, and you could listen to the radio, it was a personal radio that was portable, and up until that point radios were not portable, and they didn’t run on batteries, and they weren’t cheap enough so that you could give one as a present to a child.
And I used to listen to Cousin Brucie on W-A-B-C-A-M in New York, Cousin Brucie played the Beatles, and he played the Dave Clark Five, and the Turtles, and Pet ula Clark, and then later, I don’t know if he got into the monkeys, because I think then, by that time, the next thing after that was W -N-E-W with Jonathan Schwartz.
Those were the hippie days, and later FM radio took over, and there was W-B-A-I in New York, it was really cool, and sort of a hippie radio station in New York, and radio was a big deal.
I grew up wanting to be a radio guy, and I never really was until I got a chance to podcast .
I became a software guy, and I lived in Silicon Valley for 22 years, and now I’m sort of moving around, I’m kind of unstuck, I’ve lived in Seattle, I’ve lived in Boston, I’m now living in Florida, maybe I’ll come back to the Bay Area at some point.
It certainly is interesting that the Bay Area is where this radio station is rooting itself , and I think it’s kind of appropriate, because the Bay Area has been host to so many cultural revolutions in the past, you know, whatever , past century, and there are so many interesting stories to tell that aren’t being covered on mass media, and this is a mass medium, absolutely, where podcasting is not mass medium, this is.
The whole challenge, of course, is to be able to transmit the very personal nature of podcast ing through the mass medium, and if it’s successful, and I kind of feel that it is going to be successful, I think San Francisco is a good place to do this.
Partially because it’s, you know, I have a lot of criticisms for Silicon Valley, I really think it’s kind of become anti-intellectual and too focused on marketing, and trying to be all these things that it really isn’t.
You know, Silicon Valley at its best should be focused on technology and users, and let media and commerce take care of itself.
Media and commerce are head quartered in New York, not in the Bay Area, and I don’t think they ever will be headquartered in the Bay Area.
I think the Bay Area wants to find its way.
It will be about technology, it will be about the little ones and zeros, and making them do their dance for the user’s benefit.
And a radio station that plays podcasts can actually be a very positive force for that.
I think that if done right, it will put some pressure on KQED FM, the public radio station in San Francisco, which public radio has become more and more like commercial radio.
It’s been more produced, more homogenized, more politically correct, less informative.
You know, yeah, it still is the best radio out there.
Maybe this will be better.
One of the things that I hope that they look into is IT conversations, which is one of the very earliest channels for podcast ing run by a guy named Doug Kay.
IT conversations goes to computer industry conferences, and they record speeches given by technology leaders.
Doug also does interviews with people, he’s like, for example, done an interview with me.
Lots of people that are active in the blogging world, in the technology world.
And more, I hope more and more, he has one up there that I want to listen to, that’s a speech given by Doug Engelbar, who is one of the heroes of the personal computer revolution.
Actually, it wasn’t IT conversations, it was Engadget.
Engadget also has a podcast, and they recently did an interview with Bill Gates, and it was marvelous, and Bill Gates really does have something to say.
And it had been a really long time since I heard Bill Gates, and this was Bill Gates talking at length, without being interrupted, without being edited, and it was Bill Gates that is most sort of spunky.
And Bill Gates can be pretty sp unky, he’s an intelligent guy, he’s got a twinkle, he’s got a twinkle, he’s got a twinkle in his eye when he’s going.
And it’s been a long time since Bill Gates has had this kind of energy, and I really, really, really, really enjoyed it.
And so, what KYOU can do for its community, which I know very well, is that it can help put the focus back on the intellectual life of technology.
There really is an intellectual side to technology, it isn’t about dumbing down, which is another thing that they do in media.
And to justify, basically justify lying to their listeners and their readers, by saying that, well, they wouldn’t understand it if we told them the truth.
Well, I beg to differ, they do understand when you’re lying to them, and it’s better to find a way to tell the truth and maybe confuse a few people, and then you do it again, and you’ll more people will get tuned in.
I think that you’ll be surprised to find that when you start throwing out some real data and some real opinions from people who do things, not just people who talk about doing things, or people who imitate people who do things, but the people who actually really do things.
Put them on the air, okay? Give them some time to talk, and let them be a little bit unpolished .
Let them sort of work it out and figure out their voice, their public voice.
Cut them so much slack that, you know, that they’re going to have, that they’ll relax about it, and they’ll be able to say what they have to say, and that we can all learn from them.
And that’s what I thirst for, and that’s what I’m searching for.
I’m searching for signs of intelligence, signs of generosity, people who have something that they’re passionately, passion ately want to say.
And frankly, not only don’t I care if it doesn’t come off with the greatest polish, I’m suspicious if it is too polished.
I think that if it’s polished, that means there had to be a team involved, and that team has to be paid by somebody, and that somebody who ’s paying them is owned by somebody, and they’re responsible to some government agency, and they have advertisers and business models, and you name it, all the way up and down the line.
There’s just so many ways that then it gets sliced and diced.
