Live Audioblogging using low powered FM feed
On Saturday I recorded and published to the web, in near realtime, small audio clips of BloggerCon sessions. I recorded these moments using an open mic mounted on a mic boom in the middle of the room. The open mic pick up the audio being broadcasted into the room by the room's PA system. Being an open mic, it also picked up a lot of background noise that was created near it's location.
After the sessions, I spoke to Bob Doyle and Kevins Marks about an idea I had for a better way for anyone in the audience to produce quality clips of the session and not deal with the background noise. At the next BloggerCon I proposed we transmit a low powered FM signal of the live session feed right in the session's room. I never heard of anyone doing this at a conference and I think this would be a great way to pick off quality audioblogging clips to publish to the net in realtime. The audiobbloggers and listeners of the FM feed would just need to bring FM receivers.
RouteAround Radio 
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A bunch of us from BloggerCon went to dinner last night — it was effectively the last event of the conference — and talked, among other things, about radio. One of us worked with a school that wanted to start a radio station. Should they try to put the station on the air in the conventional way, with a small local signal on the FM band, or on the Net? |
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I recommended the latter. Partly because it's a lot cheaper and easier, and partly because the Net can easily be extended to the air in a clean and unlicensed way. |
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For example, this morning I listened to Chris Lydon's latest interview, with Len Apcar of the New York Times. I listened in the shower at the hotel, on the radio. The station was on 88.5FM, a relatively open channel here in Cambridge, MA. The transmitter was an iRock 300w Wireless Music Adapter that I picked up for about 25 bucks at Radio Shack. The range is short, but probably not much shorter than a wi-fi signal. |
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Whether by wi-fi, digital cellular, satellite or something else, big licensed brute-force radio transmission will eventually become a thing of the past. Not only because it's woefully costly, bureaucratized and ineffecient, but because it's a bottleneck between supply and demand. The Net will route around that bottleneck. Count on it. |
[Doc Searls Weblog]
5:04:26 PM 
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