The Open Source conversation is reborn at the Watson Institute at
Brown University.

Chris is on his way to Jerusalem via Greece to do some traveling and conferencing. He and Chelsea had hoped to record a conversation with Harold Bloom on the occasion of his 77th birthday, but the Bloomster came down with an illness and postponed the interview.

Upon hearing the news of Open Source’s summer hiatus, ROS member Sutter suggested what he called “a very Emersonaian idea for this already Emersonian affair: an Emerson discussion group, to read and think through the first and second series of essays.”

Mynocturama has written the kickoff post which will be up shortly.

So have at it. Chris is bringing his computer to Europe with him and perhaps can dip into the discussion on his travels.

Here are some of the ideas we’ve had in-house:

* Chris and Mary could keep blogging, updating you with their exploits, their ideas about the next project, and every now and then, a recorded interview. We know we’re all going to miss sending links around and having a story meeting everyday, so we’d like to figure out a way to share that here, too.

* We could invite 5 or 10 tried and true community members to start writing posts and start their own threads on the site.

* We could invite 5 or 10 of our favorite bloggers and guests to do the same.

Other ideas?

To start you off, here’s OliverCranglesParrot‘s list:

Top Ten ROS Shows (which goes to eleven, ‘cus it’s like spinal tap)

1. Convergences.
Breathtaking. Illuminating. Radio’s manifest destiny, IMO. Absolutely the best radio I’ve heard in a long time, outside of Joe Frank. Wonderful Guests. Mr. Weschler, Joel Meyerowitz, and Richard Taylor.

2. Convergences.
This was actually multiple shows in one composite show. I especially enjoyed the John Berger Bonus Interview.

3. Economic Hit Men.
Great topic. Great guest in John Perkins. The right amount of skepticism and thinking-on-the-spot from Chris and ROS. The blog was hopping.

4. Lawrence Wilkerson.
This was quite a show. Metaphorical bombs were dropped by an ex-high level state department official. One for which as an Iraq war dissenter I needed to hear, chiefly: There was no way this administration could or would accept anything short of boots-on-the-ground as a viable measure of Iraq’s WMD capacity.

5. Ground Hog Day (GHD I: February 1st, 2006; GHD II: January 30th, 2007).
Perhaps this is my generation’s Woodstock.

6. Plamegate: The Libby Trial.
Chris and team ROS were superb. Just made it past the Ellington show for me.

7. Ellington, Newport and the American Century.
It’s the Duke. Need I say more? Stanley Crouch was wonderful, as were all the guests.

8. The History of Utopia.
Riveting from the moment it was posted on the website. ROS as Utopia, or media oasis.

9. The Democrat’s New Reading List.
The new day has dawned…which will look like many previous days. Wonderful round-table discussion. With a bonus.

10. Moby-Dick, Cheney, et al.

11. Samba School.
My cats went nuts with confused cosmic paralysis…they couldn’t move away from the radio during all the samba stuff. It’s the only time they’ve listened to ROS. The only time I’ve seen them this mesmerized was watching a hockey game.

Honorable Mentions, but definitely not also-rans:

Requiem for Darfur, The Death of Anna Politkovskaya, The Ecstasy of Influence, Thucydides: Ur-Historian of the Ur-War, Samuel Beckett: Nothing Funnier Than Unhappiness, A Museum Tour with John Updike, Harold Bloom: Jesus and Yahweh, Is God in Our Genes?, Chowhounds, Spring Cleaning.

OliverCranglesParrot, in an email to Open Source, February 14, 2007.

From Nick, on his first conquest:

Today I’ve been putting the polish to our Comments RSS Feed by adding the show title to each feed item. Now you can easily keep up with the most recent conversation on our site from your favorite reader.

Nick Allen, June 21, 2007

RSS feeds collect all of the new information that’s posted on a site and deliver it to an RSS feed reader for you. In this office, we all have Bloglines accounts, but you can try Google Reader or Live Bookmarks and see which you like best. You can tell your reader to collect new posts from all your favorite daily reads on the web.

