Craig Forman's Blog

The last BBC world news bulletin podcast via iTunes dates from 11 April at 1500 GMT. I know the legendary British Broadcasting Company has not suddenly gone to ‘dead air’ in its flagship top-of-the-hour world news summary because I can still hear it on satellite and shortwave.

So what gives? This is a classic illustration of the growing pains of modern media. I imagine – and this is a guess, not a reported answer from Broadcasting House (the BBC’s London HQ) – that no one (not a computer script, not an engineer) is watching the iTunes feed. So a broken feed process doesn’t get the attention that a destroyed relay antenna on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean would. Likely there is not the budget to support such quality control for their online efforts. And besides, because online is a downstream ‘redistributed’ product, and not the ‘real thing,’ it probably can’t command the same prioritization.

If that is what’s going on here, that’s a problem. In the current era, dead air online is as serious (or more so) as dead air in the shortwave spectrum. You get no grace, and you lose credibility if you are dark now for more than 96 hours.

I am thinking about these support and infrastructure issues a lot these days as our CS and MIS/IT/Operations groups work hard to deliver 6 9’s reliability for our operating networks and for our applications. I know it isn’t easy. And not a single one of our hundreds of staffers or thousands of sales and technical reps around the world is trying to do anything other than their best.

That said, the BBC’s five-minute or so update is the news industry’s gold standard. For years, and for millions of people around the world (especially during the decades of the Cold War or in countries with little press freedom) those top-of-the-hour broadcasts have long been a ‘single source’ of credible news reporting and invaluable.

Maybe there is something wrong with my machine (although I have checked several times, unsubscribed from the feed, resubscribed, and I still get the most recent broadcast from midafternoon London time on April 11). So I am guessing it’s not a problem on a local machine, or at iTunes.

We will see how long it takes the ‘Beeb’ to restart the feed.

Update: April 27, 1200 GMT update is working. Great!

….the Access and Audience group has been working very hard over the last few weeks as we near an early milestone. There have been many very thoughtful and thorough discussions of our current and future prospects. People have been working hard, culminating in last week’s deep discussion in the successful PLR.

Lots more work ahead, but I simply want to say thanks to everyone for all the effort that each and everyone has put into this.

…this week is Al Hunt’s Political Capital on Bloomberg TV. You have to work hard to find it (9:30AM Saturday ET on Dish #203) and neither the folks at Bloomberg nor at Dish make it easy to record (no rebroadcast, no full-show Podcasts, no video links on iTunes)….Regardless, it is worth the effort.

In a fast 30 minutes, Al (with whom I had the pleasure to work long ago) covered Iraq and Afghanistan with Adm. William Fallon (head of Central Command), did a quick hit on why interest rates are unlikely to change for a while, weighed in on what he believes is the inevitable departure of AG Alberto Gonzales and then rounded it off with his weekly melee with Bob Novak and Margaret Carlson.

Al covers a lot of ground quickly. We’ll see how accurate this week’s predictions are, but I tend to bet on Al, a veteran Capitol Hill reporter who was once known as the 436th member of the House because he was so close to the political action.

The show would be even better if Al got more help from his bookers. Fewer 1:1s with Bloomberg journalists and more interviews with newsmakers themselves would be an improvement…Still, it’s a worthwhile half-hour.

Now, if Matt, Marty and the Bloomberg team would only make it downloadable so you could watch the whole show on your computer at your convenience, instead of having to program the VCR or Tivo……

UPDATE: It is a month later, and you can now reassemble the show at iTunes by clicking on four or five separate blocks. That’s progress! Congrats to Bloomberg.

…It has been awhile since I have added to the site, largely because of a huge amount of work, but the long posting drought is ending.

For those looking to see some new things, check out preview.my.earthlink.net (beta site for EarthLink subscribers only) and also our new Protection Control Center with new malware interception at www.earthlink.net/software/pcc/

As Dave points out at Earthling, our team launched our beta of a new RSS reader and linking tagging/favorites engine and a fair number of folks are using it.

