Building my personal radio stream

This post was originally published on AOL's 2.open.aol.com internal blog. I have been blogging there since 2006. I see the evolution in Internet Radio stepping up a gear and wanted to bring my thoughts to a wider audience. Hence posting this and yesterday's posts on my blog.

Yesterday I wrote about the threat that the radio industry is facing for continued relevance. I think the radio industry, just like the music industry, needs to look at how their content is consumed and, more importantly, how the audience want's to consume it. Just like Stowe Boyd, I enjoy "Video Snacking." I will go to YouTube to to look at a video and find myself browsing through related content. This is active participation in consuming media. I have written in the past on [On 2.Open.aol.com - I can post here if people ask to see that post] the concept of creating streams that form personalized channels. This can be done for audio or video.

Let's look at what would be required...

The media content creators would need to encode and tag their content. It would need to be time-sliced in to discrete segments by topic. Given that we are already familiar with transcripts and playlists accomplishing this feat does not seem too difficult a problem to overcome.

The tags need to be in an open format that can allow search and filtering to be performed. This would then need to be compiled in to streams. RSS looks like a candidate to handle the publishing. This is already well proven with audio and video podcasting.

Now all we need is for to use a feed reader, like Google Reader, to slice and dice these feeds in to personal channels.

...Then all we need is for Google to integrate the audio feed in to their Android open handset platform and link the handset via bluetooth to in car entertainment systems. [Watch out for the follow -up post. Or go read about flytunes.fm]

If you think about this scenario, the latest hubub about Google Reader's "Share with Friends" feature is interesting. It would be possible to share your audio and/or video streams with friends or keep them private. The fascinating thing is that publishers that embrace this radical concept could find themselves breaking out from the shackles that come from limited radio distribution and allowing consumers to re-mix their feeds in to personal channels could see content being distributed via tens of thousands of channels rather than hundreds of traditional radio stations.

In this radical new world there is opportunity for aggregator services that make the process easy for consumers. It is those aggregators that have the potential to monetize the streams. I bet someone at Google is thinking about that.

What are your thoughts? What are the challenges to moneitzing the audio stream? Share your ideas. Leave a comment below.

I want personalized radio

This post was originally published on an AOL Internal Blog (2.Open.aol.com). Given the developments at CES I wanted to put this out for wider discussion. Hence I am posting the full article to my personal blog.

Fred Wilson is a New York Venture Capitalist. He is one of very few VC's that writes a blog. It is one well worth putting on your reading list (http://avc.blogs.com). In a recent post he took a look at the different forms of media. We are probably all familar with the plight of the newspaper industry. It seems that radio is on the same slippery slope. 

What I found most interesting with Fred wilson's analysis is the perspective he took. He looked at media from the perspective of his kids' usage. Now a handful of kids is not conclusive proof, but it serves as a great indicator because kids are very socially driven.

When I think about my own kids they don't listen to radio that much. As Fred discovered, on a long trip the iPods and headphones come out or the Playstation portables get fired up. An iPod will probably get connected to the car audio system. Radio doesn't get a look-in, unless there is a need to check on traffic - and the newer GPS systems and Google Maps are eliminating the need to check on traffic via the radio. Things may be different in Europe where the Radio Data System (RDS) is more pervasive and can be setup to switch to a local station when traffic news comes on.

Why do I want to listen to radio when I can carry anything from 100 to 10,000 songs in my pocket? The main thing we have radio for, in the car, is to catch the latest news. But don't you find the news format frustrating. The news channels spend more time telling you what they are going to tell you than they doing on the actual news segment they advertise!

I was also reading Stowe Boyd's /Messenger blog and his word of the week is "Video snacking." This got me thinking. If we mainly want radio for News, Traffic and Weather why don't we create "Audio Snacking." Just think. If we could take actual radio content, or audio segments from anywhere on the web and apply some of the constrints we have with Twitter. In other words we careate mciro-audio blogs. These could be 30 second to two minute audio posts. These could be highly compressed and delivered via the cell phone network and streamed via bluetooth to the audio system. Ideally what we want is to be able to vote on news items Pandora-style. Tagging the audio snippet triggering a more detailed news item on the topic to be added in to your audio stream.

When you think about it all of the components are available to produce personalized radio streams. It is going to be something like this that will save the radio industry. If you look at the music business, sales of music CDs may be plumetting, but music listening is not diminishing. We are moving to an era where personalization will be available on a mass scale. Are we looking at the long tail of the radio industry. An evolution of the podcast era?

What are your thoughts? How would you like to see Personalized radio evolve? We have all the tools at our disposal. Share your thoughts. Leave a comment below.

Reflections on Enterprise 2.0

Unfortunately I only had opportunity to attend the first day of the Enterprise 2.0 conference . Despite this it was a valuable trip. Reflecting on the conference these things stuck out for me:

• One thing the organizers got right was plenty of power outlets in the meeting rooms.
• The wireless worked better than at the Web 2.0 Expo, but then there were far fewer people. Probably 1,000 as against 10,000 at the Expo.
• Microsoft doesn't get it, or is biased by its revenue model. How c an you talk about unified communications across multiple devices and then talk seriously about sharepoint and integrated Office Business Applications that use the Office system - that ties me to my desktop
• Institutional IT doesn't get Web 2.0 yet. This was evidenced by the discussion on Mobile platforms and the desire of IT organizations to lock down mobile devices. Developing revenue growth powerin g mobile applications will spread beyond an enterprise boundary. IT will not be able to lock down, or even prescribe all the devices that will connect to data feeds, applications and services. Developing to open standards and interfaces is essential.
• Enterprise Mashups. I was disappointed to miss this session , which is being held on Wednesday June 21st. My thoughts on this area are that we must first get the basics right. Enterprise search (that really works!) is a critical first step. Add syndication capabilities via RSS and you have a solid foundation on which the organization can build emergent processes with minimal IT investment. When you combine Enterprise search with RSS and a Wiki publishing capability you have the essential components to create new knowledge and to be able to springboard new insights from that knowledge.