ARTS & FARCES internet

Go listen to Elvis Costello’s “Radio Radio.” Go ahead, it’s important and I’ll wait. Listen to it again. What do you hear? I hear a talented musician’s angry rant about the consolidation of commercial radio and its use to enforce conformity of thought and behavior.

Radio wasn’t always that way. Thirty years ago it was easy to find great music that you hadn’t heard before simply by trawling the extreme edges of the dial (back then radio’s had dials). The commercial top-40 crap was aggregated around the center of the dial, but the edges were for the community and university stations. A friend of mine ran the station in Santa Cruz, California back then and it was one of the best in the country. Like my favorite station at the time—Georgia Tech’s WREK—the Santa Cruz station almost never played singles, opting instead for whole album sides. Listeners regularly had to call in and tell them to flip the record; the needle had hit the end of the vinyl and the signal being broadcast consisted entirely of the annoying but somehow meditatively soothing click-click-scratch, click-click-scratch of the needle hitting the record label in the center of the platter and bouncing off.

Ah, the good old days when surfing was what you did while driving coast to coast, navigating the far edges of the radio dial for the next city on the horizon. Radio was regional and idiosyncratic.

Now, like every other mainstream medium, radio is homogenized and pasteurized for your protection. Where there used to be thousands of unique voices from coast to coast, now there are three. And unfortunately, they all suck. The causes of this consolidation include relaxed ownership rules and pay-for-play policies (the modern equivalent of payola). In the United States, what gets played on the roughly 10,000 commercial radio stations depends on what gets played on the 1,000 or so largest stations. And the record companies make sure of what gets played on those 1,000 stations by paying for “adds” to the tune of US$1,000 each on average, up to as much as US$8,000. And that’s why radio sucks.

What makes the Internet different from other mediums—and what the purveyors of mainstream media will likely never grasp—is that the Internet was designed as an end-to-end network, with little or no intelligence in the network itself. Without intelligence, there is little chance for control. My packets are no more or less important than yours. As Lawrence Lessig points out in both of his books, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace and The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, the network’s design effects a neutral platform. Because the network can’t discern one kind of packet from another, it is unable to discriminate against some packets. This design makes it impossible to discriminate against new application designs on the edges of the network.

And that’s where innovation happens—at the edges of the network. Ecommerce notwithstanding, the interesting things on the Internet have always happened at the edges.

One of the companies that has staked out a pretty nice sandbox in which to play at the network edge is UserLand Software. They make Frontier/Manila, the server engine and content management system that ARTS & FARCES internet currently runs on. UserLand also makes Radio UserLand, a cute little gizmo that has always been useful for reading RSS feeds from various web publishers. There’s no consensus about just what the RSS acronym stands for. It could be Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary, or something else completely. It’s not important. What’s important is that it provides you with a really easy way to monitor headlines and abstracts from websites that support it.

For the most part, these are websites at the edges of the network, although synthetic feeds of the New York Times and Washington Post, among others, are available. But like old-time radio, the interesting stuff on the web happens at the edges.

Radio UserLand 8.0 is a tool for creating weblogs and other website formats with a voice. For the most part, these websites are created by individuals because few corporations have a voice or allow it to be heard if they do have one. This will change shortly. Webogs are a great way to manage knowledge within large organizations, but most large organizations are afraid of the freedom such forums engender and therefore tend to suppress them. Similar to the way PCs originally were snuck past the IT department, weblogs are just now beginning to be smuggled into organizations through the back doors.

So, for the time being, most Radio websites are individual websites.

And almost without exception, websites created with Radio have a strong and identifiable voice. That’s what makes them so interesting. The sites that make up the Radio universe aren’t what you think of when you think of a personal website (“hi, here’s a picture of my cat and me”). No, these are websites that are usually authored by a single person but are surprisingly literate and well-informed.

When the web first began to become popular, mainstream newspapers and magazines struggled to create a presence on the web. They all have a web presence now, and they’re almost all still struggling, mostly because of consolidation and all the reasons other mainstream media suck. Back when the web was young they thought they’d found a new profit center and that advertisers would flock to their sites. They were wrong then and they’re still wrong now. These days the best news coverage is happening outside of the mainstream and a surprising number of personal websites are more authoritative than the mainstream alternatives.

Today I hesitate to visit any website that doesn’t offer a syndicated version of its content. Four big reasons: 1) Syndication allows me to avoid the disruptive advertising methods—pop-ups, pop-unders, flash and trash, etc.—that have become fashionable; 2) I can browse the updated content of hundreds of sites much faster with a standard interface; 3) The diversity of voices—if you dig deep enough—is astounding; and 4) It’s much easier to avoid crap content.

If you use any of the UserLand publishing tools, you don’t need to know anything at all about syndication—it’s handled for you automatically. All you have to do is decide whether to turn it on or not.

With Radio, the UserLand developers have made personal web publishing—publishing with a voice—just about as easy as it can be. You can configure the software to upload your dynamic content to UserLand’s server, upload static pages to a traditional web server, serve dynamically from your desktop, or any combination.

Radio’s “categories” are one of its more powerful aspects. Each category can have its own RSS feed as well as its own website. If, for example, you write about technology and gardening (separately), it’s a simple matter to set up separate categories for each area of interest and syndicate each category separately. Your gardening users need never necessarily know about your technology writings, and vice versa.

None of this is what matters with Radio, though. What matters is that Radio has given moderately sophisticated computer users the power to publish syndicated dynamic content on the web with little to no knowledge of the underlying technology (although that’s open and accessible for our nerd buddies; Radio is built upon open formats and protocols). What that means is that the net is becoming less and less like television and a whole lot more like something much more powerful of which we’ve only begun to scratch the surface.

Radio UserLand 8.0 brings the milieu of radio at its peak to the web, in all of its unadulterated pureness. Use Radio to find and create the interesting bits at the edges of the network. My Radio weblog, named oddly enough “Radio Radio” is available at http://www.farces.com/radioRadio/. It’s used mostly for quick notes on future essays that appear here and us usually updated daily. Add it to your syndication list.