Monday, October 6, 2003

And we're off

Travel day today. Unless I get on wi-fi at Logan or LAX, I'll see you next in Santa Barbara.

[Later...] I'm back, and I'm tired (easy trip; just a long one). See ya tomorrow.

RouteAround Radio

A bunch of us from BloggerCon went to dinner last night — it was effectively the last event of the conference — and talked, among other things, about radio. One of us worked with a school that wanted to start a radio station. Should they try to put the station on the air in the conventional way, with a small local signal on the FM band, or on the Net?

I recommended the latter. Partly because it's a lot cheaper and easier, and partly because the Net can easily be extended to the air in a clean and unlicensed way.

For example, this morning I listened to Chris Lydon's latest interview, with Len Apcar of the New York Times. I listened in the shower at the hotel, on the radio. The station was on 88.5FM, a relatively open channel here in Cambridge, MA. The transmitter was an iRock 300w Wireless Music Adapter that I picked up for about 25 bucks at Radio Shack. The range is short, but probably not much shorter than a wi-fi signal.

Whether by wi-fi, digital cellular, satellite or something else, big licensed brute-force radio transmission will eventually become a thing of the past. Not only because it's woefully costly, bureaucratized and ineffecient, but because it's a bottleneck between supply and demand. The Net will route around that bottleneck. Count on it.

[Later...] More from Steve MacLaughlin and myself.