Whole Wheat Radio

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Whole Wheat Radio (WWR) is a listener controlled, internet-only webcast and wiki website based in Talkeetna, Alaska, centered around independent music aired 24 hours a day, that is financially and operationally maintained by an all-volunteer community as a grassroots alternative to mainstream media. WWR's listener driven webcast and real-time interactive community, distinguish it from other streaming webcasts, social music networks, and peer to peer music file sharing websites.

Musical offerings range from independent singer/songwriters, to blues, to classical, to bluegrass and newgrass, to folk. Daily "rants," scheduled interviews, house concerts and spontaneous conversations are often broadcast live from Talkeetna. Though Jim Kloss and Esther Golton host WWR from their home in Talkeetna, listeners control the music and other on-air content heard throughout the day through the website's request pages. Generally 15 to 30 listeners are tuned in at any given time with occasional spikes of up 90 concurrent listeners.

Whole Wheat Radio webcasts two streams. One is for "low-speed" listeners (24kpbs) with dial-up connections. The other is for "high-speed" listeners (56kbps) with DSL, cable or other fast connections. Both streams utilize mp3PRO audio technology for listeners whose players support it. (An mp3PRO 56kbps stream is comparable in audio quality to a 128kbps stream while requiring only 1/2 the bandwidth.)

To listen to the Whole Wheat Radio webcast, participate in the chat and/or contribute to the wiki a listener needs only a computer, an internet connection, a software music player and a browser. Listening and participating are not operating system specific or proprietary. Popular music players such as Winamp, iTunes, Windows Media Player and Jetaudio can all be utilized as well as the Microsoft Windows, Linux and Macintosh operating systems.

WWR's technological innovations have facilitated the growth of a small virtual community that is driven by the audience and not station management. Known as Wheatheads, regular listeners interact in a "chat room", request, rate and tag music, send original music, write to artists and create wiki pages.

An example of technology reaching the world from a small rural town in Alaska, WWR's low-profile adult format succeeds without typical web advertising or competitive musical hype. Typically, WWR reaches more SHOUTcast listeners on a daily basis than any other webcast originating in Alaska.[1]

Contents

[edit] Music

Whole Wheat Radio features the music of several thousand independent artists not associated with the RIAA. Major artists who are household names generally have contractual obligations which does not allow them to submit their music for airplay on stations who do not pay RIAA royalties. Therefore, WWR does not air their music. The phrase "indie music" often refers just to the genre of independent rock in the wider world, but Whole Wheat Radio's emphasis is on independent acoustic music including singer-songwriters, folk, jazz, blues, and classical who have retained the right to submit their music for airplay without receiving RIAA royalties. The library also includes indie rock and pop, but on a limited scale.

Music from CDs sent to WWR are ripped to MP3 files and entered into a music library mySQL database. Tracks are ranked by listeners using a 1 to 5 star rating system. Each song is also tagged and categorized by genre, keyword, subject matter, arrangements, keys, musical instruments featured, etc. There are currently over 20,000 tracks in the Whole Wheat Radio music library. Unpopular tracks are automatically removed from the library based on listener's rankings.

All tracks in the music library are listener-requestable through the Whole Wheat Radio wiki. Songs can be requested individually, or in music sets or blocks based on the requester's criteria. For example - one could request a 20-minute block of female singer-songwriter music added to the library within the last six months, with an average 4-star rating, with the tag "Mood-Pretty".

The requested songs are queued for airplay from the main computer in Talkeeta. Dynamic pages on the website show information about the artist, listener rankings, artist website, etc. simultaneous to playing of the track. Links to the artist's website and CD Baby (where proceeds from CDs sales are paid directly to the artist) are displayed.

Musicians submit their music by sending a CD to Whole Wheat Radio. If a CD fits the overall WWR music genre requirements, the entire CD is put into the music library. This distinguishes WWR from most radio stations or webcasts where a program director is responsible for choosing which tracks get airplay. All tracks on an artist's album are available for listeners to request.

Each day an artist is spotlighted on WWR. One of their songs plays each hour, a prominent link to their WWR page is displayed and they are often discussed on-air.

Because Whole Wheat Radio is a listener interactive experience, listeners often participate in the building of the Whole Wheat Radio by contacting independent artists and requesting CDs to be included in the library on behalf of Whole Wheat Radio.

