The WGBH.org Development Blog

Last week, like many of you in the public media world, I attended the Integrated Media Association’s Public Media Conference 2009 in lovely Atlanta, Georgia. I leaned a number of things (like, for example, did you know they grow peaches in Georgia? Who knew?) A good time was seemingly had by all.

I flew down Tuesday night, so as to attend the Tech Summit on Wednesday, then hung around for most of the General Conference, going home Friday evening, so I missed the late Friday and Saturday morning sessions.

My strategy going into the conference boiled down to a three pronged attack:

(1) Learn as many cool technical tidbits as possible
(2) Attend any session involving Andy Carvin
(3) Don’t miss out on any free food or coffee

I am happy to say I feel as if I achieved these goals, though I did miss one Andy Carvin session. However, I didn’t miss any of the free food or coffee, so I’d call it a wash.

Anyway, what follows is a rough chronology of my time there and what notes I took at various sessions. My note taking skills have deteriorated a bit since I was last in school, so in some sessions I took good notes and in others not so good. Also, most of my note taking action took place on Tech Summit day, as you’ll see. Fair warning.

The IMA has an excellent wiki for the conference. Audio for a number of sessions is available here. Also, video of some sessions are available right on the IMA home page.

Ready? Here we go:

I flew down late Tuesday afternoon and arrived on time and hassle free at the Westin Peachtree Plaza right there in downtown Atlanta. I was given a lovely room on the 43rd floor.

A few interesting nuggets about this hotel. First of all, whomever designed sure liked concrete. The main lobby and lounge was crammed full of it. For example, take a gander at this coffee table in the lobby:

I kid you not, that thing is a solid eight inches of concrete! Wow. Strange.

Secondly, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out (like many of us there did) that right across the street from the hotel is a Hooters. Seriously:

For the record, I did not go there. Honest. No, really, I swear.

OK, moving on to more serious matters, Wednesday was Tech Summit day, organized by PRX’s Andrew Kuklewicz (nice work, Andrew!).

The summit started bright and early, with a keynote address, What Do They Want and How Do We Deliver, by Todd Mundt of Louisville Public Media.

Todd said that LPM has moved to WordPress as their CMS and spent $12,000, for setup and custom theming. The front page is hand coded (yikes!), meaning that content is entered directly into code via the theme editor.

On Facebook they have one page for each of their three stations and they use RSS-Connect to pull in content from the site. They are also on Twitter and pull site content through twitterfeed. They find Twitter to be an excellent tool for listener interaction. This would turn out to be a recurrent theme throughout the conference.

Along with Graham Griffith Todd publishes The Mediavore, a hand-curated blog meant to highlight public media content outside of Louisville that could appeal to their listeners.

Todd noted that, in general, they are not seeing a lot of traction on their bogs. He says they get many more comments on news stories.

The next session was a CMS Roundtable discussion. First up was Dan Goldman of WNET New York’s thirteen.org.

They are now using WordPress MU (multi-user) as their CMS. They wanted a CMS that would impose the same structure and similar look and feel across all of their various sites (of which there many), so as to remove some control of these things from content producers. This would then let them focus on building community and audience.

They currently use WP MU to manage 30-40 sites, with more yet to be integrated, each of which uses one of two site templates. They built a custom migration tool to move existing sites to WP MU (basically via HTML scraping). New features that are coming up: full COVE integration (ongoing), sponsorship system, and personalization.

As an example, Dan showed us the Wide Angle site where each episode is a blog, and the site itself is a blog of these blogs.

Joe Sheppa and Jerry D’Antonio from ideastream in Ohio discussed the use of ExpressionEngine as their CMS.

They currently run six sites using EE, content from each of which can be easily be shared across the other sites. They like EE’s templating language, which allows content producers to create dynamic content without having to know how to program. EE templates also allow the use of embedded PHP, which provides coders with even more ways to easily generate dynamic content.

Things then took a Drupal turn as James Rutherford of Georgia Public Broadcasting talked about their use of it. James gave a nice background on Drupal for those who may be not be familiar with it.

My friend Margaret Rosas of Quiddities then got a little more into the Drupal weeds with a discussion of the Radio Engage project which her company is working on.

Radio Engage is meant to solve many of the usability problems of Drupal by building a turn-key CMS/site based on Drupal geared towards public radio stations.

The package includes a number of the best contributed Drupal modules for public media stations, as well as an installation profile, and a more user-friendly administration theme (they are currently trying out the RootCandy admin theme). The package will provide support for station management, member management, content management and audience engagement.

They envision using social bookmarking sites to bookmark interesting content, which can then be pulled into Google Reader, from which editorial staff can stars items to highlight which, finally, can then get pulled directly into Drupal. Likewise, they plan on using standard tagging of content on popular social networks (e.g. Flickr, Twitter) and third party sites by both station staff and audience members, which can then be pulled into Drupal and published in an automated fashion.

