I’m thinking about switching from just using a text editor to an IDE, but I need some help. I went to the Zend web site and became thoroughly confused. So many versions. With and without Eclipse. (I’ve never used Eclipse, either.)
Help me out here. What package(s) do I want and why? Download Eclipse separately? Multiple versions of that, too. TIA.
Due to the split with GigaVox Media, we were forced to move the primary feed for IT Conversations. It appears that only two-thirds of the RSS clients are responding to the redirect. So if you haven’t received any IT Conversations programs for the past week, check your podcatcher. The new URL for the IT Conversations RSS feed is http://feeds.conversationsnetwork.org/channel/itc.
And in case you missed it, check out our new Premium Edition RSS feeds — without the promos, pitches and music.
There’s nothing unusual about my experiences, but I wonder if people in other industries realize how fundamentally the Internet has changed how software is developed. In my case, it’s software for and on the Internet itself, so the development environment is also the distribution platform. (That wasn’t always the case. Yes, there was software before the Internet.) Just consider what happened this morning.
Elapsed time from bug report to fix: less that 20 minutes. Okay, so that’s not unusual. We’ve all fixed bugs that quickly. But I never opened a book. I used a tool (Safari developer tools) I’d never even heard of. I learned and deployed a workaround to a browser-specific issue I knew nothing about. And I had support from three other people located in different timezones in near real time and for free. Without the Internet, this process would likely have taken weeks and a relatively formal QA process: test, document, research — and how would I have ever found the solution? — fix, test, release. Rapid development is an understatement.
We get many requests for videos of conference sessions in addition to MP3 files. Virtually every time we ask why, it’s because people want to see the slides. Most of the online conference videos you see are some combination of a presenter standing at a podium and blurry shots of a projection screen. What people really want is a high-resolution slideshow with synchronized audio. You asked for it; we did it.
Today, The Conversations Network published our first slideshow from a third-party conference. For no particular reason other than our internal production schedule, it’s the presentation by Jane McGonigal, Lead Game Designer at Institute for the Future, at last year’s O’Reilly Media Emerging Technology Conference (ETech). Let us know what you think. And expect a lot more slideshow-versions of programs as we’re able to get access to presenters’ PowerPoint and Keynote files.
We’re in the process of re-evaluating our use of explicit ratings on The Conversations Network, so I just did an analysis of our rating activity. Interesting.
The numbers tell us that ratings aren’t terribly useful in the short term such as to understand the quality of episodes published within the past week, but they are quite valuable for the long term.
Must-see TV on a two-part Frontline (PBS), Monday and Tuesday night: Bush’s War.
Also on Monday, Terry Gross interviews Frontline producer Michael Kirk on Fresh Air.
And supporting the broadcast online:
Across the entire four-hour Bush’s War series that will be streamed online, FRONTLINE will integrate and embed in its video player an array of related interviews, background material and video that can be viewed with just a click. In addition, more than 100 video clips of key moments and events in the Iraq war will be the centerpiece of an annotated master chronology which FRONTLINE will publish on the Bush’s War site. The interviews, video and background material are drawn from one of the richest archives in broadcast journalism: FRONTLINE’s 40+ hours of documentaries and 400 interviews done since 9/11 on Iraq and the war on terror, as well as new interviews conducted for Bush’s War.Our old friend Steve Gillmor has published a great program about the state and future of NPR. Guests include Doc Searls, Stephen Hill and Dennis Haarsager, Chairman of the Board and now interim CEO of NPR. A bit long, but well worth the listen. [mp3]
Gretchen Morgenson has an excellent explanation in the Sunday NY Times business section of what’s really going on with the Federal Reserve Board’s bail out of Bear Sterns. Highly recommended if you want to see who’s getting the benefit of your U.S. tax dollars. I hope one of the cable-news channels gets Gretchen to explain it on camera on Monday.
I’ve been blogging about a lot of new features on The Conversations Network’s web site over the past few weeks (clips/excerpts, comments, premium editions and premium RSS feeds), but today we launched one that is particularly near and dear to my heart. It’s a feature that I’ve been talking about and wanting to implement for at least two years.
We’ve long had an underutilized Personal Playlist feature (previously referred to as Personal Program Queues) which is essentially the same as a Netflix DVD rental queue. When you find an IT Conversations program (for example) that you want to save and listen to later, you save it in your playlist. Later, you can listen to programs from your playlist or download them to your MP3 player. You can reorder your playlist, remove programs you’ve heard, and even subscribe to your playlist via a personal RSS feed. It’s a great feature, but like a Netflix queue, it requires that you manage it yourself.
But suppose you had a smart playlist — one that automatically selected just the new programs they you wanted to hear and skipped the rest. And suppose your smart playlist could also dig into The Conversations Network’s archives to find those gems just right for you.