[edit] Live broadcasts

The Ranting and Raving News Muffin: Somewhat regularly, except in the summer, Kloss and Golton go live on-air at 11 a.m. (Alaska time) on weekdays for "The Ranting 'n' Raving News Muffin" show which features news, music, opinion, humor and slices of life. The shows are often referred to simply as "Rants" because listeners consider loud outbursts of emphatically expressed opinion to be the most memorable highlights of the show. The Rant was one of the earliest (Oct. 2004) live shows recorded for a live internet audience and then made available within minutes for podcast listeners.[2]

Live Interviews: Other live broadcasts include Golton interviewing musicians who are visiting Talkeetna on-air. The interviews usually include live performances, and are recorded for rebroadcast.

House Concerts: In addition to its normal musical webcast, WWR webcasts live house concerts held at Whole Wheat Radio facilities in Talkeetna.

When listeners drop by they often get on the microphone
When listeners drop by they often get on the microphone

Spontaneous Live Broadcasts: Frequent spontaneous live broadcasts include coverage of events such as flooding in Talkeetna in 2006, neighbors dropping in, open mics while cooking steaks on a campfire in the yard, and Friday night merriment.

Live broadcasts are often recorded for rebroadcast and some are later available for download.

[edit] Simulcasts

Throughout its history, WWR has been sporadically simulcast on other internet and terrestrially based webcasts and radio stations including Robin Valley Community Radio, AM 1690 in Omaha, Nebraska.

[edit] Technology and innovations

From the Talkeetna studio, where the music library is housed on Windows computers, using Winamp, music and live broadcasts are streamed in MP3 format to a SHOUTcast server in California to which listeners actually connect to the audio stream. The main website is hosted in New York on a LAMP server and communicates on a constant basis with both the SHOUTcast server and a non-public server in Talkeetna in order to react in real-time with users.[3]

All technical software aspects are based on open source or standard technology. Most of the coding is done with PHP and MySQL databases. For listeners and website users WWR is platform independent — listeners tune-in using almost any audio player, and access the website with any browser.

Kloss is WWR's core code developer although since migrating to a wiki format, users play an increasingly large part in both screen layout, design and testing. Code development is done without formal requirements or testing procedures. As an aspect of community involvement, users are code testers. During active development the site is frequently unstable which enhances the 'community bonding' experience.

Previous to March 2006, the website with its real-time chat and request/tracking interface ran on proprietary PHP/MySQL code written by Kloss. In March, 2006, after seeing how successfully Wikipedia created an active community of contributors, he began testing and migrating to MediaWiki. By writing several customized hooks into the wiki code, Whole Wheat Radio was able to give users access to customized realtime variables containing information about what is currently playing for placement on any wiki page. WWR is the first website/webcast to integrate a live chat, which understands wiki markup, and real-time music requesting into a wiki.

With the wiki format, development of the website opened to the WWR community which now volunarily maintains much of the website.

WWR was the first webcast to allow listeners to insert text-to-speech into the audio stream by typing messages into a browser chat interface. Also, using text-to-speech technology the system, known as "EJs", is programmed to read stored or off-site information on the air such as horoscopes and philosophical tidbits.

In 2004, WWR was the first and may still be the only, webcast set up with a phone-in line on which listeners leave voice messages (Phonegrams) that almost immediately play in the stream.

[edit] Podcasts/Audio Magazines

WWR was the first webcast to podcast as well as include other people's podcasts in the WWR audio stream. The first WWR podcast[4] was created on October 3, 2004[5]. On October 12, 2004 Doc Searls[6] mentioned Kloss's blog entry "The Bridge Between Webcasting And Full-Fledged Radio"[7] and called WWR "...one of the legendary internet webio stations". For several months, daily "rants", which listeners only heard live for the previous two years, were recorded and within minutes automatically posted as podcasts. WWR produced the first podcasts of live house concerts. Hundreds of hours of audio which were available as podcasts are archived for on-demand listening on the WWR website.[8]

Shortly after making the first podcasts of the "rants" available, taking podcasts and RSS feeds a step further, Whole Wheat Radio became the first to use podcast "channels." On October 12, 2004[9] Kloss created several subscription channels (e.g.: Rants Channel, Comedy Channel, Podcaster Tips Channel, Music Channel and All Channels) to enable listeners to be able to control what content they received in their podcast aggregator. Listeners were then able to have more control of their feed. By subscribing to a particular channel rather than having listeners download everything that Whole Wheat Radio put into podcast form, wasting listener's bandwidth and Whole Wheat Radio's bandwidth, they could subscribe solely to a feed of interest e.g. Comedy only or House Concerts only.

