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Tell Me a Story...

1/27/2019

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Who would have thought that an inexpensive wireless speaker could have such a profound impact on how I take in information, but a small, portable Tribit has turned me into a voracious listener of podcasts. In a blink, wireless speakers have blossomed into a multi-billion dollar market, full of brands that were off the radar—if they existed at all—a couple of years ago. Online retailers dream of audio e-tailing riches ("Alexa! Order me this, that and some more, too!"), but right now the killer app is listening to music and, increasingly, to podcasts. 

No one really knows exactly how many podcasts there are, only that there are an awful lot, with more uploaded every single second. Following in the digital footsteps of blogs and videos, they are taking over the internet at kudzu speed.

While videos can be published on multiple platforms (mostly YouTube and Vimeo) and blogs can be shared as links and embeds across dozens of sites and aggregators, podcast distribution is in a class of its own. 

For example, Rachel Maddow's riveting series Bag Man, a deliciously detailed dissection of former Vice President Spiro Agnew's fall from political grace, is available via iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, TuneIn, Art19, Spotify and the MSNBC website. Collectively the seven-part podcast has been downloaded more than ten million times. If Bag Man had been packaged as a book that had sold a mere ten thousand copies in a week, it would have zoomed to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. 

Reading is great, but tell me a story... 

••••••••••••

There are also networks such as Vox offering suites of podcasts that in turn are uploaded to multiple platforms. From a listener's perspective, everything is everywhere. 

And everything can be a podcast. Radio shows are now routinely repackaged as podcasts, while long forgotten archives are mined for audio treasure (see Bughouse Square with Eve Eweing | Studs Terkel). Newspapers, magazines, television shows and movies spawn podcasts, too, as do businesses, museums, conferences, trade shows, high schools and political campaigns. Even videos can do double duty as podcasts if the visuals aren't essential. Since anyone with a smartphone can record audio, upload it to the web and call it a podcast, it seems like everyone does.  

Which makes finding the good stuff really, really hard. The content pie is expanding at an exponential rate, so even if the vast number of mediocre and outright terrible podcasts were cut, that would still leave far more good stuff than could possibly be listened to in a lifetime, even multi-tasking. 

But you have to start somewhere, so here are a few off-the-beaten-track podcasts I've recently come across: 
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  • The Aquarius Project is a charmer. Produced by the Adler Planetarium, it tells the tale of an intrepid group of high school students determined to find and retrieve meteorites 200 feet beneath the surface of Lake Michigan. In 2017 a meteor streaked across the Midwestern skies and broke into pieces over the water in a display of cosmic rock-skipping at its finest. So far there are three episodes, but the story isn't over...
 
  • The Art of Manufacturing: Interview with Preeti Battacharyya, founder of Hydroswarm. With over 50 podcasts in the series,The Art of Manufacturing  hosted by "Z" Holly for the Make It In LA website is geek binge-listening heaven. Preeti Battacharyya, a young engineer/entrepreneur from India, talks about her company, which grew out of her research on autonomous marine drones at MIT. Applications range from exploration to espionage. Personally, I'd love to see a swarm of little egg-shaped yellow aqua-drones help the Aquarius team hunt for space rocks. 
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  • Farming Today (BBC Radio); I came across this one on Pocket Casts, a mobile podcast platform. I have no idea whether it is a better platform than others (there are so many), but it provides easy access to the BBC's vast collection of deliciously eccentric programming. I am a born-and-raised city slicker, but have covered a lot of Ag stories over the years, so Farming Today quickly won my heart. From Brexit to hedgehogs, it provides insight into the practicalities of farming and the food economy that never seem to make it into the news here. The Christmas show included farmers reciting seasonal poems. Yes, please, more of that.   

Enjoy!
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Now Then...

1/1/2019

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New years happen all the time. Count 365.25 days from the thinnest slice of time you can imagine and it's a new year. Put another way, it is "always 5 o'clock somewhere" on our spherical blue dot of a planet that spins at a cheeky tilt, kept company by a silvery moon, circling a sun at the just-right distance for life as we like it.

Yet only at midnight on December 31 do we all collectively marvel that we are flying through space and time on a planet so big that the party in Tokyo is long over by the time the ball drops in Times Square. New York is always chasing the future. 

••••••••••

I came across a copy of Steve Johnson's How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World last summer at Powell's, a gem of a bookstore near the University of Chicago known for its vast collection of used, remaindered and antiquarian treasures. Powell's is a dangerous, wondrous place with books so tightly packed together on long skinny shelves that stretch from floor to high ceiling that they seem to serve a structural purpose. It is a store built of books—and most are bargains. I browse under a cash-only rule or I'd never be able to carry out all the gems that beckon. 

The book sat in a stack by my favorite reading chair for months until, in a nice parallel to its premise, the time was right. Johnson's long arc, connect-the-dots storytelling provides reason to the rhyme of innovation, though tempered with a measure of caution. "Eurekas" are not inevitable but more (or less likely), depending. They do not happen in a vacuum, either. The lone genius is a myth.

Also, intentions and implications are two very different things. Who would have predicted that the popularization of the printing press would lead to the near extinction of sperm whales? Commercial whaling came of age in the pursuit of oil in found in massive chambers above the orcas' brains. The oil made a superior candle which made reading at night easier. These "spermaceti" candles were so prized that George Washington is said to have paid the equivalent of $15,000 for a year's supply. Imagine how many LEDs that would buy—and power—today.

Inevitably the "now" of Johnson's book, published in 2014, is no longer the cutting edge. The chapter on sound, for example, which begins with the acoustical qualities of prehistoric caves and ends with radar and ultrasound imaging, misses the rise of Alexa and Suri, bluetooth speakers, Spotify, podcasts and the unnerving fakery of Lyrebird software. In a blink, now is then.  

The future is informed by the past, but unpredictable. For every daisy on the innovation daisy chain, likely there are many other would-be daisies that didn't quite make it. The more knowledge, open and freely available, and the more connection, the better the odds for daisies. Ignorance isn't bliss. It's the Dark Ages. 

The challenge for each of us, more urgent than ever with so many tipping points poised to tip, is to know as much as we can, to tap into Johnson's "network of ideas" to mix, match and leverage for better.

​So what are you waiting for? It's a new year!

  • Steven Johnson (author website)
  • What’s next for virtual assistants like Alexa? Maybe buying stuff for you automatically (recode/decode podcast)
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