That feature, called the SmartPlaylist Manager was turned on earlier today. Here’s a screenshot of part of the manager’s control panel:
You can select programs by keyword (tag) and by specific channels or series. You can instruct your SmartPlaylist manager to capture new programs as they’re published and add them to your Personal Playlist, and you can tell it to add programs from the archives as well. Each night the system looks at your choices, the newly published programs and the archives, and it adds programs to your Personal Playlist according to your instructions. And not only is there an RSS feed for your Personal Playlist, but if you’re a paid member of The Conversations Network, you’ve got a feed that contains the Premium Edition versions: programs without all the introductions, promos and music.
The new Personal Playlists and the SmartPlaylist Manager are live now, ready for your use. Let us know what you think of them.
With a tip of the hat to Lake Wobegon, our goal at The Conversations Network is for every program to be above average: broadcast-quality audio and content that is inspirational, educational and entertaining. Of course, we don’t always get original recordings that meet those criteria. It seems to me (and perhaps to others) that the content quality of the programs we release has dropped somewhat over the past two years, and I think it’s due in part to our success. We have a terrific team of writers and audio engineers who produce our programs — 396 new ones last year alone. We’ve got a great content-management system and a streamlined and automated workflow. In short, producing a steady flow of programs has become routine for us.
The Conversations Network per se isn’t the source of the programs we publish. Most are received in raw form from conferences. Others are recorded independently by host/interviewers and submitted to our CMS for post-production. Whatever we receive goes into the pipeline and comes out the other end. I’d estimate that fewer than 5% of the submitted programs aren’t ultimately published, and those are usually canceled due to problems with the audio, not the content.
Nearly five years ago when I started IT Conversations, I applied a much stronger editorial filter. I had to because it took a lot of time to produce each program. The production process was a scarce resource. That’s no longer the case. It’s almost too easy now.
Public radio has a solution, which is also their limitation. They’re constrained by the clock. With only 24 hours in a day and 168 hours in a week, program directors are always exercising their editorial muscles. There’s a lot more good content trying to get ontp your local public-radio station, and this phenomenon tends to keep the average quality level high.
This brings into question the role of The Conversations Network, which doesn’t have the inherent constraints of radio, and what our listeners expect of us. You can go to the websites of many conferences and find audio or video recordings of all or most of their sessions. The quality of the audio, descriptions and supporting material may not be as good as what we publish, but it’s all there. So why visit our web site? Why subscribe to our RSS feeds? And why should you support us financially? I think it’s to a great extent because our listeners expect quality over quantity. And it’s not just good audio, but even more it’s all about great content.
We’re therefore now instructing our Series Producers (SPs) to be much more aggressive in their decisions about what programs to publish. There’s no quota system in place, but I’d expect that of the 25 or so recordings we get from a typical conference, perhaps 10% or 20% shouldn’t be recommended to our listeners. That’s just a guideline. There are some events for which we shouldn’t publish even a single session.
In support of this policy, we’ve given our SPs two tools to deal with below-threshold programs:
If you’re an SP, not only can you kill shows that aren’t great, it’s your job to do so. We’re not YouTube. Our listeners expect us to select only good shows for them. Work with the channel’s Executive Producer (EP) to see how s/he wants to handle each series, but let’s start using our curatorial skills more aggressively.
If you’re a post-production engineer (PE) or website editor (WE) and you come across a show that has poor audio or boring content, bring it to the attention of the SP ASAP. If the two of you agree that the show should be killed, then it’s killed. If you can’t agree, run it past the EP to break the tie.
Note that we will pay anyone who completes a show even if it’s killed. We don’t want the money to be a reason for us to keep a show that our listeners shouldn’t ever hear.
There are some situations in which it’s “politically correct” for us to publish a program that doesn’t meet our audio or content criteria. A good and common example is when a major sponsor/underwriter of an event or some other VIP delivers a keynote speech. They may be boring, but the event producer really needs us to publish the show to keep their sponsor happy. What to do?
The same is true for our host-based interview shows. One reason I always want at least two people involved with every show is to get multiple opinions. I doubt Phil (Technometria) or Jon (Interviews with Innovators), as examples, would kill one of their own shows. They put the work in, and they feel an obligation to their guests. But let’s face it: Not every show is good, and not every show is good enough to be published on our home pages and RSS feeds.
In cases like these, we can produce the show like always, but ask the EP not to add it to the homepage or RSS feeds. It’s there for anyone who is looking for it — you can find it with search, and we can send the URL to our partners and their sponsors — but we’re not going to push it to our listeners. This is a great solution for any show that you’d otherwise kill, but that you believe should be in the archives for the sake of completeness or politics. Yes, I can see even 10% of our hosted shows getting this treatment.
The MLK Example
From my blog last year: “I’m as fanatical about quality as anyone, but having published spoken-word events now for four years, I’ve developed a sort of algebraic view. The absolute need for quality is inversely proportional to the underlying value of that content. For example, if we had the only recording of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, I’m sure we’d publish it regardless of the quality. We would tolerate distortion, noise, etc., because the message is so compelling. But not every conference presentation is quite as powerful, and as the content trends towards the mundane, our tolerance for poor audio or video rapidly decreases.”
So let’s get more aggressive about delivering the best-possible experience to our listeners by exercising our editorial muscles via the two options above.
There’s a forum thread on this topic from last year.
Blogarithms 