What I want to hear is I want to hear human communication with all of its frailty, with, you know, subject to all kinds of criticism, and then I want to defend it.
I want to say, now wait a minute, stop criticizing that person.
They’re taking a risk and you ’re not.
When you say that they’re not being, that they’re not polished, that it’s crap, what you’re doing is not contributing anything, what you ’re doing is you’re trying to subtract.
And I don’t like it when you do that.
At least there’s no harm in somebody saying something that is ineliquid.
And maybe, maybe there’s a great benefit if you actually do listen to what they have to say.
You know, think about a child who comes home from school, kindergarten, comes home from school with a painting, a picture, or some kind of a drawing, or maybe a sculpture, and shows it to the parent, or uncle, or aunt, or grandparent, or just neighborhood friend, and says, “Here, this is what I created today. " And so what do you say to that child when they show you their piece of creativity? Well, you don’t say, “Well, that’s crap,” or when you’re asked about the whole kindergarten class, and say, “Well, it’s nothing but crap. It’s not even worth looking at. " You don’t say that, because you understand that there is something precious happening there.
There is something that requires protection, and there ’s something beautiful there, that there’s a little human being, a new person, who is trying to communicate something to you, to tell you a story, to tell you basically nothing more, maybe, than, “This is how the world looks from down here, from my eyes. " And that’s precious, and it’s not just shouldn’t be something that is just reserved for children.
It’s something that we, as adults, have lost something when we forget that we are also creative beings capable of ours .
Capable of moving each other, and touching each other, and really experiencing our own and each other’s humanity.
And that, in a sense, maybe that is the only reason we’re actually here.
And that’s what, when Marshall McLuhan says, “This is what I think he means,” when he says, “The medium is the message. " That really, we are a communicating species. That’s really what we do.
And when the communication works, we’re capable of miracles of generosity and creativity.
And when communication stops working, we end up with global warming.
We have crazy wars that just don’t make any sense, and we do things that long-term probably aren’t very smart things to do.
And it, my feeling, and you know, gotta know where I’m coming from. I’m a liberal, and I’m not ashamed of it.
And when a conservative says, " You’re a liberal,” I go, “Yeah, and I’m a gun-tomb liberal. " And you better, you know, I’m not one of these guys who shir ks.
I just, you know, you come at me, I’m getting in your face.
And which is, I think, how the conservatives often win is through intimidation. We’re not gonna stand up for what we believe in.
But that’s where I’m coming from, and that’s what my filters say.
But I think that if, and I’ve actually had this experience, and I’m about at the 40-minute point, which is where most podcasts seem to stop.
I’m not gonna wind this down, but I had a wonderful experience at a conference at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University earlier this year.
It was a conference on blogging journalism and credibility, and they had bloggers and journalists there, and they had some left-wing bloggers like myself, and they had some right -wing bloggers too.
John Hinderaker from Powerline was there, and Powerline was the blog, basically, that outed Dan Rather, and then stayed on the case, and eventually forced Rather out of his position as anchor at CBS News.
And, you know, he’s a right- wing guy, and I’m a left-wing guy, and you would think that, well, you know, we wouldn’t have a whole lot to agree on.
And at a level that’s much deeper than our personal politics, we agree at a very deep philosophical level about this whole idea of responsibility and democracy and communication.
One of our obligations, we have an obligation to be active politically. Whether I agree with you or I don’t agree with you, I insist not only do you have the right to do that, but I believe you have the obligation to share your political views, to listen to other political views, to try to convince people and to let yourself be convinced that this is the most important part of being an American.
Whether you’re Republican or conservative, or liberal or Democrat, I think that this was the amazing thing about this meeting was that I found that we were basically brothers on this one, that we agree completely.
And I think it’s so much more important than the individual politics and who you voted for, and, you know, if you were to ask me, who do I have more in common with? And then there’s no question Dan Rather is a liberal. At least I don’t think there’s any question. I don’t feel that there’s any question.
But if you ask me, who do I have more in common with, Dan Rather or John Hinderaker? I’d say John Hinderaker in a mile, by a mile. No question about it .
So is there something profound, something important going on here, where it leads you to a statement like that? No question that there’s something important going on here.
There’s something going on politically and intellectually.
And I think that culturally and technologically as well.
So I’m going to leave it on that note. I really am honored to be allowed to be the first broadcast, podcaster in the United States.
And I encourage you to come by my, any one of my different sites, whether it be scripting.
com, which is my blog, or morningcoffinodes. com, which is my podcast, or podcatch. com, which is the community site for podcasting.
So anyway, that’s morning coffee notes for the 15th of May, 2005. This is Dave Winer.
I hope you’re all doing great.
Have a great day, and I’ll see you real soon. Okay, bye.
Okay, bye.
