Blogarithms

Doug Kaye’s Weblog

3/27/2008

Software Development in the 21st Century

11:31 am

There’s nothing unusual about my experiences, but I wonder if people in other industries realize how fundamentally the Internet has changed how software is developed. In my case, it’s software for and on the Internet itself, so the development environment is also the distribution platform. (That wasn’t always the case. Yes, there was software before the Internet.) Just consider what happened this morning.

  • We released a new feature, Slideshows.
  • A few minutes later, Paul Figgiani reported a bug when using Safari. Instant QA.
  • I used Twitter to ask “Are there any tools for debugging JavaScript and the DOM under Safari?”
  • Phil Windley and Coty Rosenblath replied within three minutes.
  • With their suggestions, I found the problem five minutes later.
  • Not knowing why my code didn’t work on Safari, I asked The Google about “xml load in safari” and found an explanation seconds later.
  • I coded a fix, tested it and published it via Subversion to our public servers a few minutes later.

Elapsed time from bug report to fix: less that 20 minutes. Okay, so that’s not unusual. We’ve all fixed bugs that quickly. But I never opened a book. I used a tool (Safari developer tools) I’d never even heard of. I learned and deployed a workaround to a browser-specific issue I knew nothing about. And I had support from three other people located in different timezones in near real time and for free. Without the Internet, this process would likely have taken weeks and a relatively formal QA process: test, document, research — and how would I have ever found the solution? — fix, test, release. Rapid development is an understatement.

Better than Video: Slideshows

9:19 am

We get many requests for videos of conference sessions in addition to MP3 files. Virtually every time we ask why, it’s because people want to see the slides. Most of the online conference videos you see are some combination of a presenter standing at a podium and blurry shots of a projection screen. What people really want is a high-resolution slideshow with synchronized audio. You asked for it; we did it.

Today, The Conversations Network published our first slideshow from a third-party conference. For no particular reason other than our internal production schedule, it’s the presentation by Jane McGonigal, Lead Game Designer at Institute for the Future, at last year’s O’Reilly Media Emerging Technology Conference (ETech). Let us know what you think. And expect a lot more slideshow-versions of programs as we’re able to get access to presenters’ PowerPoint and Keynote files.

3/26/2008

The Value of Ratings

5:04 pm

We’re in the process of re-evaluating our use of explicit ratings on The Conversations Network, so I just did an analysis of our rating activity. Interesting.

  • Total ratings to date: 65, 881
  • Mean per episode: 38.5
  • Median: 17
  • Most-rated episode: 1,041 ratings
  • Episodes rated per day: 60
  • Ratings made per day: 78
  • Distribution
    • Episodes with only 1 rating: 70
    • Episodes with 2 ratings: 77
    • Episodes with 3 ratings: 95
    • Episodes with 4 ratings: 61
    • Episodes with 5 or more ratings: 1,410
    • 40 most-rated episodes: >200 ratings each

The numbers tell us that ratings aren’t terribly useful in the short term such as to understand the quality of episodes published within the past week, but they are quite valuable for the long term.

3/21/2008

Bush’s War

4:32 pm

Must-see TV on a two-part Frontline (PBS), Monday and Tuesday night: Bush’s War.

Also on Monday, Terry Gross interviews Frontline producer Michael Kirk on Fresh Air.

And supporting the broadcast online:

Across the entire four-hour Bush’s War series that will be streamed online, FRONTLINE will integrate and embed in its video player an array of related interviews, background material and video that can be viewed with just a click. In addition, more than 100 video clips of key moments and events in the Iraq war will be the centerpiece of an annotated master chronology which FRONTLINE will publish on the Bush’s War site.
 
The interviews, video and background material are drawn from one of the richest archives in broadcast journalism: FRONTLINE’s 40+ hours of documentaries and 400 interviews done since 9/11 on Iraq and the war on terror, as well as new interviews conducted for Bush’s War

3/17/2008

The Gang on NPR

8:02 am

Our old friend Steve Gillmor has published a great program about the state and future of NPR. Guests include Doc Searls, Stephen Hill and Dennis Haarsager, Chairman of the Board and now interim CEO of NPR. A bit long, but well worth the listen. [mp3]

3/16/2008

The Truth About the Bear Stearns Bailout

10:26 pm

Gretchen Morgenson has an excellent explanation in the Sunday NY Times business section of what’s really going on with the Federal Reserve Board’s bail out of Bear Sterns. Highly recommended if you want to see who’s getting the benefit of your U.S. tax dollars. I hope one of the cable-news channels gets Gretchen to explain it on camera on Monday.

