The people formerly known as the audience

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The phrase above is attributed to Jay Rosen, a blogger and journalism professor at New York University. I thought it nicely summed up an article written by Katharine Q. Seelye (Answering Back to the News Media, Using the Internet). Subjects of newspaper articles and news boradcasts taping interviews, gathering email exchanges, taking notes on phone conversations…and publishing them on their own web sites or blogs, creating a new world where the audience and sources are publishers.

As far as I know, this has not happened to any of the reporters that work for our various radio news networks. But it will. One of our guys (intended as gender-neutral) will record an interview and pull some “cuts” for the story. The person being interviewed will be recording the interview as well. And they’ll post the full transcript (or the audio) on their website. Not necessarily to question the accuracy of our story, but just to let the public see what we did –and did not– include. Is this “fair” or “okay?” Don’t know. But that’s beside the point. It’s happening.

If is was a hot topic, I’d post the entire interview myself. Unedited. [Thanks, Morris.]

Retirement: Relic of the Industrial Age

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“Funny thing about getting older. Time goes faster. When you’re young you do time on the bunny slope, easing along at a slow and careful pace. Then as you grow up and become an adult, you go over to the intermediate slope, making the most of time rushing by. Not quite finally, as your dotage approaches, you move over to the black diamond slope, and you carreen downward to Certain Death. … I’m enjoying work now more than ever, running life’s slalom like a wacko skier in a Warren Miller movie. The certainty of death doesn’t bother me. If anything, it motivates me. But the word “retirement” creeps me out. It’s a relic of the Industrial Age I’ve devoted my life to ending.” — Doc Searls

Every time the idea of “retirement” comes up, I’m the only one in the room who hopes to work until the day I die. It’s comforting to know there are others out there.

Images from the Shell Museum

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SeashellsHenry has a terrific tag line on his web site: “Creating wonder and delight through fine art nature photography.”

I’ve posted on his work a number of times. He recently spent some time at the Shell Museum in Santibel, Florida, and brought back some amazing images.

She sells seashells on the seashore;
The shells that she sells are seashells I’m sure.
So if she sells seashells on the seashore,
I’m sure that the shells are seashore shells.

Learfield Interactive

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I have three “pet projects” (for lack of a better description) at work. They make a little money but not much. One could make a good argument that these are things we shouldn’t be messing with. But I am quite proud of them and today seems like a good time to bench-mark them.

Legislature.com (how lucky were we to get that domain?) has to be one of the more expensive subscription services on the net. We charge $750 a year for a live stream of debate audio from the Missouri House and Senate. All the more amazing since those two bodies offer a live stream for free. In addition to the live stream, we archive each day’s debate. We’ve got it all going back to 2002. Don’t ask me “who cares?” because I don’t know. It’s a little bit of history and it seemed dumb to discard it.

UPDATE: We registered Legislature.com on September 16, 1999. Roger Gardner called me the day before and asked if the domain was available. I assured him someone had snapped it up but had our IT guy (Phil Atkinson) check. Lo and behold, it was available. Not many one-word domains still up for grabs in 1999.  Post-Dispatch story on Legislature.com 5/14/00 (PDF)

Supreme Court of Missouri Oral Arguments. Very dry stuff. We stream audio of the oral arguments before the court, and then we archive it. 637 cases, dating back to December 14, 1999. The service has been free until just recently, when we started charging an annual subscription of $99. [We started doing this in January of 2000.]

So we have the audio of the state legislature making the laws…and the audio of the state supreme court interpreting many of those laws. While I don’t care that much about the process, saving this audio record just seem very cool to me.

Last, but not least… Missouri State Highway Patrol Crash Reports. These are the initial reports filled out by the state troopers and radioed back to the dispatcher. He or she then enters the information into a computer and it gets distributed to various points around the state. Several years ago, Phil did a little hack that put the reports on a website which, today, easily generates 800,000 Page Views a month. There’s a free, “public” version of the site…and a “premium” subscription service which includes a searchable database of reports going back to the beginning of 2004. Two years of crash reports. God (and maybe Andy and Phil) know how many files that might be. Thousands. Hundreds of thousands? A shit load.

A good businessman would tell you these projects are “distractions” that “dilute” our efforts from our “core businesses.” Which, for the most part, is selling 30 and 60 second commercials on radio networks. I think it’s a credit to our company that they let me (and others) explore these murky, digital waters. But I wonder… if I went to that Big Blogging Convention in the sky tomorrow, would anyone keep these projects going?

Dave Winer: Are we more than our stories?

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Could it be that our purpose is to tell a story, and that the better lived a life is, the better the story that survives after you’re gone?

An intriguing question posed by Dave Winer (a couple of years ago). If I read the post correctly, he’s wondering if there is really more to us than the stories we tell. For those of us that attempt to share our hopes and fears, successes and failures (in journals like this one)…is there really more to us than our blogs? Reminds me of a great T-Shirt David (Brazeal) found on someone’s blog: Enough about me. Let’s talk about my blog.