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It’s and it is definitely new You know so What is a podcast? I mean if you’re listening to this on the radio And one of the things I try to figure out is how many people were going to actually just be sort of flipping the dial on the AM Band at midnight and then at noon and happened to run into this and not know what a podcast is and and not know what they’re listening to And I decided there’ll be enough people there that it probably is a good idea to say what a podcast is And if you think about it, it’s sort of like well if you know what a blog is a blog is a Personally edited website that sort of changes every day where people link to each other and They write their own opinions about things. They’re sort of interpretation of Events they’re not mass media Although some people would disagree and say that they are there really aren’t any blogs that have more than say a hundred thousand readers On a given day and that that makes it the size of a of a small town Newspaper the biggest ones are the size of a small town newspaper and many of those actually operate more like a newspaper than they do Like a blog, you know, whenever there’s multiple authors and there’s an editorial process and a review process It’s really hard to say that that’s a blog the same way this you know and this podcasting differs from radio in that There really aren’t very many if any restrictions on what you can say on a podcast and and there are many more podcasts and there are radio stations just like there are many more blogs than there are newspapers or magazines and you know by some estimates there are like 20 million web logs today and That’s up from basically zero in the mid 90s. So it’s all come together quite quickly Podcasts, you know current Conventional wisdom says that there are 5,000 podcasts actually think that there are more I have a site called audio web logs comm Which basically tracks all the new podcasts as they come on the database there has quite a few more than 5,000 entries in it Some of them if not many of them aren’t actually podcasts.
So there’s no And I one of these days, huh? One of these days I hope to actually write a script that validates them and figures out which ones are real which ones aren’t and then sort of keeps a Running tally of how many there are But so what is a podcast well podcast then you know is something small It’s something that has a few listeners of you know I don’t know a lot of people download my podcast because it was one of the earliest ones But how many people actually listen to it? Well, I get a lot more email from from my web log than I do for my podcast And so that’s sort of one rough measure of it It’s easier to read a blog than it is to listen to a podcast because a podcast is a Serial thing, you know, you kind of listen from beginning to end Whereas you can sort of skim a blog which one of the reasons why I like podcasts is that you know You can’t skim them. It’s or if you can it’s really hard to do that to know Well, you know what you missed.
Maybe you missed the thing that you really came for and So that makes it a smaller medium They’re just you know for every minute of a podcast you need to have a minute to listen to it.
So So, you know one of the slogans that I use for for blogging and it works equally well for podcasting is come as you are and We’re just folks and those are two things come together sort of like if you’re having a party You know podcasting says basically Anybody can podcast and it should be easy to podcast and I know a lot of people try to make it sound like it’s complicated It’s hard and I think they’re Oftentimes are serving their own sort of interest and that they want to keep it kind of an exclusive thing And and that just isn’t gonna work. I mean basically the best podcasts are the ones that are by people who have something interesting on their minds or something interesting to say and And that they sound real that they you know I don’t really like things that sound too polished because you know, it’s like the more polished there is I think the more somebody’s hiding, you know, they don’t want to show you their imperfections, but hey, you know, I know you have them It’s not news to me that that you’re a human being but when you try to make it sound in human You’re not actually fooling anybody. It still is human But but it’s kind of hard to say what your humanity is and what your beliefs are and and so forth which reminds me of a interesting little anecdote One of the first places that you know, we podcasters like to podcast events It’s kind of nice to bring your laptop with you or I have a little PDA made by a company called Arcos ARCHOS and it’s a really nice little device and one of the things that it can do is record an mp3 and So I bring it with me now. We ’re pretty much wherever I go.
And so I can do a podcast pretty much anywhere I did one in a restaurant a few days ago with a Iranian blogger whose name is Hodor and it was so it was so interesting that The TV crew came this was at a blogging conference and TV crew came in and they wanted to interview me and I said well Well, you’re interrupting my podcast and I don’t think they understood that I was doing pretty much what they do We weren’t doing with video. We were just doing with audio, but it was still was the same activity But the recording equipment was like sitting on the table kind of looking like a radio And there was no like visible microphone. I wasn’t on a headset yet the quality that came out of it was pretty much radio quality stuff and You know Hodor is a very interesting guy. So it was really an interesting story also Brendan Greeley from from radio open source or who was there as well and he joined in the conversation and If you want to find any of my podcasts, by the way, here’s a little plug for where you you know go for my site for where you go to that It’s www. morningcoffinotes. com and you’ll see that there’s a little white on orange xml button there sort of like a chiclet and that’s the sort of standard weight that Sites have to inform you that this is how you can subscribe to the site and what you would do there is Is you you know add that URL to your iPod application, whether it be iPod or iPod or X Doppler Blackmatrix There’s a whole host of them.
