Comparing the new HD radio receivers

My bud Glenn Fleishman reviews five  HD Radio (digital AM/FM) receivers in Wednesday's New York Times: Radio Stations Add Personalities, Digitally. And here's an accompanying graphic: Comparing the New HD Radio Receivers.

Will NPR's podcasts lead to new business models for public radio?

New from Mark Glaser in the Online Journalism Review: Will NPR's podcasts give birth to a new business model for public radio?

Reclaim community radio

From author/media reform advocate Robert W. McChesney, president of FreePress:

In 2000, the FCC opened up the nation's airwaves to low power community radio stations. Since then, more than 675 local stations have gone on the air in 50 states, forming the national backbone for community broadcasting.

Now, local radio (LPFM) needs your help to survive and grow. The FCC is considering critical new measures that would prevent commercial stations from pushing our community broadcasters off the dial. Before the FCC decides, they need to hear from you.

Email the FCC and tell them to protect Low Power FM radio stations.

It's taken commercial saturation of the radio waves to create demand for something as revolutionary as LPFM. These stations are locally driven and noncommercial, providing news and information to communities often ignored by mainstream radio.

The FCC is modifying the 2000 rules that created LPFM stations. If you have and value a local station, or wish you had more homegrown broadcasting in your area, the FCC needs to hear from you right now.

'Morning Becomes Eclectic'

From the NY Times Sunday Magazine, a look at the wonderful weekday music program ''Morning Becomes Eclectic,'' on the Los Angeles public-radio station KCRW.

On NPR's 'On the Media'

I was the featured guest today with host Bob Garfield on NPR's On the Media, talking about Darknet, Hollywood and creative remixes. Here's the Real mp3 stream, and here's more about the segment.

Co-host Brooke Gladstone also had an interesting piece, looking at Infinity Broadcasting turning its San Francisco radio station into the all-podcast KYOU, plus Christopher Lydon and his open-source radio program in Boston.

Open source radio

Chris Lydon & co. invite your ideas of what you'd like to hear on the radio. Their beat? The Internet.

Brendan writes, "We’re looking to capture the way people talk to each other online, the way they record their own stories. The blogs and the podcasts and the Wikipedia are not the story; the people we find through them are."

Their new program, Open Source, begins a week from today. More soon.

Build what you want with BBC content

The BBC gets the open-source bug: Build what you want using BBC content.

Podcasting and the future of radio

This morning I got up early and, before the coffee kicked in, participated by phone as a guest on the Diane Rehm Show, where we discussed the future of radio.

I lobbed a couple of grenades, such as suggesting that commercial radio is dead, and that podcasting - personalized, portable, on-demand Internet audio - is the wave of the future.

Diane Rehm wasn't in today, but Steve Roberts - erstwhile Washington journalist and hubbie of Cokie Roberts - served as a knowledgeable host. Also joining the roundtable were

The show's producers agreed to let us post the broadcast on Ourmedia, so now I've got to figure out how to grab the stream and convert it to MP3.

The Diane Rehm Show comes out of American University and is syndicated nationally on NPR. That makes my third NPR guest spot since last summer. Now, we just need to get some discussion of the personal media revolution on Fresh Air.

I'm interviewed on NPR

Bob Garfield has an insightful new piece for NPR's On the Media on what he calls the chaos theory of big media. Jeff Jarvis (briefly), Om Malik (briefly) and yours truly (briefly) are among those interviewed.

See An Impending Period of Transitional Chaos for Media.

I (and others) have been writing about this for some time -- the notion that we're in the midst of a major transformation in the mediasphere, away from traditional media pumped to us through one-way pipes and toward media that's much more under our control -- circular, responsive, malleable, multidirectional, personalized.

Simply put, people are looking to exert greater control over how they interact with media.

I just listened to it -- good piece, 12 minutes long, entertaining and dead on.

"The age of the mainstream media is passing. the new order is taking shape," Garfield intones. "Digits are the new widgets." He sees "an impending period of radical changes in the economy, the culture and society itself," and warns that "we are heading into a historically turbulent moment." Indeed, we've already entered this transformative period, which is ushering in "the democratization of media."

The result may be frightening to Madison Avenue, but it's empowering to the rest of us. "We cease to be demographics, we become individuals again," Garfield concludes.

"Mass media will be overthrown by micromedia," adds Drazen Pantic of Unmediated, perhaps a bit too melodramatically.

The show airs this weekend -- it aired Friday in LA, and it airs today in other cities.

Cross-posted to Darknet.

iRadio: the AM-FM killer

For this week’s Engadget Interview, I spoke with Dave Ulmer, director of marketing for Motorola Media Solutions about Motorola’s upcoming release of iRadio and how the technology may forever change how we listen to radio.

I was frankly blown away by how Bluetooth is going to change the way we consume media -- beginning in only a mattter of months. You'll be able to download content from the Internet at night into a portable device, carry it to your car and listen to it on your car radio seamlessly -- and use the car radio's controls to change the content. All in high fidelity.

Ulmer calls Motorola's upcoming iRadio "an AM-FM killer." Excerpt:

Ulmer: I think what we’ll find is that the celestial jukebox in the sky is a bit of a misnomer. It’s a celestial jukebox that’s served up from the sky but it’s actually in your phone, in your car, in your pocket, in your home — bits and pieces of it reside in different locations in your life and they’re bounced around to you no matter where you might be.

So you won’t have instant access to all the world’s music?

No, it’ll be a subset. The bulk of your content will always be on a server somewhere. It might be in your home or in an online service. But how big of a subset is big enough? When phones and car radios roll out in the days ahead with 20 gigabytes of storage, that’s a lot.

So we’re going to soon see cars coming off the assembly lines with hard drives under the hood?

I have seen cars in the planning stages that have hard drives, yes.