3/14/2008

Smart Personal Playlists Launch

10:48 pm

I’ve been blogging about a lot of new features on The Conversations Network’s web site over the past few weeks (clips/excerpts, comments, premium editions and premium RSS feeds), but today we launched one that is particularly near and dear to my heart. It’s a feature that I’ve been talking about and wanting to implement for at least two years.

We’ve long had an underutilized Personal Playlist feature (previously referred to as Personal Program Queues) which is essentially the same as a Netflix DVD rental queue. When you find an IT Conversations program (for example) that you want to save and listen to later, you save it in your playlist. Later, you can listen to programs from your playlist or download them to your MP3 player. You can reorder your playlist, remove programs you’ve heard, and even subscribe to your playlist via a personal RSS feed. It’s a great feature, but like a Netflix queue, it requires that you manage it yourself.

But suppose you had a smart playlist — one that automatically selected just the new programs they you wanted to hear and skipped the rest. And suppose your smart playlist could also dig into The Conversations Network’s archives to find those gems just right for you.

That feature, called the SmartPlaylist Manager was turned on earlier today. Here’s a screenshot of part of the manager’s control panel:

SmartPlaylist Manager Screenshot

You can select programs by keyword (tag) and by specific channels or series. You can instruct your SmartPlaylist manager to capture new programs as they’re published and add them to your Personal Playlist, and you can tell it to add programs from the archives as well. Each night the system looks at your choices, the newly published programs and the archives, and it adds programs to your Personal Playlist according to your instructions. And not only is there an RSS feed for your Personal Playlist, but if you’re a paid member of The Conversations Network, you’ve got a feed that contains the Premium Edition versions: programs without all the introductions, promos and music.

The new Personal Playlists and the SmartPlaylist Manager are live now, ready for your use. Let us know what you think of them.

3/12/2008

The Algebra of Quality (Part 2)

12:42 am

With a tip of the hat to Lake Wobegon, our goal at The Conversations Network is for every program to be above average: broadcast-quality audio and content that is inspirational, educational and entertaining. Of course, we don’t always get original recordings that meet those criteria. It seems to me (and perhaps to others) that the content quality of the programs we release has dropped somewhat over the past two years, and I think it’s due in part to our success. We have a terrific team of writers and audio engineers who produce our programs — 396 new ones last year alone. We’ve got a great content-management system and a streamlined and automated workflow. In short, producing a steady flow of programs has become routine for us.

The Conversations Network per se isn’t the source of the programs we publish. Most are received in raw form from conferences. Others are recorded independently by host/interviewers and submitted to our CMS for post-production. Whatever we receive goes into the pipeline and comes out the other end. I’d estimate that fewer than 5% of the submitted programs aren’t ultimately published, and those are usually canceled due to problems with the audio, not the content.

Nearly five years ago when I started IT Conversations, I applied a much stronger editorial filter. I had to because it took a lot of time to produce each program. The production process was a scarce resource. That’s no longer the case. It’s almost too easy now.

Public radio has a solution, which is also their limitation. They’re constrained by the clock. With only 24 hours in a day and 168 hours in a week, program directors are always exercising their editorial muscles. There’s a lot more good content trying to get ontp your local public-radio station, and this phenomenon tends to keep the average quality level high.

This brings into question the role of The Conversations Network, which doesn’t have the inherent constraints of radio, and what our listeners expect of us. You can go to the websites of many conferences and find audio or video recordings of all or most of their sessions. The quality of the audio, descriptions and supporting material may not be as good as what we publish, but it’s all there. So why visit our web site? Why subscribe to our RSS feeds? And why should you support us financially? I think it’s to a great extent because our listeners expect quality over quantity. And it’s not just good audio, but even more it’s all about great content.

We’re therefore now instructing our Series Producers (SPs) to be much more aggressive in their decisions about what programs to publish. There’s no quota system in place, but I’d expect that of the 25 or so recordings we get from a typical conference, perhaps 10% or 20% shouldn’t be recommended to our listeners. That’s just a guideline. There are some events for which we shouldn’t publish even a single session.

In support of this policy, we’ve given our SPs two tools to deal with below-threshold programs:

Option 1: Kill the Show

If you’re an SP, not only can you kill shows that aren’t great, it’s your job to do so. We’re not YouTube. Our listeners expect us to select only good shows for them. Work with the channel’s Executive Producer (EP) to see how s/he wants to handle each series, but let’s start using our curatorial skills more aggressively.

