Comic Relief via Shortwave
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Harry Shearer, a familiar voice on âThe Simpsons,â takes radio to heart, especially his Sangean.
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I don't have an office, and I'm not running a conference, so I hope to hook up with someone, hopefully in the Bay Area, with either of these, to try some experimentation with FlickrFan. First a little background... My first glimpse of how wonderful news photography and screen savers are together was when I visited Andy Rhinehart at the Spartanburg Herald-Journal on 2/15/05. He had to go to a meeting, and left me in his office to check email, update my blog using my laptop. HIs PC of course went into screen saver mode, and started showing pictures of various political leaders in meetings around the world and sporting events, people digging out of snow storms. It didn't take long before my eyes were fixed on his screen.  Later I found out that everyone at AP does this too.  If you have a folder of new pictures on your LAN it makes a fantastic source of distraction. But it's different from video because it's silent. You can have a conversation about what's on the screen without interfering with it, or try to have a conversation about something else entirely.  This is something we noticed about podcasting too, that sometimes less is more. Because there is no video you can: 1. Use your eyes for something else, like driving, walking, doing housework. 2. Use your imagination in ways you can't with video, imagine what the speakers look like, where they are, who else is there. Once your imagination is activated in one direction it goes off in others.  So photocasting or picturecatching, whatever it ends up being called, has a similar "less is more" dimension.  So then I tried an experiment, I put an early version of FlickrFan on a 46-inch screen in my den, and when people would come over to visit I'd leave it running and we'd talk about whatever we were going to talk about, and I wasn't surprised to see the attention drift over to the TV. It's captivating. So I'd like to try it in two new venues to see what happens. 1. In a reception area in an office. Imagine one of the buildings at Microsoft. Or a doctors office, or the lobby of a VC firm. Install a big flatscreen TV on the wall, with a Mac Mini behind it, with a net connection, and let it run. See if people don't gravitate to it. See if people don't want to have meetings in the lobby. (I think some might.) 2. At a conference, like Demo or Davos, scatter four screens around the main lobby (not the meeting room), with one Mac driving them all or each with its own Mac Mini. Again see how it affects the dynamic. You might want to show pictures taken at the conference for a unique recursive effect. Or just use the AP news photo feed. Either would be sufficient to learn how it works. I bet we would learn a lot. Let me know if you decide to give it a try, and by all means please blog about your experiences, share what you learn with the rest of us.
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Also: DJ alert: Crack for music techies. See what people are saying on News.com Extra.
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Blog: Device from Immersive Media may be  funny looking, but boy does it get all the angles.
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Tycho: Some of you have probably already heard it, since I put it up yesterday - but we're trying new hosting for the podcast, and I wanted to make sure everything made sense before I dropped it on the front page. The podcast is for Wednesday's strip, "The Ungift, Part Two." You can download it here, or subscribe to the feed here. The levels are a little crazy in a couple spots, for which I apologize. I think we've got those ironed out, now. (CW)TB
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Here's a screen shot of the HTML source.  Looks like it's trying to serve some kind of ActiveX control. Happy to be using a Mac.  PS: Scoble just showed up and TM works on his cell phone so there's something weird going on.
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Scientists develop a device thousands of times smaller than a human hair that can turn radio waves into sound.
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Eleven days ago I wrote a blog post describing a call-in service that I'd like to use to create a podcast with my friend and fellow blogger Robert Scoble. A new service (or one that I just became aware of) comes achingly close to doing what I want. Maybe it goes all the way there, but I've not seen how to do it. First, here's how it works. 1. Call 646-495-9201 x 49763. 2. Talk. 3. Hangup. There will be a new recording here.  http://drop.io/tradesecrets  Looks good!  But there are two problems. 1. The RSS feed doesn't have an enclosure, and even if you were willing to scrape the HTML there's no pointer to an MP3 file. 2. There's no pointer to an MP3 file on the landing page, although there appears to be one if you don't look at the HTML source. Tricky. It was enough to get Mike Arrington at Techcrunch to think it was there. I have a call into Mike to discuss. A caveat, I am also in touch with the folks at BlogTalkRadio. I want this service, and we're close to having it now. drop.io doesn't go quite far enough, they clearly want to drive traffic to their site, and appear unwilling to let the MP3 out into the wild. Interesting stuff!!  Update: I did a podcast with Robert and Patrick Scoble using drop.io. I was able to download the MP3, although it pretty well hidden, and upload it to my S3 account.
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Internet radio service Mercora introduces an application that streams music libraries wirelessly. Images: Mercora's "M"
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Will HD radio be enough to keep listeners tuned in?
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By Linda P. Campbell, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas  Jun. 21--Smiling Bob must be laughing now.   You know Bob, though you might not have spied him as much lately.
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Inventors claim they've developed a way for a single radio to work simultaneously over a variety of networks such as 3G, WiMAX and Wi-Fi.
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A new study addressing the quality of AM broadcasts when stations reduce  the bandwidth of their transmitted signals to below 10 kHz is providing  the National Radio Systems Committee (NRSC) with valuable information on  possible ways to improve the listener experience with AM radio.
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Tycho:  We were getting our hands on a four gig CompactFlash for the podcast recorder when the "friendly staff" gave us an idea for a new comic.  Thank you, friendly staff!  May nothing ever happen to your... staff.
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Electronic devices are starting to come equipped with a short-range, high-speed wireless radio technology known as ultrawideband.
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The portable stereos that ruled city streets in the 1980s aren't shipping in high volumes anymore. But some sound artists are finding new ways to incorporate the devices into performances and ad-hoc radio networks. By Elizabeth Biddlecombe.
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A couple of small--but serious--issues regarding the audio output of the iPhone have been percolating on the Web for the last week or so.  From Crave, CNET's gadgets blog.