Community Broadcast Centre

More on the New Media Nexus

The staff of the Times Picayune, the local New Orleans paper - had to evacuate their building. But they still kept up their business of reporting and are relying mainly on a web based version.

Here is the link

As well as reporting they are also becoming the local Nexus - they have set up a template for Forums where for instance students and staff of schools can contact each other. By offering a template, they are enabling a wide variety of forums to emerge that an editor may have missed. But by being the Paper of Record for NOLA, they create the nexus where all are one click away from the information that they can offer or seek.

This is a powerful example of how the old and the new media can come together as a Nexus.

The gripping article about this follows in full as the Times will not keep their links

The Future of TV - RocketBoom

From Business Week Online

Rocketboom is a video blog, posted at rocketboom.com, and in 10 months it has become the most popular site of its kind on the Net. The brainchild of former musician Andrew Michael Baron, who writes the shows with Congdon, the three-minute mock news program covers everything from tech trends to pop culture with frank irreverence, sly humor, and a big dollop of unabashed silliness.

The approach is resonating with viewers. Daily downloads have doubled in the past six weeks, to 50,000. If they stay on that pace, they'll soon approach the 200,000 viewers of an established cable show, such as CNBC's Kudlow & Cramer. "There was this excitement early on that we videobloggers were at the forefront of something, but we didn't know what would happen," says Baron.

These are the early days of video blogging. Most of the postings on the Web are rough and tedious -- little more than home movies. But the success of Rocketboom and a few sites like it underscore the potential of video blogs. Cheaper video recorders mean just about anyone can make videos, while the spread of speedy Net service means almost anybody can watch clips posted online. The result? The Internet is coming alive with a mix of video, from the polished parody of Rocketboom to the raw interviews of reporters. As these videos flow into the living room, they will reshape what we think of as television. "TV will be transformed," says Mitchell Kapor, the founder of Lotus Development Corp. (IBM ) and now an investor in Participatory Culture, an online video startup. "People will look at it as historically quaint that you had to watch something that others chose for you."

Congdon and Baron have no doubt their quirky show is the future. So while Rocketboom shows are lighthearted, the two are dead serious about their work. They post new episodes every weekday morning, beginning the process by looking online for news and reading through suggestions from viewers and six correspondents in the U.S. and Europe. After e-mailing the script back and forth, they meet around 6 p.m. in downtown Manhattan to record the show in a pea-green conference room in a turn-of-the-century building.

CBC On the Line Aggregator of CBC Bloggers

Here is a good source of general CBC News - they are looking for CBC staffers who are bored with picketing to blog

CBC Regina Podcast

Here they are

Podcasting on the future of CBC and Community Radio

This afternoon David Cormier and I met in his house to record a podcast about the future of community media. One of our topics was the potential for e new CBC to emerge from the staff. and to take over the support and hence funding from Canada. We did not know then of the plan to put on a serious alternative.

Here is the link to David's site and the podcast.

It is a wide ranging discussion that includes:

• How journalistic freedom is enhanced on community media
• A guide to not being too stupid as a blogger/podcaster
• We answer the question of will you get a job if you blog by saying will there be any good jobs in traditional media soon
• Why you can be like Pat Robertson and get away with murder - if you own your own station - which of course you can
• Why soon if you don't have a web presence - you wont exist
• Why truth and transparency will out secrets and self service - we talk a lot about Robert Scoble and Microsoft - in a good way
• The paradox of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs - listen and you will find out
• Why the web is like PEI - why it is a bad idea to diss people in front of those that you don't know
• What we are trying to achieve with this site
• What is the future for CBC
• What are the new economics for the new CBC and why these will win
• Why the bigger and the blander is better model is dying
• How you can help birth the new CBC

CBC- the real alternative - it's coming!!!!!

CBC Staffers met this week in Toronto to organize a new national network!

Snip:

As CBC management tries to inject a few Canadian items into its backup news programming, locked-out CBC staff are organizing an alternate national news and current-events broadcast via the Internet from Toronto.

From day one of the lockout which began last week, restless CBC reporters, writers and producers have been talking about finding alternative means to do their jobs. Already there have been small Internet-based radio programs created by locked-out CBC staff in Calgary and Vancouver, which have aired on local university stations.

On Tuesday at midday, around 150 CBC writers, producers and announcers from the broadcasters' TV, radio and web-based services, English and French, met in a room in Toronto's Metro Hall, across from the CBC's downtown headquarters, to plan an alternative national service to start as soon as Monday.

