Friday, April 18, 2008

msb-0289 Its getting closer...

msb-0289 Its getting closer...

intro

Disclaimer! Disclaimer! Disclaimer!

MSBPodcast is "not" any kind of a medical podcast.

It is by and for MSers.

Its purpose is to keep us entertained, to explain our symptoms, to remark on our discoveries, and to raise the general consciousness about our disease.

The path to illness is shadowy, murky and rough strewn.

The path to wellness is lit by the lamp of knowledge.

----

Feedback comes first, so...

The more I think about this watchdog that I'm proposing (think "MediaGuide" [ http://www.ascap.com/playback/2004/fall/hd-headlines.html ] from ASCAP [American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers] but for adverts,) the more I think its an absolute necessity for the "Wild West" of the internet to have some impartial authority that just gathers statistics that both the podcasters and the advertisers can trust and disseminates impartially to anyone and everyone who asks.

---- "Closer" by: "Norman Hedman's Tropique" http://normanhedman.com/

Feed Forward comes next, so...

This is "your" segment.

Say "your" piece on this segment.

Share with other MSers whatever "you" want to share.

Drop me an email: "charles at MSBPodcast.com"

---- "Come Closer" by: "Marcus Williams" http://www.mywpmusic.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=section&id=15&Itemid=118

Feed Me comes third, so...

Do you have a therapy, product, good or service that is of interest to MSers?

Consider advertising on this podcast.

Reminders on this segment only cost $0.03 per reminder per download of an episode. (A $30CPM targeted at MSers.)

It can/should lead to a full ad, in text, audio or video, which costs $3.00 per download.

That sounds expensive until you do the math and realize that if nobody downloads it it costs you nothing, unlike print, where you often can't even get an ad in to the specialized journals, or radio or TV where you'd just be wasting your money with the 0.0833% MSers rate of return. (That's about six times "below" the level of "statistical noise".)

But MSBPodcast is 100% in your market, and you only pay per download of your material.

No play, no pay.

Reach the MSers who would buy your therapy, product, good or service, with-out having to waste your advertising money on anyone who is "not" interested...

Send me an email at: "charles (at) MSBPodcast.com"

---- "Closer Still" by: "Robert Gomez" http://www.robertgomezmusic.com/

"Thesis:"

Next week at this time, I'll be delivering a bombshell, (hopefully "not"the same way that "Slim Pickens" [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slim_Pickens ] did in "Doctor Stangelove" [ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/ ],) that may upend my life as thoroughly as I did when I embraced object-orientation and open-source programming.

Believe me, at the time it was all new, untested, and meeting lots of resistance from the "old guard" [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praetorian_guard ] unstructured programmers.

Now object-orientation is "de rigeur" and open-source is seen as the best way to get contributions from the "wisdom of the crowd" to quickly and inexpensively 'mash up" [ http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/ibmmsk ] software to do whatever you need. (Thankfully I managed to get out of software development with my shirt and a couple of bucks put aside. I can afford to look at new opportunities.)

I "know" what podcasting needs to be taken seriously as a medium the same way that I "knew" about object-orientation and open-source.

I "also" know how advertising assets are created, charged and tracked.

And if "you" don't, well you're screwed.

You have to play the game if you want to get dealt a hand.

But there has to be a nice way to get the "Hooper, Crossley, Nielsen, Pulse" and "Schwerin" and other type of people to realize that we don't need them and their statistical manipulations to derive a "touchy-feely" sense of audience share "at all."

Download logs are "absolute, verifiable" and a "true" end-to-end metric.

---- "Closer" by: "The Divine Madness" http://myspace.com/thedivinemadness

"Synthesis:"

What has been missing everywhere is a trusted source for the episode "circulation" numbers.

Somewhere where the by-words are: "the bull shit stops here."

Somewhere where anyone can go for the final arbiter of who caught what episode.

Somewhere where both podcaster and advertiser can absolutely trust the circulation statistic.

Lets be honest, nobody who's interested in going to PodCamp NY is also going to be interested in:
  • the kinds of minutia and accurate record keeping activities which the non profit will require,
  • the kinds of equipment that this kind of processing will require,
  • the kinds of personel that this kind of equipment will require.
But I'll take it on anyway because "I'd" be interested.

It will take
  • enough bandwidth to take all of this stuff in and spit out the emails we're going to generate,
  • enough storage to load up a few month's worth of Apache/IIS logs (we're talking a few terabytes hard disk and maybe a terabyte of RAM)
  • enough processing power to filter out the stuff we're not tracking from the stuff we are, (that's going to be one massive dictionary)
  • enough processing power to sort what's left by podcaster, episode numbers destination IP address, (that's going to be one massive radix table and link-lists)
  • enough processing power to also sort by advertiser, podcaster, episode number, destination IP addresses (a more massive radix table and link-list) and
  • enough processing power to take the output, format it and send it via e-mail to the podcasters and to the advertiser.
Its all going to be electronic because there is no way to guaranty timely and accurate reporting otherwise.

From the hoovering of the logs to the spitting out of the emails, the entire process has to happen with extremely rapid and dependable turn around.

---- "Closer" by: "Diane Jessurun" http://www.dianejessurun.com/

"Conclusion:"

Next week-end, my life will probably take a turn for the better (or worse, depending on how you look at the work that I'll have to do.)

Luckily, I know people who would be interested in taking on parts of the work (and these all mesh together into a seamless whole,) while I would have to handle the semi-public face of the organization. (Good thing I'm not shy...)

(Not to mention negotiate for space, negotiate salaries or hiring contracts, negotiate for new equipment and maintenance contracts.)

---- "Closer to you" by: "Evolver" http://evolver.co.za/

Outro

2 comments:

mdmhvonpa said...

I'm in the thick of it right now ... Agile methodology can be absurdly perverted if you are not careful.

Charles-A. Rovira said...

Agile development is one way to work.

Its extremely focused on results. If you can't test something, you don't have to code it. If proof of the pudding is in the eating, don't start cooking beef stew.

Its also extremely effective in any maintenance situation where you don't want to focus on creating any side effects because you don't want any side-effects...

The problem is that there are times, like when you're creating tool kits or frameworks when you can't exactly craft the code that way. (You'll want side effects.)

Its always a question of knowing which you're actually in.

I once had to write something that would read a file created on a mainframe (COBOL type specification) and process it.

I ended up taking the document we were handed and writing something that was different from what the rest of the team was doing.

They were and translating from the COBOL layout into an Smalltalk Stream instance layout.

I coded something which would parse the COBOL and generate the Stream Smalltalk code and compile it into the image.

My code had to actually know how fields were aligned, (LEVEL 88s etc.) and the various synchronization methods.

The effectiveness of my method was proved when they changed the record layouts us.

I just 'include'd the new record layouts into my parser, let it run, and I was finished.

The rest of the team had to start all over again crafting stuff by hand.

(The team leader had criticized my efforts and had told me I was wasting my time. Then when the specs changed, [as they inevitably do, don't they?] he looked like the idiot he was and I turned on my heel and quit, [after pulling my little magic trick with my pointlessly complicated piece of code.])