Closing out the round table was our host Andrew Kuklewicz of PRX, who spoke about their use of Ruby on Rails. Andrew gave an overview of what RoR (or Rails) is (really a development platform, rather than a CMS). They like Rails for rapid development and change, and find it easy to modify and maintain plugins.

PRX currently uses Comatose, a micro CMS, based on RoR, and they have integrated their site search with Solr.

After a semi-fine - but free - box lunch, I headed over to the Mobile Site and Service Development session. Melinda Driscoll of Minnesota Public Radio got the ball rolling with a discussion of the MPR News mobile site. It’s RSS based, using MoFuse, and includes feeds for news, politics, business, arts & culture, science, and their News Cut blog. Traffic to the mobile site if less than 1% of total web site traffic, but continues to grow.

Matt MacDonald of PRX then talked about the Public Radio Tuner, an iPhone application for playing public radio streams originally developed by MPR. The beta was launched in November 2008. Currently more than 200 stations are involved.

Matt talked about some of the features now included in the tuner, such as search, save favorite stations, etc. They are encouraging feedback as to what stations would like to see in the tool. Version 2.0 of the tuner will be released by May 31, 2009, at which point they will also make the source code available.

Zach Brand of NPR then discussed the NPR mobile site. It was launched August 2007 and traffic has been steadily climbing since. In particular, they found getting on the AT&T deck has led to a lot of growth.

Zach said they’ve found mobile visitors much more loyal and engaged than regular web visitors. 81% of the mobile audience comes from iPhone (61%) or BlackBerry (19%).

The NPR mobile iPhone application debuted in December 2008 and, interestingly, was created by an independent developer of his own volition, using the NPR API.

Doc Searls then spoke but something came up at work that I had to help fix, meaning I took no notes during his time. Ahh, it’s great to be constantly connected, ain’t it?

The session was closed out by Keith Hopper of Public Interactive (which is itself now a part of NPR). Keith spoke more about the Public Radio Tuner and, in particular, about the VRM ListenLog, which is coming in version 2.0. It will capture some of the listener history, and is meant to allow for the incorporation of user-driven functionality to the tuner. But it is really more than that as it’s open source and open standard so potentially any application will be able to write to and make use of it.

The last formal session of the Tech Summit that I attended was Developing and Using Widgets and APIs. Andrew Kuklewicz once again got things rolling with a nice primer/overview of widgets.

Among the tools and applications that Andrew uses and recommended for widget development were the Google AJAX API Playground, Google Dynamic Feed Control for adding feeds to blogs and websites, and ProgrammableWeb, the Wikipedia for APIs.

John Tynan of Arizona State University and News21 initiative then spoke about his experience building widgets. He recommended using Yahoo! Pipes as a great way to transform XML data into JSON format, in order to get around XSS issues.

Zach Brand wrapped up the session by speaking about the NPR API. It was originally written to support NPR.org (which is now almost completely powered by it). The API makes available virtually all of the content on NPR.org, with lots of different ways to slice and dice the data (by lists, by topics, etc.). Zach spoke of some of the legal challenges involved with this venture (e.g. exclude rights-restricted content).

In order to use the API you must create an account on NPR.org. Currently there are 1,300 registered API users and requests are growing quickly.

They offer a sophisticated query builder and multiple output formats. NPRML is the default data output format, but they also offer data in a number of other formats, such as RSS, JSON, HTML, etc.

Future enhancements they envision include improved ingest of member station content (currently 14 stations contribute content), better integration with PI, the addition of other output formats (e.g. PBCore), offering video content and a full story HTML widget.

Zach also mentioned the Inside NPR.org blog (which I love).

The Tech Summit wrapped up with a Show Us Your Stuff session. By that point my note taking hand was tired out so I just sat back and enjoyed seeing what other folks are doing.

I ended the night by enjoying a nice dinner and adult beverage(s) at Max Lager’s. I recommend checking it out if you’re down there!

The General Conference kicked off on Thursday with some local Georgia musicians. They started off with Foggy Mountain Breakdown. Can’t beat that for kickoff music!

Tim Olson of KQED was among those giving the opening remarks.

Following the keynote speeches I made my way over to A Social Media How-To: Choosing and Using the Right Tools, where I scored a coveted seat right near an outlet!

Kevin Dando of PBS started us off by speaking of his experience with several social networking tools. He recommended that on Facebook fan pages are a better choice than groups, explaining that fan pages have better search engine visibility and you can always direct message all fan page members, whereas you no longer can once a group becomes too big. He also said that targeted advertising, based on status updates and wall posts, are coming to Facebook, though it has not been announced yet.

