Thank for your cogent analysis and the generous mention. And of course for joining us last Wednesday night despite the “biblical weather.”

Hope to see you at future social media events here at 90.9.

As your insights and clever use of metaphor exceed my poor expository powers, I have taken to directing folks to your blog for a recap of the Tweet-Up’s conversational themes. Expect at least one visitor from the Frozen North.

Good points about the subsidy. And yes, show-specific pledging would, in all likelihood, mean the death of some shows, though labors of love like Con Salsa are better positioned to survive — at least in the interim.
It is the expensive public radio gems that would be looking over their shoulders.

In Con Salsa’s small (for broadcasting), but passionate following and relatively cheap production costs are parallels to podcasting, blogging and other citizen-generated media.

And citizen-generated media in all its exuberant chaos, creative energy and risk-taking also invites analogies to public broadcasting before its institutional arteries hardened. Public broadcasters would do well to bottle that tonic and take a good, long swig.

I guess this my long-winded way of saying that while the web is a tower killer, it’s also represents fertile soil for grassroots media creators like yourself to invent new forms of public media that may hew closer to the original vision. Though I will confess to a craven practical interest in keeping the towers up a few more years at least. At least until we public broadcasting and public media folk roll up our sleeves and forge a new model. Let’s get busy building the future!

Great work on the blog, though it tends to make me ravenously hungry!

Love the photograph of the “bafflers” (so that is what they are).

Now to get me one of those sweet-looking radios.

Thanks again for your analysis and attendance.

If there’s a place where lots of people have high-speed internet but no computer, I must have missed it.

I think they mean it for kitchens, living rooms, and bedrooms, especially for people who only have laptops and don’t want to listen to music through laptop speakers. That said, it’s overpriced for a kitchen and underfeatured for a living room.

I’d like an internet radio because my local radio coverage is poor, but that’s a ridiculous price for what’s essentially a shortwave.

yet if I’d subscribe to those NPR shows that I like for a month, I’d be out almost $40 for four shows (”on the Media” isn’t listed — but by 2005, it’s available for free as a podcast, yay!), far more than my local NPR station gets from most of its subscribers. Scaled up to yearly subscriptions, I’d be looking at $130, still an amount in line with a serious donation … “Fresh Air”, by the way, is by far the best deal of my group, at $12/month for 20+ hours, and $40 for a whole year; the worst is “Says You”, four times half an hour for $7/month and the same price as “Fresh Air” for a year.

It’s also possible to make a homebrew podcast of any streaming content you want, either by using a program like Replay Radio or by finding a station that broadcasts in mp3 streams and setting up a scheduled task that runs a shareware program like streamripper to record it as you want. Both of those solutions involve recording in real time though, so I don’t think either one was a serious threat to audible, despite the prices that audible charged. This device does something similar, except that it records radio off the air and stores it as an mp3. And radio shark is a radio tivo device that allows you to skip the internet and a computer altogether.