You can also restrict your RSS subscription so that the reader gathers only certain kinds of posts from those sites. On our site, you can subscribe to a feed that sends you all new posts to the site, or a feed that sends you every new comment posted on any thread, or one that sends any new comment posted to a specific thread. You can even subscribe to a feed of links to articles we’re reading in preparation for upcoming shows, or a feed of new photos tagged “radioopensource” on Flickr.

The catch: until this morning, the feed that collected every new comment posted to any thread was pretty worthless. It sent the text of the comment and the commenter’s name, but it didn’t tell you which thread it was posted to. Everything was out of context and very hard to follow.

Today, Nick went in with his nimble little coder fingers and fixed all that.

Here’s what the comments feed looks like in Bloglines now:

Essentially, it works like a “display all unread comments” feature, which Allison and others have been hankering for for a while now, and now it tells you which thread each comment comes from.

It also means that new comments to old threads, which have often gone unnoticed in the past, can now get just as much attention as new comments to new threads. Now you have a much better chance of re-igniting that discussion on coltan mining, or dystopia, or potatoes. Every comment gets more time in the sun.

So to subscribe to any of our feeds (or just to catch up on the action every now and then), click on any of those orange boxes at the bottom of the right column.

This one: shows all new posts.

This one: shows all new comments.

This one: shows all new podcasts.

This one: shows links to articles we’re reading.

This one: shows new photos tagged “radioopensource” on Flickr.

So what should Nick do next? Here’s another note from him:

While I’m here this summer, I’m going to be working on other small improvements to the website. Big changes like editable comments and show topic tag clouds will have to wait until the redesign, but I’ll do what I can and I’ll let you know what I can’t. So write in and tell us what you would like to see on the Open Source website.

Nick Allen, June 21, 2007

And we continue poring through ideas you’ve given us that we haven’t answered yet.

Also: we’re trying something new this round. From now on we’ll be responding to show pitches with green boxes placed directly inside the comment. Think of them as in-pitch post-its. We like to anyway.

Here’s the full archive of pitch-a-show threads, and here’s the full list of the listener-suggested shows we’ve produced as well as the ones we’re still working on.

Leave your pitches below.

How This Works

Every day one of our producers reads the pitch-a-show thread and responds in the thread with a roundup. We read every show suggestion and will respond to as many as we can.

Every day, that same producer takes the pitches that could make a good show and presents them to the whole staff in our 11 am story meeting. If the rest of the staff thinks the show might work on the radio, too, we write up a short description and post the idea as a new show under “Warming Up.” Sometimes the pitch dies in the meeting; we often reject our own ideas, too. (Often brutally. It’s not a meeting for wallflowers.)

When you pitch a show idea, try to answer the question “Why now?” We don’t want to be slaves to the news cycle — and we’re less news-bound than most public radio shows — but if you want us to do a show on Maurice Ravel, for example, help us figure out why now is the time to do it. Is there something going on in France now that makes him especially relevant or interesting?

Pitch us ideas from your own reading habits and your own lives. We read The New York Times and listen to Fresh Air, too; we need your help catching the stories we might not see. Do you have regional insight on a national issue? Have you read something in a local paper with wider implications (or just fascinating in its own right)?

On the radio we need a conversation. We need questions. If you have a thesis or a conclusion, you’re better off writing a blog post or an article than pitching it as a show.

Give us as much information as you can. Are there any links you can leave us as a reference? Run a search on Technorati or Google Blogsearch; are any bloggers writing about this? We’re understaffed and distracted; point us in a direction and then help us down the road with a solid nudge.

We’re working hard to respond as quickly and as thoroughly as we can; please don’t be disappointed if your pitch doesn’t make it to the radio. Stick around. Pitch again. We’re reading.

Speaking of the younger generation, the wonderfully bright, eager and all around delightful Colin Baker has returned to Open Source for the summer after a semester in Paris. Colin was responsible for the biggest spike in web traffic ever at OS with his foray into North Korean missile sites.

For the record, the OS fundraiser is still going strong. Our new total is 160,044.

The show itself is just an incredible listen. It’s fascinating to read/hear what other people are writing about and get just that tiniest glimpse into other lives…. Taken collectively, the blogosphere offers an incredible look at not just the “big issues”, but also the tone and shape of our mundane lives at this point in time… People’s real lives are vibrant, tragic, joyous, tear- and laughter-filled, and sometimes deadly dull and boring, and I want to chronicle my little piece of that, for whomever wants to read it.