According to Mark O'Neill, producer for CBC Radio One's Toronto drive-time show Here & Now, who is helping to co-ordinate the project, the alternative national news service will initially be an Internet news site, with written reports and photographs from individual CBC staff members from across the country.

By the following Monday, the CBC staffers hope to be producing a regular national radio broadcast, which will be downloadable on the Internet. There are plans also to make the feed available to campus and co-op radio stations across Canada, some of which have already expressed interest in running the show. The central office for the project is in Toronto's central Annex neighbourhood, and the initial budget for the planned national show, modelled roughly on The World at Six and As It Happens, is a few thousand dollars being provided by the locked-out Canadian Media Guild.

"There is no possible way of replacing the CBC, and everybody recognizes that. But if we can organize ourselves to continue to get some quality news and analysis out to people, why wouldn't we?" said one union official.

In addition to this national show, a team of CBC staff is also working on an alternative CBC radio morning show in Toronto, which a local campus station could pick up, similar to what has already been tried in Vancouver and Calgary.

So imagine - it is October. The CBC staffers produce 50 hours of quality content a week and have plans for a full service. Who then is the real CBC? Where should our tax dollars go?

Your direct link into the CBC Staffer's world

Here is the CMG Vancouver site

CBC Unplugged podcasts from here

Alternative Radio or Not - that is the Question

Here is a great discussion via Peter linked to Dan Misener

The New Media - Making the small big?

I have added a new list today of useful new media links. It has a Community news and PEI focus now but we can expand this to take in all sorts of interests. Please let me know, as Sonia did in her post of how to get radio online, if you have some links that would be helpful to add. The links are all about small is getting big.

Small is getting big. What do I mean by this?

In the 1870's my grandfather walked from a small town on the Quebec border to Montreal. He was 16 and one of 8 kids. The small 100 acre farm could no longer support him. In time, all his brothers and sisters joined him and, in the end, so did his parents. They abandoned the farm. They moved to the city because only by being in a big city could you get enough work and opportunity to support your family. Young ambitious men and women still make this trip today. But such a migration is no longer essential. There could be a new migration back to rural life. This has been made possible by the web.

Take me for instance. I spent all my formative years working from a large urban base. But for the last 10 years I have worked for myself and have lived on PEI. When I first arrived in 1995, I did feel cut off from much of what the big city offered. But now!

I start the day by reading my aggregator and catching up with all my friends - many of whom I have made via blogging. I read the New York Times and Business Week Online. As I read I often listen to the BBC. My business partners both live in Toronto as does my daughter and my son lives in Montreal. I still have friends in the UK and Skype has been a boon. My sister lives in the Turks and now with Skype we can afford to talk. I bank online. I buy books, music clothes and stuff online - I have more choice than I did 10 years ago in town without all the hassle. Working at home, I get my office social life at the Commons but I am only 8 minutes from home. I teach online so I can be off Island and still meet my commitments. I was in New York last semester and have taught from Thailand in the past.

So what's my point? My point is that if you live by your mind, you no longer have to be in a big city. You can choose to live in a nice place like PEI. Part of nice is that a little money here goes a long way in terms of a house. I have a dream property that I could never have afforded within 200 miles of Toronto. You can too. My commute - 1 minute from the coffee machine to my home office or 8 minutes to town.

So dear readers. If you are of a certain age. If you make your living by selling ideas. Then you give up little by moving to a nice place. So what is the catch? Actually there are 2 on PEI. First is food - PEI today is where Toronto was in 1975. A long history of Scots and Irish neglect of the joys of food has mean that there is no base of feeling for good food - quantity beats quality. But this is changing. I am off to lunch today at a little Thai drop in that would not be out of place in a side street in Bangkok. The beachhead of better food has been made and in 5 years there will be lots more choice just as happened in Toronto. As immigrants trickle in so does their food. As more people from away arrive so does the demand for better food expand. The other catch is of course our winter. There is nothing you can do about it except rejoice in the summer and understand that without it, we would be over run by CFA's.

The web is making the small big. You can be like me on PEI and have all the big you want without most of the price in money and stress that comes with a big city life.

Google Launch Google Talk

Well after many rumours it is here but only for Windows. Google talk is linked to Gmail so your user list is the same.

Today Verizon announced a deal on DSL. They understand that maybe the high-speed link is the core business of a phone company as we shift to IM, VOIP and Cell

The clock is ticking I think for the standard phone