We’re also going to there’s a community site that I maintain called podcatch. com pod catch. com and You can go there for sort of the latest gossip and news on podcasts And we’re gonna have a directory there of all the different tools you can use to access podcasts So anyway, I was going to tell you a story before I interrupted myself about the Democratic National Convention I was at a blog I went to the DNC To cover it as a blogger. You know they did something that was pretty interesting and kind of new is they said in addition to Professional reporters that they would allow a certain number of amateurs That they would allow a certain number of amateurs to cover the Democratic Convention and I applied and was accepted and And I went to cover it and they had a breakfast for us and at the breakfast they had a speaker Who was a guy who had been a reporter for many years at the Associated Press and Yeah, I’m gonna forget if I can ’t remember his name. It’ll come to me. I’m sure but So he’s giving a talk and as you know About what it was like to cover the convention before when he was a reporter for AP And what it’s like to cover it as a blogger now And of course the room was filled with bloggers and we wanted to find out you know Like if he’s a real blogger or not and so David Weinberger who is has a blog called Jo Ho Jo H. Oh He asked him well, who are you voting for for president and The reporter said I can’t tell you that because if I did that would screw with my objectivity and And we sort of had a little disagreement with him about that and said well if you you ’re a blogger We need to know where you’re coming from and That’s sort of a fundamental difference between Reporting and blogging and therefore between radio and podcasting is that We want to know where you’re coming from and that way we know how to we feel we know how to interpret what you’re saying And this is a technique that we call triangulation What it means is that if I know where you’re coming from and I listen to your account of an event And I listen to somebody else’s report of the same event And they tell me where they’re coming from whether they’re Republican or Democrat pro-life pro-choice Whether black or white or male or female or you know the theory of professional journalism is that none of that matters And that you’re going to get the same report from you know two different reporters no matter what their background is Now if you say that to a reporter they disagree they say well you know there’s an art to what I do and You know you won’t get the same report from two different reporters And I say well why is that if you put the same event in front of two objective reporters Why do you get a different report what is it that accounts for that and I think that’s kind of a contradiction Sort of because I think the truth is they do color their their own personal beliefs do color their Reporting and it’s just strictly unavoidable You know to ask a A reporter to report objectively would be like asking a fish to describe water a fish can’t describe water fish doesn’t even know water exists It’s kind of like you know ask a human being to describe air to us air is just the environment it’s like that the air is nothing But try take a fit taking a fish out of the water and putting him in the air and ask the fish to describe the air The fish can tell you exactly what the air feels like because it’s not the fish is natural environment So a Republican is going to look at a set of events in a certain way and see them objectively differently from the way a Democrat would look at the same events And again feel that they’re saying objectively what actually happened so which is why we need to get multiple points of view on things It’s why the striving to provide one point of view which actually in the end The professional journalists have actually kind of succeeded at doing that and it isn’t so much the objective objectivity of journalism That accounts for that. It’s the fact that they’re serving the same Sort of they’re competing for the same ad dollar for the same sponsorships You know for they’re they’re trying to so hard to be the same that in some sense they in some sense they do succeed You know give you a case in point and CNN used to be sort of the shining light I thought of of news coverage I mean it was a magnet we used to go there like for example if you ask somebody today Or if you ask somebody in the early 90s where do you go for your news and their instant answer would be CNN That would just be where people go for news especially in time of a crisis like the Gulf War was a pretty the first Gulf War was a good example I mean basically everybody was glued to CNN then and today is no longer true and in fact you know one by one the TV shows News shows on CNN have turned into basically into entertainment shows There you generally one issue things like Lou Dobbs for example practically fascist coverage of sort of a crisis that he’s created That in everyday life it just really is hard to find that crisis And so what’s his motive and what’s their thinking at CNN you kind of have to shake their head that they call that journalism It’s ridiculous and same things true with Anderson Cooper with Paula’s on all the major Larry King They all have a point of view and they and the point of view is remarkably narrow and the kind of news stories that they actually will cover Are remarkably also remarkably narrow and there was one last bastion of news on CNN that was worth watching And I would tune in every night to Aaron Brown’s news night and you know they were trying to cover news and they gave you some variety And you know they gave you things to think about which is kind of why I watch news is to sort of set my agenda to give me things that I need to think about You know test my morals and my beliefs and give me something to think about basically and the early May on May 2nd in fact I remember the date because that was my birthday on May 2nd I was in New York and I was tuned into Anderson Cooper and the whole show was about this runaway bride This woman who basically George somebody who lives in Georgia and she was going to get married and she sort of didn’t show up at her own wedding And that’s not news I’m afraid I just don’t you know that happens every day and it’s not even I mean you just wonder how the hell do they justify it to themselves And how does Aaron Brown sleep at night because Aaron Brown is a journalist I thought or so I thought you know and and I love I’d love to hear what Jeff Greenfield would have to say about this you know and you know and I imagine basically he stays there because he gets paid really well to stay there But I think of him as a journalist but I can’t believe that he stays at CNN after they ’ve completely trashed their whole all their credibility is completely gone But their production values are very high at CNN in other words you won’t really hear too many you know on air mistakes Their voices are very professional Lou Dobbs knows exactly how to look into the camera so does Anderson Cooper while he’s being a complete fucking jerk They’re gonna have to