If you’re a post-production engineer (PE) or website editor (WE) and you come across a show that has poor audio or boring content, bring it to the attention of the SP ASAP. If the two of you agree that the show should be killed, then it’s killed. If you can’t agree, run it past the EP to break the tie.

Note that we will pay anyone who completes a show even if it’s killed. We don’t want the money to be a reason for us to keep a show that our listeners shouldn’t ever hear.

Option 2: Archive the Show

There are some situations in which it’s “politically correct” for us to publish a program that doesn’t meet our audio or content criteria. A good and common example is when a major sponsor/underwriter of an event or some other VIP delivers a keynote speech. They may be boring, but the event producer really needs us to publish the show to keep their sponsor happy. What to do?

The same is true for our host-based interview shows. One reason I always want at least two people involved with every show is to get multiple opinions. I doubt Phil (Technometria) or Jon (Interviews with Innovators), as examples, would kill one of their own shows. They put the work in, and they feel an obligation to their guests. But let’s face it: Not every show is good, and not every show is good enough to be published on our home pages and RSS feeds.

In cases like these, we can produce the show like always, but ask the EP not to add it to the homepage or RSS feeds. It’s there for anyone who is looking for it — you can find it with search, and we can send the URL to our partners and their sponsors — but we’re not going to push it to our listeners. This is a great solution for any show that you’d otherwise kill, but that you believe should be in the archives for the sake of completeness or politics. Yes, I can see even 10% of our hosted shows getting this treatment.

The MLK Example

From my blog last year: “I’m as fanatical about quality as anyone, but having published spoken-word events now for four years, I’ve developed a sort of algebraic view. The absolute need for quality is inversely proportional to the underlying value of that content. For example, if we had the only recording of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, I’m sure we’d publish it regardless of the quality. We would tolerate distortion, noise, etc., because the message is so compelling. But not every conference presentation is quite as powerful, and as the content trends towards the mundane, our tolerance for poor audio or video rapidly decreases.”

So let’s get more aggressive about delivering the best-possible experience to our listeners by exercising our editorial muscles via the two options above.

There’s a forum thread on this topic from last year.

3/9/2008

Premium RSS Feeds

4:13 pm

In addition to Premium Editions of individual programs on The Conversations Network, we’ve started deploying Premium Edition RSS Feeds, too. These feeds contain restricted URLs to the special versions of the MP3s without music, intros and promos, and are only available to paid members of The Conversations Network. Is it a good time for you to join?

3/3/2008

Premium Editions — You Asked for It

12:43 pm

Due in part to strong popular demand, we’ve just added Premium Edition versions of The Conversations Network’s programs.  If you’re a logged-in paid member of The Conversations Network, when you download or stream the audio from our web pages, you’ll no longer have to listen to (or skip) the music, intros or promotional messages. The initial reactions are better than I expected and we’ve already seen an upturn in membership dues and donations. (Our goal is to cover 50% of our costs by member contributions.)

For now, the Premium Edition versions are only available from the web site. We’ll soon has them available via RSS feeds, too.

3/2/2008

Comments are Back on The Conversations Network

1:52 pm

Due to the usual problems with spam and some other challenges, comments have come and gone from The Conversations Network’s website pages. Well…they’re back! Just visit any of our program detail pages such as this one and look for the usual Comments (3) link. Come join the conversation.

2/29/2008

Bid4Vid Launches

10:31 am

Our friends over at Ourmedia and Outhink Media have launched Bid4Vid, a service that helps clients find independent video producers. Recommended for all pro and semi-pro video folks.

2/9/2008

Towards a Listener-Supported Network

5:18 pm

[This is another post related to The Conversations Network’s 2008 business plan. Please join the discussion in our forum.] 

As a non-profit, we’re always in fundraising mode, beating the bushes for grants and sponsorships from foundations and corporations. It takes a tremendous amount of time and effort and the successes are only temporary. If you get a grant for one quarter or one year, there’s not reason to believe you’ll get funding from the same source next time. You’ve got to start from scratch. There are two more reliable sources: advertising and listener donations. One reason these sources are more reliable is that they come from a larger number of parties. If you lose ten listener/contributors, for exampe, you probably won’t notice the difference. But lose one major foundation grant and you could be out of business.