When using YouTube Kevin recommended creating strategic video descriptions (e.g. putting your URL up front, putting clickable links in the description, i.e. include http://, etc.). He also recommended making use of YouTube Insight, their free analytics tool, branding clips, and posting long form videos (which you can do, if you create a non-profit account).

Public media’s favorite social media expert Andy Carvin then shared some of his knowledge. He spoke of the importance of tagging, tagging and more tagging!

Andy also spoke of crowdsourcing, which is getting lots of people to contribute small bits to a collaborative work, and cited examples like BallotVox, The Hurricane Information Center and NPR.org’s Vote Report;

Andy also went into some of the drawbacks of crowdsourcing such as the potential for inappropriate content and the need to have somebody curate of all that user-generated content. He also recommended the use of free widgets (see widgetbox for a good selection), picking unique tags and, or course, promotion!

Julia Schrenkler of MPR and American Public Media spoke about collaboration vs. conversation and John Tynan also shared his thoughts on social media tools. I must have been getting hungry for lunch because I stopped taking notes.

After a tasty boxed lunch for IMA member stations I spent the afternoon attending the Got Mobile? and AIR’s Producers - Moving the Communities of Tomorrow sessions. In retrospect, though the latter was interesting, I should have attended instead The Shape of Content to Come: Think About It! Build It! session. Not sure what I was thinking there.

That evening Georgia Public Broadcasting hosted a reception at the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Site, which was very interesting. I had no idea that MLK (along with his wife) is actually buried right there:

The reception featured good food (including some sort of spicy chicken thing which was really good), good music and lots of interesting history!

Friday was the final day of the conference for me and it started with the Public Media Metrics Breakfast followed by the opening session, but the highlight for me was the Social Media: What Worked and Lessons Learned session, once again featuring Andy Carvin, along with Jesse Thorn from The Sound of Young America and Adnaan Wasey from The Takeaway. I didn’t take any notes here but just sat back and really enjoyed hearing how these fellas use social media. Great stuff.

My time at the conference ended with a nice spicy pork burrito for lunch, followed by part of the address given by Vivian Schiller, the new president of NPR. I had to cut out early to head to the airport and catch my flight home. Luckily, as on the way down, the travel went smoothly and I was back in cold and snowy Boston before I knew it.

Whew - I think that’s it! Gee, have I used enough tags on this post? Andy Carvin would be proud - or horrified.

Tags: #IMA09, Adnaan Wasey, American Public Media, Andrew Kuklewicz, Arizona State University, At&T deck, Atlanta, BlackBerry, Comatose, Dan Goldman, Doc Searls, Drupal, Facebook, Flickr, Georgia Public Broadcasting, Google, Google Reader, ideastream, IMA, iPhone, James Rutherford, Jerry D'Antonio, Jesse Thorn, Joe Sheppa, John Tynan, Jr., JSON, Julia Schrenkler, Keith Hopper, Kevin Dando, KQED, Margaret Rosas, Martin Luther King, Matt MacDonald, Max Lager's, Melinda Driscoll, Minnesota Public Radio, Mofuse, News21, NPR, NPR API, NPRML, PBS, peaches, programmableweb, PRX, Public Media Conference, Public Radio Tuner, Quiddities, Radio Engage, RootCandy, Ruby on Rails, The Takeaway, Tim Olson, Todd Mundt, Twitter, Vivian Schiller, WNET, WordPress MU, XML, XSS, YouTube, Zach Brand.

I’m happy to report that some PHP-based initiatives are still cooking! This week we launched one of those, Project Dropout.

Project Dropout is a collaboration between WGBH and our friends at WBUR looking at the student dropout crisis in Massachusetts. It includes a radio series, a television series and, if course, the blog.

The blog was built using WordPress. As I’ve previously discussed, we had to give some thought to whether to build this blog using Drupal or WordPress. We decided on WordPress for this project mainly because it’s meant to be a short lived, stand alone effort, quite distinct from WGBH.org (i.e. no shared templates or look and feel involved, no need to tightly integrate it with the rest of our main site, etc.).

Plus, by going with WordPress, much of the work (including theming) could be handled by others (both WGBH and WBUR staff) without requiring much work from Pete or I. That’s always a plus! My work involved installation and configuration and helping out with some of the trickier theming and CSS issues. All in all it’s been a smooth ride and a fun project to be involved with. Please check it out.

In other news, I’ll be attending the Intergrated Media Association’s Public Media Conference next week in Atlanta. I’ll be arriving Tuesday night so as to make the Tech Summit on Wednesday. I’ll be at the general conference as well, through Friday evening, when I return to Boston.

I’m looking forward to seeing some familiar faces and meeting new folks. If you see me wandering around, say hello! I’ll be the guy who looks kind of like this (minus the beard, which I just shaved off):

I hope to see a number of you there!

Tags: CSS, IMA, Project Dropout, Public Media Conference, WBUR, WordPress.