oh sorry you have to bleep that one out you know just an aside I did so many takes on this to get started and I think the problem was you know I found myself talking about well how different is this from my normal podcast And I and my challenge was to make it not different from my normal podcast yet still try to say something relevant to a radio audience And there I use the F word and that sort of that sort of tells you that I have gotten out of my head because normally if you were like if we went out to dinner and we were just talking I probably would use that word in conversation when I felt you know like embellishing something or making it more colorful but you’re not allowed to use that word on the radio so And you’re also how many different masters are you serving when you talk on the radio think about it there’s the advertisers right There’s the station management there’s the owners of the station in this case infinity broadcasting there’s the owners of the owners which in this case is Viacom so it’s a congl omerate that owns many entertainment companies There’s the FCC that has a lot of say in what you can and can ’t say and then there’s the music industry so you know now they have been really good I just want to say this first of all I’m not being paid to do this This is a completely and this will be distributed through my normal channels and much the same way by the way I was a columnist at Wired magazine in the mid 90s And I had I did it the same way I mean they did pay me but it wasn’t very much and and I insisted that I’d be able to distribute my written work on the web and through email before You know when it was ready basically and that they could sort of pick whatever they wanted to out of that stream and run it in the magazine and that it be kind of an independent process And that was when it really worked when it really was independent but then as they hired more people and and the editorial my editors and the management at the magazine at first were just wonderful they were really great to work with They never interfered really never interfered with what I wanted to say and in fact encouraged me to be more original but as the publication grew and became more important and hired more people it became more difficult to say You know what I wanted to say and I was seeing more as a as a problem for them because well because I think they were mis interpreting things that I was saying but you know because political correctness drives communication And podcasting at its best really isn’t very politically correct let me just be really straight about that it also isn ’t really highly produced so you know I have what I think is a reasonably good radio voice But I’d like to think that this would still work even if I didn ’t have sort of a really good voice or sorry see that’s not politically correct you’re not supposed to praise yourself but frankly I think I’ve got a good voice so anyway Right it’s not about how good it is how polished it is how you’re the best at what you do that’s really important it’s a really important point of podcasting so if you’re flipping through the channels here on the radio dial as you ’re driving around in San Francisco And you happen to come across this and you know maybe you find it intriguing and if you do why do you find it intriguing and if you want to like answer that question You can send me an email at Dave. winer@gmail. com or you could go to podcatch. com and post a comment there because I ’ll put a place for you know for people to comment on this You may have to scroll down a little bit but you know at midnight it will be the top item there and it may not be the top item at noon when this is played later played the second time But what was I going to say? Right it may sound intriguing and then again it may sound like it doesn’t belong on the radio and I’ve had that kind of criticism a columnist at news.
com Charles Cooper wrote a piece He wrote a piece after the Democratic Convention which I mentioned before that I covered it along with I guess it was about 20 other bloggers I don’t remember the exact number but it was you know more than a handful And there was a lot of criticism of what we did and you know everybody has their own filters and of course I had mine too and this is what my filters told me they were saying was you guys don’t sound like Judy Woodruff or Wolf Bl itzer or Ted Koppel or Dan Rather or any of those people And you know they said it a little bit more like the quality sucks or these people don’t know what they’re doing or they’re only covering themselves or you know there’s no they’re not getting any news And to which I say a lot of different things it’s like well first of all it’s a convention so what happens at a convention everybody hangs out and schmoo zes with the people that are just like them that’s what they do And conventioneers from Ohio hang out with other convention delegates from Ohio. Duh. You know you might think well this is their opportunity to hang out with people from California but no they hang out with other delegates from Ohio because these are the people that they know Reporters hang out with other reporters. We saw that happen all over the place and I made an effort to work out of the working press room which I was allowed to do because I had a press pass and I made a point one day to work out of the working press room so that I could find out what it felt like to be a member of the working press And I sat next to people from the Washington Post and the Salt Lake City newspaper and A OL sent some people there who work on their website. They were there as well and the room was filled. It was interesting.
You know what was really interesting was to see how much what they do is exactly like what we do.
I mean they type stuff into web forms. They send emails out.
They have little mini recording booths that they carry around with them like us podcasters do . I was already podcasting. You can find some of those podcasts by the way at MorningCoffeeNot es. com. If you scroll down to the bottom you’ll see them there.
I just had a sip of coffee. By the way that’s another thing about a podcast. You’re allowed to drink coffee and everybody has to wait for you. I may actually go fill my coffee cup up too without even hitting pause. And guess what? At the radio station they won’t even edit that out because it’s part of the deal we have basically.
Anyway, where was I? Ding ding ding ding ding. Dave. Earth to Dave. Earth to Dave. What were we talking about? We were talking about the DNC and about getting around and well now would be a good time to go fill up my coffee cup then wouldn’t it? I guess I got distracted.
I’ll be right back. Yeah, I’m walking across the room now and there we go. There’s a coffee pot right now. I wonder if you can hear that. Yeah, now I’m going to open up the refrigerator and I’m going to take out a little bit of half a can because I like to have my coffee with some cream in it.
Yep. Right. Okay, so what’s another, sorry, I gotta remember where I was going. I remember that I went down to the broadcasters thing. Oh right, yeah, now I remember.
