Joe Urban on Denver’s Public Transit

“The bottom line is that good transit is frequent, affordable, easy to use and takes you where you want to go.” – Sam Newberg

Sam really likes Denver. Unlike some other friends of mine.

Personally, I’ve never been. Just around. Airport, Boulder, Broomfield. Though I’m always happy to hear when public transit works. I’m optimistic, but walking or bikes always seem to make more sense.

(disclosure: Sam’s a friend/client)

Doc and Hugh, To the Rescue

Because I’m such a Doc Searls and Hugh MacLeod fan, I re-subscribed to a podcast I long ago dismissed (only because I couldn’t download the individual files from the podsh** website.)

Looks like I’m not the only one regretting this decision:

“Attention Doc Searls: if you ever create your own podcast, please let us know. I’d take an hour of you reading recipies from a cookbook over listening to the roundtable from hell.” – Craig Maloney

Same goes for Hugh Macleod.

Tip to everyone else in this situation: the roundtable from hell starts after the 4 minute mark.

In Need of a Rural Internet-ification Administration

This country is vast. “Miles and miles of little more than telephone line”, I wrote last summer after half-cross country road trip.

The costs of providing and maintaining that infrastructure miles and miles between neighbors is baffling to me. Let along the fact we electrified the cornfields 70 years ago.

But, unlike energy – we can’t get broadband internet access from the wind and water around us. Something has to literally connect us to the rest of the world – and fast (in both senses of the word).

Internet access has an interesting potential to revive dying rural towns – for the exact same reason it’s helping India, China, Brazil, Russia, and Eastern Europe – people can work worldwide, get paid worldwide-ish wages, and maintain a lower cost of living.

This is why customer call centers are in the Dakotas.

50 years ago – electricity and telephone service meant survival, today – it’s high-speed internet access.

Compare this from the Wikipedia entry on the Rural Utilities Service:

“Many were critical of the decision, in particular private electricity utilities, who argued that the government had no right to compete with private enterprise (though many of those utilities refused to extend their lines to rural areas, claiming lack of potential profitability as the reason)”

And this from With a Dish, Broadband Goes Rural in the New York Times:

“Roughly 15 million households cannot get broadband from their phone or cable provider because the companies have been slow to expand their high-speed networks in areas where there are not enough customers to generate what they regard as an adequate profit.”

The mindset of the incumbents hasn’t changed in 70 years – we need a Rural Internet-ification Administration to bring new life to our rural areas.

Thanks to PFHyper for the pointer

Measuring What You Can’t Automate

“[I] think how much better it would be if we could just measure how much people care.” – Dave Slusher

Like Dave, I don’t understand the fascination with measuring downloads. Well, I take that back – I understand it for producers trying to woo advertisers. I don’t understand why advertisers would want to base their ad buy on download stats. Downloads don’t equal listeners, fans, or impressions.

Requests for downloads are not full downloads.
Full downloads are not plays.
Plays are not listens.
Listens are not engaged.
Engaged are not customers.

And as Dave points out, download requests can be automated.

Kris Smith’s CastLock application provides unique feed urls and could be spun out to deliver a custom, complimentary ad (or other) message to individual subscribers – based on some measure of engagement (i.e. some bastardized quantification of caring).

As early-stage as it is, it still provides more useful metrics than download stats. Mapping individual listeners to customer purchases still needs some work, but the gap would be shorter.

The real question is – what’s the Effort/Engagement ratio of a publication like a podcast or weblog. I’m glad you’re reading this, and I’m glad you know who I am. That’s return enough for me.

ELSEWHERE:

“Any website that attempts to improve time spent on every page (or pageviews for that matter) is just wasting time. What matters is intent. Permission. Action. Retention. Likelihood that ideas get spread. Clickthroughs.” – Seth Godin

Blogging as Image Control

“Leonsis is what you might call a defensive blogger. His main goal isn’t to enter into a ‘conversation’ with the AOL ‘community,’ but just to gain more control over the results that show up when people google him.” – Nick Carr

If you have blog and it isn’t the first thing that comes up in searches for your name – there’s something seriously wrong. I see nothing wrong with this strategy – often times, it’s the easiest strategy for people to glean when I talk about reasons to blog.

Whether this strategy is ‘cluetrain-friendly’ is a separate issue. It is however far better than someone other than yourself controlling your search results.

Related: Take Control of Your Reputation – Blog

Computers and Cars: Differences and Similarities

Driving around this weekend with the family and the dome light in the car wouldn’t turn off. An irritation for sure, but not as serious an issue as the speedometer, tachometer, or odometer not functioning at all. Freaky.

Scouring through the owners manual while still on the road, we came up with nothing. Not even sure why Chrysler spent the money on printing, all it did was frustrate us more.

Also this week, my decade-plus-old Apple Personal LaserWriter 300 came home after a long absence. This printer is a workhorse – printing on anything that’ll fit in the paper slot

Unfortunately, despite having the hardware to bring the printer into the home network, none of computers we use these days have the software to recognize it. I suppose it goes on a shelf next to my Remington Rands and Smith Coronas.

Imagine if your car no longer fit on the road. Baffling.

Studying Buggywhips

“‘Go forth and make media,’ I told the group. ‘You want to be a journalist, be one! There’s no badge that makes you one, no degree, no license (thank God and the founding fathers), no credentials and no special anointing from the New York Times. So just do it.’ This again drew a few moans and rolled eyes.” – Terry Heaton

Maybe there was a time when Bachelor-level studies prepped people to lead a profession. I’m not confident. For me, it was 4 years of understanding background, history, and gaining basic skills like critical thinking and taking criticism. A few years back I explored going back to school to get a better foundation for some of the things I’m doing today. In the end, I decided that 2 years doing in the “real world” would better serve me.

To those rolling their eyes – I didn’t graduate that long ago, and what I’m doing today didn’t exist then. The profession I thought I wanted to get into turned out to be really, really boring and not as cool as I thought it would be.

😉

The 5 Needs of Internet Tools

“So why did YouTube catch on? Simple — free storage.” – Dave Winer

Exactly. In YouTube’s case, I’d also throw in format conversion. Converting video into a format that is small and viewable by anyone with a Flash player is a opaque and geeky process. The reason they clicked – they did the conversion and spit back the html code.

This reminds me of this Help Needed Here checklist. Right now, it’s a list of 5 areas where our current tools aren’t that helpful. While it will rarely make sense for any single tool to provide answers to all 5, the more the better.

  • Aggregation (everything that’s interesting to me in one spot)
  • Bandwidth (so we won’t need to worry about becoming popular)
  • Conversion (video formats, presentation formats, bandwidth, and devices)
  • Filtering (Spam, news, etc)
  • Storage (video, audio, games, backups, sharing)

I’ve explicitly left off ‘community’ because these 5 attributes are pre-requisites for an online community.