That someone felt it was worth reading to the world, well, that’s just about the most amazing thing that’s ever happened to me.

Mel, They Read It!, Cabezalana, June 15, 2007.

We’re happy to announce the arrival of another new intern. Nick Allen comes to us all the way from Portland, Oregon. He heard our shows on Major Jackson and The End of Free Will and got hooked on our podcast as a CS/New Media major in college. Now he’s looking for a place to live this summer — if you happen to know of anyone looking for a roommate near Harvard Square, let us know.

The GBH news generated a lot of questions, as expected, and we don’t have answers for all of them. We will keep producing the show after July 1st, probably from a different studio in town. We might use PRX to distribute it. We’re asking our stations how they can best access it.

There will be new freedoms that come with these changes, and some difficulties too. Losing a home on the Boston airwaves will be tough, but more and more of our audience listens online or podcasts. So, we’ll necessarily be realizing more and more of the web 2.0 of it all, retrenching but surviving and keeping an important experiment and a vital new community alive.

Checks and Paypals still rolling in. New tally coming. Thank you! Thank you!

And speaking about podcasts and radio and Open Source, Mark Glaser has written a nice post about us on PBS’s Media Shift blog. Check it out.

Garrett Zevgetis, aka nother from the ROS community, has joined us as a summer production intern. We’re grateful for his enthusiasm and help. Watch out world, he has the makings to be a mean ol producer.

David is looking into the China stock market story for tomorrow. Katherine is researching joneden’s suggestion from the pitch thread asking whether capitalism is the right economic model to deal with climate change.

Chelsea is following up on last night’s show on Big Pharma and looking into a focussed hour on the relationship doctors have with drug companies. Have we mentioned that Chelsea is living off of the 21 dollar a week food stamp diet? She’s two weeks into it and says the free samples at Whole Foods help a lot. Here’s part of her shopping list from last week:
a bag of spinach ($1), 6 mangoes (.69 each), two jars of peanut butter (two for $4), two cans of tuna (three for a dollar), canola oil ($1.39 per pound), 24 bananas ($2.40), 16 oz. shredded mozzarella ($1.77) and a big splurge — 24 popsicles ($2). What a country!

HTML tags that work on ROS:

i: italic
b: bold
u: underline

(I’ve yet to figure out which other HTML tags are supported here on ROS, and the lack of a Preview feature makes experimentation risky and difficult.)

John Navas, in a frustrated comment to our May 4, 2007 pitch thread.

Experiment no longer! Here’s a guide to help you boldly, emphatically, and verifiably go wild in the ROS comment threads.

HTML tags help you format the text in your comments to make your words appear bold, italicized, underlined, or linked; or to make long quotes appear in pretty blue boxes. The tags are fairly straightforward. Every tag needs to be opened to signal the place that you want formatting to start and closed to signal the place where you want formatting to end. Closing your tags is especially important — if you don’t, you’ll wreak some minor havoc on the threads, but we’ll get to that later.

All HTML tags look and act the same, so maybe it’s best to teach by example.

To italicize something, just put it between a <i> and a </i>.

So <i>Moby Dick</i> in HTML looks like Moby Dick on the page.

To bold something, put it between <b> and a </b>.

So the HTML code <b>Herman Melville</b> gives you Herman Melville.

Underlining follows the same rules, but with a <u> and a </u>: Everything inside here will be underlined.

For our blue-boxed “blockquotes,” put the word blockquote in those same brackets:

<blockquote>I feel so blue and boxed in.</blockquote> gives you:

I feel so blue and boxed in.

Embedded links are a little trickier, but not by much: <a href=”URL of the page you want to link to”>text that will show up as linked</a>

Got it?

Also, for the record, we agree that a site without a preview function or editable comments is like a night without stars. Editable comments will be one of the first additions to the new site. We’ll make every comment editable until someone has responded to it directly. Perfect, right? I wanted to kiss our developer team — all of them — right on the mouth when I heard that was an option.

Last word: if you remember nothing else, please please remember to close your HTML tags. When you forget, the code spills over, turning the rest of the comment thread into one giant blockquote, or one big bolded mess. If you ever do forget to close a HTML tag, send an email to everyone radioopensource org [turn it into an email address] and we’ll go in and fix it.