There we go. So the bloggers, right, we’re covering the blog gers. That’s what we were doing at the convention.
I like the Ohio delegates. We ’re hanging out with the Ohio delegates. We did get it out.
We did go to some parties. We did go to some breakfasts. We walked around places. We were allowed to walk around. We even walked around some places. We weren’t allowed to walk around.
We experienced the security, which was unbelievable. I mean, you know, it was really hot in Boston, so we told everybody how hot it was and how uncomfortable the whole climate was. We basically, what we did was we reported on what we saw, and that was the best we can do . That’s all we can do.
There’s no magic. We’re no better or no worse than the TV reporters are. They synthesize stories, but people sort of end up nodding off because their stories aren’t very interesting , and that’s just the way it is.
What goes on in a convention isn’t really all that incredibly newsworthy. It’s a bunch of people going to a convention and hanging out with each other and doing what people do at a convention, and that’s the story.
So, we pretty much carried the story, and we took a lot of heat from people because we didn’t have the polish. We were bloggers because we didn’t understand how the convention worked.
That was really funny because I was there at the opening moment of the convention, and I wrote into my blog. I forget exactly what it was. This thing is unbelievably boring, or it can ’t even make out what they’re saying, and there’s nobody in the room.
That’s not exactly true. The bloggers were there, but otherwise the place was kind of empty. You’d have these speakers would get up, and they would talk to the room, and they would say absolutely nothing, you know, the speakers .
They were people you’d never heard of, and nobody was there, and you’d go, “What the hell is going on here?” It wasn’t until later that I fully got it that what happens is that while the floor opens at 4pm and the speeches start at 4pm, that the convention doesn’t get rolling until the TV cameras come on at prime time, and what people are doing at 4pm is they ’re having their breakfast.
Why? Because they stayed up till 4am last night, the night before, that the whole schedule of a convention is totally ske wed towards night, and whether that’s because TV is there or because it’s always been that way, it’s very different from a computer industry convention where, you know, you sort of burn the candles at both ends.
I guess they do that too, but we were new to this, so we didn ’t know. You know, so you could take two different views of this.
One is, you could really hate us for doing that, and see an opportunity, kick us in the ass , and say, “Well, these people aren’t doing anything, and, you know, let’s just, let’s just, like, put them down for whatever reason. " Because some people like to put people down, I guess. I don’t know. Like Charles Cooper did.
Charles said that. Basically, this reporting sucks.
There’s a lot of hullabaloo about this, and they, in the end, they didn’t do anything.
But, you know, I beg to differ.
I think we told you what we saw , and we couldn’t have done anything more than that. We weren’t trying to be supermen and superwomen.
We were simply just trying to do what we do. That’s it. We got our eyes, we got our ears, we’ve got our key pads, keyboards, and we’ve got our fingers, and we can write stuff and take some pictures, and maybe do a podcast, and that’s it.
And you have to choose the people that you want to listen to, and one thing we can guarantee you, though, is that what you’re hearing is what we see.
Because we can’t color it, because we don’t have editors, and we don’t have the RIAA to account to, and we don’t have, we’re not owned by anybody, we’re not owned by, and they’re not owned by anybody, and we’re unregulated by the FCC.
And, you know, we’re all together. We do have our strings. I mean, you know, the fact is that the podcasting world is becoming kind of click ish, like the blogging world is clickish, and I’ve never been one to sort of want to be too much part of those clicks, and that’s why I sort of have a reputation of being a difficult person.
And I kind of actually have come to like that reputation, because it means that I’m not playing ball with anybody, I’m not playing footsie.
I mean, I don’t do business, and I do, and when I’m doing business, I do honor conf idences. You’ve got to do that, okay? And, but, on the other hand, is I’m going to say what I think, and if somebody is my friend, and I have to not say what I think, if I want to maintain the friendship, then generally speaking, the friendship goes, and I do say what I think.
Not enough, though, and I want to do more of that, because I ’ve had situations happen where I had a, I won’t say a friend, see, I don’t want to do that, but I had an acquaintance say to me that he made a deal with somebody, and I’m not allowed to talk about this, I’m embargoed, I can’t talk about it until a certain time, which is fine, I’m happy to take the embargo.
But, the person that he made a deal with is somebody that I had had a problem with, and I said, you know, in a way I wish that I had written about that problem, because you might have asked me about this deal before doing that, and maybe I could have saved you some grief, and maybe the world would have been a better place.
So, very often we’ll avoid the trouble, and not say the thing that’s perceived to be negative , you know.
And I’ve got to stop doing that , I’ve got to do less of that.
Anyway, so, you know, we’re trying to bring humanity into this, and it may not be a good match for broadcast radio for that reason, because traditionally broadcast radio has been polished more and more, I mean I grew up listening to AM Radio, I know when I was a kid, I’m 50 years old, exactly 50, it was 50 earlier this month on May 2 nd, and which means I’m a baby boom er, and it means that I grew up in the time when centralized media was, you know, coming online in all of its glory, and when I was like 5 years old, my grandfather gave me a transistor radio, a handheld transistor radio, which was the miracle technology of the day.