From the days when we first opened our tip jar more than three years ago, we’ve always been reasonably successful with attracting listener donations. In 2007 we raised $9,204 in paid memberships and one-time donations from a total of 110 people. ($84 average contribution.) And for that we did relatively little: just the pleas in our newsletters and the annoying requests in our program intros. We had about 3,000 “loyal listeners” last year — those who downloaded at least one program per month — so 3.7% of that group chose to support us financially. (Viewed another way, that’s 0.09% of our 480,000 unique listeners last year.)

Listener funding accounted for 11.6% of our budget in 2007. I think we have the potential to increase that by 4x over the next year to 46.4%. This is virtually the same as the percentage achieved by KQED-FM, the public-radio station in San Francisco, and other public-radio outlets in the U.S. KQED says that 9% of its listeners donate, but the math to figure out who counts as a “listener” is rather complex. For The Conversations Network, I’m proposing that we should be able to receive dues and/or donations from nearly 15% of our loyal listeners — that’s a 4x increase over 2007 numbers. I’m not suggesting an increase in the average donation. Our target, therefore, is to have 440 individuals donate during 2008 or be paid members by the end of the year, generating a total of $36,960.

Can we do it? I think so. But what will it take? Do we have to produce even more annoying pitches in our program intros? I hope not! Until now, there have been virtually no benefits to being a member or donor. You did that for the pure satisfaction of supporting The Conversations Network. But there are things we can offer our members and donors that will scale well for us. We don’t want to be in the business of shipping tote bags or t-shirts. Everything has to be virtual.

Here are some ideas we’ve had as benefits of paid membership. What do you think of them and what can you add to our list?

  • ad- and promo-free audio files
  • participation in the decision-making process of The Conversations Network
  • slideshows synchronized with audio (or should these be free to all?)
  • early access to programs
  • enhanced playlist (personal program queue) functions

How Should We Grow Our Traffic?

9:52 am

Another important topic, posted to our discussion forums. One of the keys to our future success will be our ability to increase listenership and visits to our web sites. As Dan Gillmor taught me, there are many more good ideas from the ranks of our listeners and producers than from within the management team. So I’m throwing this out to everyone: What should we be doing to increase the listenership to The Conversations Network?

Content: Do we need to improve the quality of our programs? Are we publishing the best events? Are our interview programs everything they can be? When podcasting was the hot new thing, we had more links from bloggers. What should we be doing to increase our relevance and hence the linking activity?

Slide Presentations: One thing we are doing that I’m confident will substantially increase the value of what we do for our listeners is to publish slide shows synchronized with the presentation audio. Real soon now!

Marketing: This is the big one. What should we be doing in the way of marketing?. I had this great idea to include postcards in the registration handouts at conferences. But when I did the math I was shocked at how much it would cost us relative to the number of new listeners we would likely acquire. What free or particularly cost-effective marketing programs would work for The Conversations Network?

More? You tell us!

Watching the Space Shuttle Dock

9:24 am

Nasa has a great live video channel. I’ve been watching the Space Shuttle Atlantis go through its Rendezvous Pitch Maaneuver (RPM) in preparation for docking with the International Space Station. The images are from the ISS, which is currently 600′ above Atlantis. Superb view of Earth zooming by below and audio that include the spacecraft radios and helpful narration. Gorgeous.

2/5/2008

Website Redesign: Your Turn!

10:31 pm

I’m trying to add comments and a few other features to our detail pages (such as this one) and I’ve just run out of real estate. There’s just nowhere to add comments unless I put them waaay down at the bottom of the page. I think it’s finally time for a full-site redesign. The current IT Conversations and SI Conversations sites are (IMHO) pretty damn ugly. Very “heavy”. Cluttered. Confusing.

Now it’s your turn. What media web sites do you like and why? What other recommendations do you have for the IT Conversations and Social Innovation Conversations web sites?

Please read and post comments on The Conversations Network Forum.

Podcasting Reaches 18.5 Million

12:39 pm

eMarketer 2007eMarketer estimates that the total US podcast audience reached 18.5 million in 2007. Furthermore, that audience will increase by 251% to 65 million in 2012. And of those listeners, 25 million will be “active” users who tune in at least once a week. Driven by this audience growth, US spending on podcast-related advertising (including sponsorships) will rise to $435 million in 2012, up from $165 million in 2007. The situation might change in time, but for now podcasts are mainly a desktop phenomenon as opposed to a mobile or portable one.

2/4/2008

The Pay-to-Play (PtP) Model

11:42 am

[This continues an open discussion on the Future of The Conversations Network on our forums, and we hope everyone will join us there and tell us what you think.]