Try your hand at HTML below. Please practice here until you get the hang of it — it’s not too hard for us to go in and fix HTML flubs in other comment threads, but we’re is prone to grumble if we have to do it too much.

Robin is so cool [Katherine Bidwell]

We officially bid farewell this evening — with rooftop beers — to beloved Robin Amer (Amer like America). She’s headed to an exciting new gig in Chicago as a producer and host for Vocalo, WBEZ’s brand-spanking-new community station. So you’ll be able to hear her on the air or online very soon. She’s been eyeing this job since last autumn and marched right through a hugely competitive application process. We’re so proud of you, kid!

Robin’s been part of the crew since the infancy of Open Source and has poured her prodigious energy and curiosity into the show for two years. She was freshly 23 when she started and had real radio chops already, but in Mary’s Awesome School of Journalism she’s become a formidable reporter, able to wrestle just about anything into a compelling blogpost and hour of radio.

In a story meeting, probably pitching one of your ideas! [Katherine Bidwell]

If you’ve met Robin, you know how ebullient she is, and how engaged with the world. This place just isn’t quite the same without her keen brain and her enthusiasms for urban communities, the artworld, and of course BIKES. Afternoons lag in the absence of her mandatory Cute Overload-and-grapefruit study breaks.

It’s also strangely quiet without her warm but resonant voice. So resonant, in fact, that it required a small adjustment period… Robin and I sat next to each other, at 90 degrees, and it took some experimenting to figure out how to preinterview guests by phone when she was talking, too. First we glued some soundproofing foam in Robin’s corner. Then I started wearing headphones, askew, to cover the ear that wasn’t on the phone. And finally, Robin kindly learned to interpret the occasional wild arm flap as an international signal for “I’m on the phone. I. Can’t. Hear.” The flipside? Her voice sounds fantastic on the radio.

We miss you, dear Robin, but this Vocalo adventure sounds like it will stretch you and your creativity in so many great ways. We’ll be listening. As Mary McGrath would say, don’t ever be a stranger. We expect visits and wild tales from the Windy City.

[Graphic courtesy of entropy farm]

An anonymous donor took the Open Source fund-raiser well past its goal with a gift of $125,000 yesterday. This will keep us broadcasting this summer while we pursue conversations with additional partners. Think of it — we’ve raised $150,041 in 10 days thanks to your support! And it came in all forms — money, advice, good wishes, and today a poem:

And if the earth has forgotten you
Say to the still earth: I am flowing.
To the rushing waters say: I am.

Rilke, from Sonnets to Orpheus

Notes like this one from a listener in Olympia, Washington, come in the mail every day:

You’re the most thoughtful, enjoyable, stimulating thing on radio and one of the best on the whole web. Last year walking in Vancouver, BC, I listened to yr. Emerson Show on my ipod. By the time I was done walking, I had learned more about Emerson and why he mattered than in college many years ago. And I was on fire.

I can’t count the fascinating programs I’ve listened to. Don’t go away! You’re needed and badly!

Steve Hodes, in a letter to Open Source, 7/2/06.

We are so grateful! Though the 150K is enormously helpful, we’re not out of the woods yet, so if you’ve got it, keep it coming. Many of you expressed a willingness to pay for our podcast, in effect, with a monthly donation. Doc Searls has been talking about this recently, and he may have some ideas about how we can set this up. Needless to say, we’d be thrilled with a monthly donation. Also needless to say: our podcast will remain free.

In other news, Public Radio International has decided not to continue distributing Open Source as of July 1st due to their uncertainty about our funding. We are extremely grateful to PRI for helping to launch Open Source and for being early backers and believers in a new idea in public media. Luckily, there are other ways to distribute a radio show like ours, and now we just have to decide which option will work best for us and our stations.

Lastly, our friends at PRX announced the finalists in their Public Radio Talent Quest. One of them listed Chris as her favorite radio host.