It was something that took a battery, and you could fit it in your hand, it had a little ear plug you could stick in your ear, and you could listen to the radio, it was a personal radio that was portable, and up until that point radios were not portable, and they didn’t run on batteries, and they weren’t cheap enough so that you could give one as a present to a child.
And I used to listen to Cousin Brucie on W-A-B-C-A-M in New York, Cousin Brucie played the Beatles, and he played the Dave Clark Five, and the Turtles, and Pet ula Clark, and then later, I don’t know if he got into the monkeys, because I think then, by that time, the next thing after that was W -N-E-W with Jonathan Schwartz.
Those were the hippie days, and later FM radio took over, and there was W-B-A-I in New York, it was really cool, and sort of a hippie radio station in New York, and radio was a big deal.
I grew up wanting to be a radio guy, and I never really was until I got a chance to podcast .
I became a software guy, and I lived in Silicon Valley for 22 years, and now I’m sort of moving around, I’m kind of unstuck, I’ve lived in Seattle, I’ve lived in Boston, I’m now living in Florida, maybe I’ll come back to the Bay Area at some point.
It certainly is interesting that the Bay Area is where this radio station is rooting itself , and I think it’s kind of appropriate, because the Bay Area has been host to so many cultural revolutions in the past, you know, whatever , past century, and there are so many interesting stories to tell that aren’t being covered on mass media, and this is a mass medium, absolutely, where podcasting is not mass medium, this is.
The whole challenge, of course, is to be able to transmit the very personal nature of podcast ing through the mass medium, and if it’s successful, and I kind of feel that it is going to be successful, I think San Francisco is a good place to do this.
Partially because it’s, you know, I have a lot of criticisms for Silicon Valley, I really think it’s kind of become anti-intellectual and too focused on marketing, and trying to be all these things that it really isn’t.
You know, Silicon Valley at its best should be focused on technology and users, and let media and commerce take care of itself.
Media and commerce are head quartered in New York, not in the Bay Area, and I don’t think they ever will be headquartered in the Bay Area.
I think the Bay Area wants to find its way.
It will be about technology, it will be about the little ones and zeros, and making them do their dance for the user’s benefit.
And a radio station that plays podcasts can actually be a very positive force for that.
I think that if done right, it will put some pressure on KQED FM, the public radio station in San Francisco, which public radio has become more and more like commercial radio.
It’s been more produced, more homogenized, more politically correct, less informative.
You know, yeah, it still is the best radio out there.
Maybe this will be better.
One of the things that I hope that they look into is IT conversations, which is one of the very earliest channels for podcast ing run by a guy named Doug Kay.
IT conversations goes to computer industry conferences, and they record speeches given by technology leaders.
Doug also does interviews with people, he’s like, for example, done an interview with me.
Lots of people that are active in the blogging world, in the technology world.
And more, I hope more and more, he has one up there that I want to listen to, that’s a speech given by Doug Engelbar, who is one of the heroes of the personal computer revolution.
Actually, it wasn’t IT conversations, it was Engadget.
Engadget also has a podcast, and they recently did an interview with Bill Gates, and it was marvelous, and Bill Gates really does have something to say.
And it had been a really long time since I heard Bill Gates, and this was Bill Gates talking at length, without being interrupted, without being edited, and it was Bill Gates that is most sort of spunky.
And Bill Gates can be pretty sp unky, he’s an intelligent guy, he’s got a twinkle, he’s got a twinkle, he’s got a twinkle in his eye when he’s going.
And it’s been a long time since Bill Gates has had this kind of energy, and I really, really, really, really enjoyed it.
And so, what KYOU can do for its community, which I know very well, is that it can help put the focus back on the intellectual life of technology.
There really is an intellectual side to technology, it isn’t about dumbing down, which is another thing that they do in media.
And to justify, basically justify lying to their listeners and their readers, by saying that, well, they wouldn’t understand it if we told them the truth.
Well, I beg to differ, they do understand when you’re lying to them, and it’s better to find a way to tell the truth and maybe confuse a few people, and then you do it again, and you’ll more people will get tuned in.
I think that you’ll be surprised to find that when you start throwing out some real data and some real opinions from people who do things, not just people who talk about doing things, or people who imitate people who do things, but the people who actually really do things.
Put them on the air, okay? Give them some time to talk, and let them be a little bit unpolished .
Let them sort of work it out and figure out their voice, their public voice.
Cut them so much slack that, you know, that they’re going to have, that they’ll relax about it, and they’ll be able to say what they have to say, and that we can all learn from them.
And that’s what I thirst for, and that’s what I’m searching for.
I’m searching for signs of intelligence, signs of generosity, people who have something that they’re passionately, passion ately want to say.
And frankly, not only don’t I care if it doesn’t come off with the greatest polish, I’m suspicious if it is too polished.