When we started our second channel, Social Innovation Conversations, we began with a Pay-to-Play (PtP) model in which our partners not only provided the audio content for the channel, but also paid for our costs of post-production and distribution. It was financially sound, but we paid a price in editorial control. Those partners who funded our production of those shows reasonably expected that we would publish and promote them, but as you might imagine not all of the programs met our standards for content or audio quality. The result was that we either delivered lower-quality programs to our listeners or we pissed off our content partners. We abandoned the PtP model for all new content partners about a year ago for this reason. Now, as we look for new ways to grow and fund The Conversations Network, we’re reconsidering the pay-to-play model but on a slightly different basis. Here’s one way I think it could work for us.

The Conversations Network could offer its podcast post-production capabilities as a fee-based service to conferences, universities and other producers of spoken-word events. The fees might range from $75 to produce just the MP3 audio of a program to $300 to produce the audio, write the descriptions and publish on a Conversations Network channel (including bandwidth costs, RSS feeds, etc.). While we would offer this only to “acceptable” conferences, we would not exercise editorial control. We would produce and publish all submitted programs regardless of quality.

The content produced via this PtP service would not be promoted on The Conversations Network’s curated channels such as IT Conversations or Social Innovation Conversations. The programs would run on separate channels unique to each content partner. However, these channels would serve as a source for our Executive Producers. If they found a program produced on a PtP channel, our EPs could easily cross-publish it on our mainstream channels. We have that capability built into our system. It’s not much harder than checking a box.

What do you think of the PtP idea (a) for the service it provides, (b) as a way to generate revenues for The Conversations Network, and (c) as a source of content for our curated channels? I’m particularly interested in hearing from the members of TeamITC who produce our programs in their spare time, as they would be the one responsible for executing the plan.

Update: On his 2/4/08 podcast, Todd Cochrane said he was surprised that The Conversations Network had offered a PtP service to companies. My mistake for not explaining this. First of all, these arrangements were only made with a few universities and other non-profits. We have never produced a program from a for-profit company when that company provided funding for the program. Second, we didn’t offer this as a service to just anyone. We always initiated the relationships based upon what we thought our listeners would like to hear. We selected non-profit organizations and suggested that we could publish podcasts of their events if they were willing to cover the costs. But as I said above, we no longer pursue such relationships. Finally, we always acknowledged the content partner as an underwriter of the programs.

Traffic, Revenues and Costs

1:33 am

[This is an excerpt from The Conversations Network 2008 Business Plan. We’re starting an open discussion on the Future of The Conversations Network on our forums, and we hope everyone will join us there and tell us what you think.]

Fully burdened with our infrastructure expenses, the cost to produce each episode on The Conversations Network is approximately $200. In 2007 we produced 396 new episodes for a total cost of about $79,200. As far as traffic, we received 1.35 million website pageviews and 6.2 million MP3-file downloads. (Downloads are higher because of our RSS subscribers.)

Based on that traffic, we estimate we had the potential to generate $74,550 in net revenues from a combination of sponsorships and listener donations. That’s 94% of our costs. In fact, we didn’t generate that much in revenues, but that’s what we think we could have generated if we had done a better job of it. The difference between our actual revenues and expenses was funded by institutional grants and major private donations.

One objective for The Conversations Network is to become self sustaining. We’d like to be able to produce programs without depending on grants, which are notoriously difficult to renew year after year. To achieve this, we will have to generate the following traffic per episode, which ultimately translates into underwriting and membership/donation dollars:

  • 3,627 website pageviews, and
  • 16,596 MP3-file downloads

These are important numbers because they allow us to evaluate the breakeven potential of any new series or channel on the network. Any new programs that generate less than the above traffic will have to be subsidized by a surplus of traffic from other programs or by supplemental funding.

2/1/2008

Server Backups to AWS S3

8:21 pm

Are you running redundant database and web servers? You’re covered in case of a disk failure, etc., right? But what about a fire in your web-hosting facility? Or some maniacal sysadmin with a hacksaw? Suppose you lose *all* your servers? Off-site storage, right? Are you doing that daily and for all your files?

Here at The Conversations Network we’ve got a great automated solution. I wrote an rsync-style utility that copies any new/modified files in a directory tree to Amazon’s AWS S3 every night. I included a 7-day rotating copy of our databases, too. The cost is running a whopping $16 per month. Yes, you read that right: $16. That includes about 65GB of data supporting the more than 1,600 programs we’ve produced or that are in production including the MP2 originals and MP3 distribution copies.

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