Good Morning Boston

Well, I'm off to Beyond Broadcast.

It's really cold... and very early. And really, really cold. Did I say that?

left: view from my hotel window

IMA 2007 - Friday - Election Smackdown and Other Delights

Today was the final day of the Public Media Conference in Boston. It was my second day here. This morning I attended a meaty session on covering elections with BBC's Paul Brannon, Bob Collins from MPR and others. A lot of great ideas here. Naturally, I will shamelessly steal the best ones for our '08 page.

This afternoon Michael Skoler moderated a fast paced session on "news games," which convey journalistic information in an entertaining and interactive format. Check some of these out.

Thursday night we made our way over to Jury's Hotel for the Open Source listener party and enjoyed a few minutes with Open Source staffers Brendan, Mary, Chris, David, Greta along with a great group of blog-contributing listeners. It was a fascinating example of virtual entities colliding in real space. I thought I heard a couple of guests speaking hexidecimal, but it might have been binary. I'm rusty. Some pics here, including one extra goony one of me.

Speaking of flattering photos, here's one of my outstanding station manager Tom Dollenmayer, who departs Saturday morning for Tampa... I'll be sticking around one more day for the Beyond Broadcast workshop.

It's been a good gathering so far, despite all of the gloomy prognostications and angst ridden warnings of tectonic shifts in the industry.

The bright side: This place is filled with smart, engaged people who get it.

IMA 2007 - Thursday - Social Media 201

The Social Media 201 should have been booked in a room twice the size. Our hosts Brendan Greeley and Andy Carvin did a great job of expanding on the usefulness of RSS feeds and explaining Technorati and Google Blog Search functions. We discussed the relative merits of registration (ie. valid email, zip code) and to what degree asking for this kind of information can act as a disincentive to participation on public media sites. (photo:dsearles/flickr)

A lot of folks brought up the usual doomsday scenarios and worried long and loud about credibility and civility in discourse. Both Andy and Brendan leaned strongly away from the idea of active moderation, suggesting that moderation sets you up for failure. Both suggest that you need give the community flagging tools to eject trolls, axe grinders and other ne'er-do-wells. Brendan suggested that you simply need to trust that the community will police itself, and deal with the consequences as a problem arises.

This paranoia about blogs and social media experiments is something I think about frequently, considering all of the lip service paid to the special "trust relationship" between the audience and public broadcasters. I'm struck by the apparent hypocrisy implied by our resistance to true engagement, and the impulse Brendan identified toward "ghettoization" of public commentary on news sites. It seems to me, that just as in any healthy relationship, trust means trust. It's a two-way street.

One other noteworthy comment from Open Source's Blogger in Chief, who made the following (paraphrased) remarks about the listener blogger community:

Everyone worries about how to punish offenders or how to solve problems - but what people don't realize is that once the community organizes, your major concern quickly shifts to 1. how to handle the massive flow of "good stuff," 2. what to do with it, and 3. how to let people know that you are paying attention.

Other notes:
There was some discussion of how to use Technorati and Google Blog Search to find good story and program ideas, by linking into the mundane detail of real people's lives.

On the video side, Andy said that Blip.tv is a good video provider because it doesn't force you into branding like You Tube, and it is more respectful of copyright issues.

Brendan recommended one of my favorites, Andrew Sullivan's blog, "The Daily Dish" as good example of how to effectively integrate photos, video and storytelling.

WNYC is developing an open source player that will be embeddable in blogs as a way to present public media content in the blogosphere, and to encourage linkbacks to the station site.