What I liked best about it when Gregg first showed me it is the feature that only surfaces what is new since you last checked. We always had a hard time with that in previous lifetimes.

But there’s no monopoly on innovation and congrats to the development team for bringing this new app into the social-media world! More great things to come.

Here’s Dave’s post:

Cat’s Out Of The Bag on Reader and myFavorites
Posted on July 13, 2006 at 07:47 PM in @earthlink

Yes, it’s true. We’ve quietly exposed a new RSS reader and social bookmarking application to a small subset of our users.

Steve Rubel and Dave Winer showed up at the door a few hours early for the prom. Our hair’s still in curlers, our dress is full of wrinkles, our complexion is a mess. Horror of horrors! We’re glad our dates are here, but first a quick sit-down so everyone knows what the evening’s expectations are.

• Hey public, feel free to jump in, sign up, and try out both, but…
• We’re still rolling out changes and fixing minor stuff. Think iterative.
• There’s more on the roadmap for each. I’ll be going through some of this on the blog..err..tomorrow I guess. And I’ll tell you about known bugs too. So if you don’t see something you want, we may be in the middle of addressing it.
• Please think about using our product blogs for the two: Reader and myFavorites to talk to the product and development teams
• If you don’t have a free portal account, you can sign up for one here or from the link in the apps

My colleague ELNK VP Dan Greenfield has been doing a lot of thinking about how open content changes the game in public affairs. While sophisticated companies and politicians are using open media to advance their pr agendas aggressively, it seems to me still fairly early days and we have not yet seen all that is likely to happen as people with messages bypass traditional filters of the news media and take their stories directly to their audience via blogs, RSS and other open media tools.

One thing for sure: as it happens, Dan is likely to be commenting on it. Welcome, Dan, to the world of open media!

Happy to say we had a terrific all-hands meeting with our far-flung Value Added Services team in Atlanta, Pasadena, Chicago, Mumbai and elsewhere yesterday.

It was great to get the team together, to talk about our focus on our four main areas: portals and platforms; search, commerce and communications; security, software, subscriptions and services; and distribution and partnerships. Lots of great to stuff to come! 

My pal Tom Kamm – one of the brightest foreign correspondents of our generation and now a PR exec in France – has always been ahead of the game in music. He turned me on to Corinne Bailey Rae, a great new singer with a fantastic new album.

Tom lives in Paris where the album has been available for months. Here in the US, it has only just come out. And therein lies the tale:

I bought the CD yesterday at the Starbucks downstairs in the ELNK HQ building in Atlanta. There it was, at the checkout, as I paid for my coffee.

This got me to thinking how fast the music business is changing. Corinne Bailey Rae's new album has been on my Amazon wishlist for months — (AMZN still hasn't pinged me that it is out in North America by the way — that seems to be an oversight on their part). And the first place in the country to have it is Starbucks (SBUX).

I suspect the reason is that Starbucks and its HearMusic unit have some sort of exclusive window. It made my think — it has been months since I have physically walked into a record store. But I am buying as much music as ever – through the online channel and…SBUX. The last four CDs I have acquired were all bought at checkout with a coffee.

I've long admired Howard Schultz and have enjoyed every interaction I've ever had with him. I think with music, he has another big hit on his hands….

…with the release today of PCC 1.6, which features better firewall controls and a new feature that lets you set up a home LAN environment that is both secure, and easy to access.

Congrats to Ben, and all the folks who made this possible – especially at Aluria and on the QA and QE teams.

Spending a few days out West with the engineering and development team in our Pasadena office, and in Denver. We had a Value Added Services all-hand video meeting (via IP) on Friday. It was great to be with the Pasadena team and also join our Atlanta and other colleagues (on the dial in) to get everyone caught up on the progress of our strategy offsites and thinking during the past two months.

I'm briefly in Denver tomorrow to talk about driving user engagement at the Newspaper Association of America's summit www.naa.org/conferences/gas/program.html . Then back in Pasadena for one of our company-wide meetings on our current and future outlook.

After all this, back in Atlanta Wednesday night. It will good to be back in the office.