I think that if it’s polished, that means there had to be a team involved, and that team has to be paid by somebody, and that somebody who ’s paying them is owned by somebody, and they’re responsible to some government agency, and they have advertisers and business models, and you name it, all the way up and down the line.
There’s just so many ways that then it gets sliced and diced.
What I want to hear is I want to hear human communication with all of its frailty, with, you know, subject to all kinds of criticism, and then I want to defend it.
I want to say, now wait a minute, stop criticizing that person.
They’re taking a risk and you ’re not.
When you say that they’re not being, that they’re not polished, that it’s crap, what you’re doing is not contributing anything, what you ’re doing is you’re trying to subtract.
And I don’t like it when you do that.
At least there’s no harm in somebody saying something that is ineliquid.
And maybe, maybe there’s a great benefit if you actually do listen to what they have to say.
You know, think about a child who comes home from school, kindergarten, comes home from school with a painting, a picture, or some kind of a drawing, or maybe a sculpture, and shows it to the parent, or uncle, or aunt, or grandparent, or just neighborhood friend, and says, “Here, this is what I created today. " And so what do you say to that child when they show you their piece of creativity? Well, you don’t say, “Well, that’s crap,” or when you’re asked about the whole kindergarten class, and say, “Well, it’s nothing but crap. It’s not even worth looking at. " You don’t say that, because you understand that there is something precious happening there.
There is something that requires protection, and there ’s something beautiful there, that there’s a little human being, a new person, who is trying to communicate something to you, to tell you a story, to tell you basically nothing more, maybe, than, “This is how the world looks from down here, from my eyes. " And that’s precious, and it’s not just shouldn’t be something that is just reserved for children.
It’s something that we, as adults, have lost something when we forget that we are also creative beings capable of ours .
Capable of moving each other, and touching each other, and really experiencing our own and each other’s humanity.
And that, in a sense, maybe that is the only reason we’re actually here.
And that’s what, when Marshall McLuhan says, “This is what I think he means,” when he says, “The medium is the message. " That really, we are a communicating species. That’s really what we do.
And when the communication works, we’re capable of miracles of generosity and creativity.
And when communication stops working, we end up with global warming.
We have crazy wars that just don’t make any sense, and we do things that long-term probably aren’t very smart things to do.
And it, my feeling, and you know, gotta know where I’m coming from. I’m a liberal, and I’m not ashamed of it.
And when a conservative says, " You’re a liberal,” I go, “Yeah, and I’m a gun-tomb liberal. " And you better, you know, I’m not one of these guys who shir ks.
I just, you know, you come at me, I’m getting in your face.
And which is, I think, how the conservatives often win is through intimidation. We’re not gonna stand up for what we believe in.
But that’s where I’m coming from, and that’s what my filters say.
But I think that if, and I’ve actually had this experience, and I’m about at the 40-minute point, which is where most podcasts seem to stop.
I’m not gonna wind this down, but I had a wonderful experience at a conference at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University earlier this year.
It was a conference on blogging journalism and credibility, and they had bloggers and journalists there, and they had some left-wing bloggers like myself, and they had some right -wing bloggers too.
John Hinderaker from Powerline was there, and Powerline was the blog, basically, that outed Dan Rather, and then stayed on the case, and eventually forced Rather out of his position as anchor at CBS News.
And, you know, he’s a right- wing guy, and I’m a left-wing guy, and you would think that, well, you know, we wouldn’t have a whole lot to agree on.
And at a level that’s much deeper than our personal politics, we agree at a very deep philosophical level about this whole idea of responsibility and democracy and communication.
One of our obligations, we have an obligation to be active politically. Whether I agree with you or I don’t agree with you, I insist not only do you have the right to do that, but I believe you have the obligation to share your political views, to listen to other political views, to try to convince people and to let yourself be convinced that this is the most important part of being an American.
Whether you’re Republican or conservative, or liberal or Democrat, I think that this was the amazing thing about this meeting was that I found that we were basically brothers on this one, that we agree completely.
And I think it’s so much more important than the individual politics and who you voted for, and, you know, if you were to ask me, who do I have more in common with? And then there’s no question Dan Rather is a liberal. At least I don’t think there’s any question. I don’t feel that there’s any question.
But if you ask me, who do I have more in common with, Dan Rather or John Hinderaker? I’d say John Hinderaker in a mile, by a mile. No question about it .
So is there something profound, something important going on here, where it leads you to a statement like that? No question that there’s something important going on here.
There’s something going on politically and intellectually.
And I think that culturally and technologically as well.
So I’m going to leave it on that note. I really am honored to be allowed to be the first broadcast, podcaster in the United States.
And I encourage you to come by my, any one of my different sites, whether it be scripting.
com, which is my blog, or morningcoffinodes. com, which is my podcast, or podcatch. com, which is the community site for podcasting.
So anyway, that’s morning coffee notes for the 15th of May, 2005. This is Dave Winer.
I hope you’re all doing great.
Have a great day, and I’ll see you real soon. Okay, bye.
Okay, bye.
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