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Steve Gillmor may be back on the air as soon as tonight. Yehi! The Gang can't be far behind. Happy days are here again.  A late afternoon Morning Coffee Notes podcast (better late than never) about advertising in RSS, a vignette about the twisty world of 21st century radio, and an apology for the delay of the conversation-starters.  
PublicRadioFeeds.com is "the most comprehensive list of public radio podcasts on the Internet."  Billboard: Limbaugh Joins Podcasting Crowd.  SF Chronicle: "Podcasters took over a San Francisco radio station Monday, replacing traditional radio personalities like Don Imus with a homespun potpourri of shows featuring independent musicians, martini-making and mortality."  Google announces the beta of "AdSense for Feeds."  Sorry we're going to have to wait 24 hours for the conversation-starters to start the conversations. There's a bit more coordinating here than I would like, but I guess a few more hours won't hurt.  
Peter Day: In Pod We Trust.  I'm vaguely aware that Newsweek stepped in something as nasty as the stuff CBS stepped in last year. I'm catching it out of the corner of my eye as I scroll through my River of News aggregator on a day when I'm busy creating news instead of reading news.
It's a new regime. Set expectations super-low. That way we can only be surprised by good news instead of bad. Make lemonade! PS: Here's some synchronicity. I went looking for a picture of a lemon, and tripped over a picture of Cynsa Bonorris, who I worked with on the SF strike paper website in 1994, which I discuss below. She's part of a singing duet called Lemon Ju Ju. More godcasting for y'all.
Anyway, it turns out someone at KYOU has a sense of humor, or a sense of what's appropriate, because yesterday, during the drive time commute, they ran a podcaster who records his casts during his commute! Think about it. What a turnabout. Instead of being stuck in traffic listening to a predictable formulaic format, or at best Morning Edition on NPR, now the bored listeners are doing the programming. This struck me as amazing. The podcasting revolution has completed its mission in some sense, in a remarkably short period of time. Let me tell you a story that explains why I feel this way. A couple of years ago stuck in Boston traffic listening to a yet another WBUR pledge drive and thinking about technology that could turn this crap off for people like me who pay their NPR bill like a utility bill, I finally figured something out when the station manager, Jane Cristo, came on and said something that would be often repeated in the days ahead (my guess is that their marketing people decided it would be the theme of the pledge drive). This is your station, she said. You're the owners. We depend on your to pay the bills, that way we are only responsible to you, and blah blah blah and on and on, in the usual repetitive pledge drive way of doing things. This got me thinking. If I own this place, what can I do with it? So when I got into work I called the offices of WBUR and asked to speak with Ms Cristo. When asked who's calling, I gave my name, Dave Winer, and my role -- owner of the station. No one got the joke. I did get to speak with a vice-president, and I asked the question, what can I do with my ownership, and seriously don't you think you should stop saying that since it's total bullshit? He sent me a station prospectus, kind of an annual report, with some nice pictures, glossy and puffy, and numbers that meant nothing to me. Thinking more about it I realized that the role of an owner of a public radio station is twofold. You listen and you pay. Occasionally, if you don't mind waiting and getting totally nervous, you can call in and ask a question of an expert -- someone who is probably just saying politically correct bullshit, but you never get to speak, what you think isn't important, your job is to pay, and if you like, listen, while they lull you to sleep with their relaxing talk that's only intelligent when compared to the other crap that's on the radio. So yesterday when I heard about the commuter musing about his mortality during drivetime while other San Franciscans were caught in the horrible traffic in the Bay Area, I let out a satisfied chuckle. I had lived long enough. I could now die a happy man. As they say in Apache Land when an install is successfully completed: It worked!
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