[Graphic courtesy of entropy farm]

If you were wondering why Tony Judt didn’t appear on last night’s show, it’s because he got a last minute case of the plague — he called in sick with a high fever at 4:46 pm. Luckily the ever-nimble Chelsea Merz had a great standby guest in the wings. We’ll make good on Judt’s IOU. He’s a wonderful writer and an academic rock star of sorts with a sonorous British voice. If you have the show for which Tony Judt is the perfect guest, let us know.

Nine more pledges rolled through the door. The new OS pledge tally is $24,146. Thanks folks!

[Graphic courtesy of entropy farm]

New OS total is $22,831 from 421 contributors, some as far-flung as Dublin, Melbourne, and Basel, Switzerland. Thank you and here’s where you find the donate button.

We all read Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr.’s piece in the Sunday New York Times about Hillary’s war vote with some interest. We’re thinking of pursuing that issue in the context of the presidential campaign. Will her vote dog her the way it did John Kerry? Any ideas for other guests?

Many of you have also offered fund-raising ideas and advice, all of which is helpful. We’re always looking for sponsors and underwriters; it’s tricky to find the right match, namely a company that’s more interested in an association with us for our ideas and not purely the number of listeners we offer. We’re not opposed to non blaring, tasteful ads and things like a monthly sponsors program or a podcast subscription program. Mostly what we could use is a part time business development person who’s got some experience and contacts in the new media and technology world and a fund-raising track record.

In other business, read The Plague for Monday and all of Norman Mailer for Tuesday. We’ll be back on Monday all caffeinated and charged up thanks to Greta’s gift of Mountain Thunder coffee beans straight from the big island of Hawaii. Aloha!

Thank you!

If you want to join the party, you can do so here:

The Boston Globe wrote about our fundraising adventure today.

A number of you have asked what our goal is. As Chris said in the article, it’s to get through the summer and solidify our foundation. Two months’ worth of our lost UMASS support — about $72,000 — would help enormously.

You’ve already helped enormously by contributing and spreading the word and we’ve got some promising funding leads as a result.

Keep those cards and letters coming in, or make your tax-deductible contribution here:

If we had more money, we could afford spell-check. [galoot]

This just in from listener and community member galoot in the UK. If you don’t get the joke, check out the feature Robin wrote in April dissecting the LOLcat phenomenon. If you still don’t get the joke, your sense of humor is way more refined than ours.

Thank you! Join the club here.

As of 8 a.m. on May 29th we’ve received: $14,666 from 274 generous individuals.

If you haven’t yet donated, please consider joining our community of listeners, guests, friends, and commenters who are helping to keep Open Source alive.

We’re launching a week-long appeal for support, passing the hat to sustain “the blog with a radio show.”

For Open Source these last two years, it’s taken a global community to build a conversation.

And now we need you as never before: every listener, every guest, everyone who’s ever downloaded a podcast or flavored the site with a comment.

With your encouragement and robust participation, Open Source has become one of the most talked-about experiments in public media — a civil union of online and on-air communities that trust each other to talk about pretty much anything.

So we’re in this together. And now we’re in a bit of an emergency together.

As you may know, we lost a major funder without warning late last year. The University of Massachusetts, Lowell ended a five-year sponsorship agreement in a political shuffle of chancellors.

We’re an independent, non-profit production company, and it has been no small challenge to try to replace half a million dollars a year in six months. We’ve made some progress — a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, not least — and negotiations are underway with several interesting partners.

So the rescue ships are approaching the harbor, and still the wolf is at the door.

We need your help to keep broadcasting through the summer while we try to ink a deal.

If every listener sent one dollar, we’d have more than enough. If just the registered users on our site sent $100 on average, we’d be way over the top. And if you forward this appeal to your ten best friends, we’ll have a vastly bigger base to draw on.

We hope you’ll consider a tax-deductible contribution with a credit card here:

You can also send a check, made out to Open Source Media, Inc., to:

Open Source Media, Inc.
Attn: Mary McGrath
15 Mt. Auburn St.
Cambridge, MA 02138

We love what we’ve built with you here. We need your help to keep this community alive.

Sam reports that last night’s show on libraries surfaced some new names and faces on the site. We wonder endlessly around here what makes a successful radio show and a successful comment thread and what types of programs and subjects invite new people in. Potter said the comments on the website were better than this week’s show with Chrisopher Hitchens, for example.