Getting Up To Speed

Well, I promised you I'd deliver a harvest from this urban environment. But the crops are different here.

I published the link to the New York Times about hamburger to help you make smarter food choices and on Thursday, I went to a communications technology seminar at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Kevin Barron invited members of the local, independent media community to come to campus for a seminar at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics. Three representatives from Apple Computers put on a demonstration of their new Podcast Producer 2 software on the Snow Leopard server system. It was very impressive. And being a podcaster, I captured audio I hope to share with you in the next few days on this blog.

There are great things happening in communications technology that are already changing the ways that we live and work. The fact is that I can now be a remote farmer on Prince Edward Island and still be connected to multiple markets by internet technology. And that is only one aspect.

Another aspect is the grass roots nature of this technology. As the means to communicate spreads downward and puts the means to communicate into the hands of ordinary people,
the value of communication itself changes from the broadcast model of hitting millions of people everywhere, to local producers communicating directly with local people and addressing the needs of consumers where they live.

Apple's technology development is wonderful. But my take away this week is that the techs don't really understand how this technology will actually be used in local commercial markets.

My friend and independent producer, Patrick Gregston and I, intend to contact Apple and offer some insight into the changes this technology represents beyond their current design.

The brilliant Apple talent in Cupertino, Ca, have developed a wonderful new tool that will allow multiple sources of audio and video to be captured and streamed by a single user on a laptop to an online server. But until they learn that this tool represents the reality of live, local, streaming TV quality production on the internet - they're missing the real point and the potential of this program.

Stay Tuned!