As the term "podcast" became popular, Kloss insisted that the term itself would be relatively short-lived as more competitors were introduced for the iPod. He coined the phrase "audio magazine" sometime before April, 2005[10] believing it better described the content and subscription idea implied by podcasting.

Kloss eventually became disillusioned with the direction of mainstream podcasting. Rather than becoming a well-thought-out alternative to mainstream media, he believes it quickly succumbed to the same ratings pressures and hype inherent in corporate media outlets. He wrote several blog entries[11] concerning what he considers inaccurate podcasting download statistics and poor technical practices in the podcasting world.

Although WWR still produces public podcasts on occasion, Kloss has indicated he plans to reintroduce audio magazines in 2007 as a free feed to approved subscribers. He believes this will reduce server loads significantly and increase the accuracy of listener statistics by ensuring that a greater number of magazine downloads are done by humans who intend to listen rather than by bots, aggregator sites and outdated podcast feeds.


[edit] Audio experimentation

WWR has experimented with many technologies designed to incorporate grassroots audio into the stream itself. Examples include:

  1. Multiple listeners being able to talk live on-air via Paltalk
  2. Multiple listeners being able to talk live on-air via various IM voice services
  3. Live audio shows originating from other sources (i.e. live shows from Kulak's Woodshed[12]) being broadcast on WWR
  4. Automated inclusion of listener FTP uploads of audio material into the webcast
  5. Automated inclusion of podcasts into the webcast
  6. Automated text-to-speech announcements when listeners have updated their blogs
  7. Listener telephone calls (Phonegrams) being a part of the normal webcast
  8. Automated text-to-speech announcements of listener horoscopes, weather forecasts and 'today in history' notes

Only Phonegrams and text-to-speech announcements are now heard on a regular basis. Occasionally, new experimental audio sources obtained in real-time from the internet are included in the stream. Based on listener's overall reaction, airing of that particular audio source is either continued or not.

[edit] Community

WWR listeners form a loosely knit Web 2.0 community. With an average listener age between 43 and 45[13], the WWR community includes listeners from grade school age to retirees. With the featured musical styles that appeal to almost everybody, a slow paced non-ICQ chat with discussions that are left-leaning, WWR attracts a specific subset of the overall internet community. Along with online discussions of daily activities, listeners share an auditory bond. All the listeners hear and make requests from the same music library. This is in direct contrast to a static, solo, "on-demand" audio download experience which is not shared with a real-time dynamic community. For this reason, many listeners tend to listen all day or for long periods of time, creating a very "sticky" website with much long-term user loyalty.

With the introduction of a wiki-based website in 2006, an additional focus on volunteerism was created. Listeners teach each other how to use wiki markup language and how to make musical requests. They create image intensive userpages and talk semi-privately with one another on their discussion pages. Because independent music is little known in mainstream culture and because WWR does not adhere to mainstream radio guidelines, the community remains relatively small. Therefore, listeners have an opportunity to get to know each other in a personal way on a website they trust.

Whole Wheat Radio has become an experiment in internet community. Under the watchful eye of Kloss [14] the community has grown and changed. Listeners support the cost of the hardware and bandwidth, and are anything but passive.

Listening to a concert live from the Wheat Hole gives a user a sense of participation. There is a tip jar, artist-signed CDs for sale, and interactive chat with the audience and artists. For example, at one concert an artist drew a painting during the concert. Listener in the chat room got together and purchased the painting to adorn the Wheat Hole as a surprise for Golton and Kloss.

If the web stream goes down several listeners will broadcast a stream of Whole Wheat Radio music using their own bandwidth to keep chat users entertained until the stream is repaired.

The sense of community goes well beyond the internet and the web. The depth of information and experience of the community is amazing. Whether working on sixth grade math with a young listener, discussing plumbing code, or having a structural engineer take a look at a building problem while delivering a pizza via airplane, it happens on WWR. If one of the independent artists is performing in your part of the world expect to not only know about it, but to meet other Wheatheads at the performance. In the fall of 2005 one of the featured artists Danny Schmidt did a live house concert. In the summer of 2006 he once again showed up in Talkeetna, not for a house concert, but to help work on the new "Wheat Palace" and take a break from performing. The artists are also part of this global community.

WWR is also unique in the "cross-pollination" that exists between other well established internet communities such as the J-Walk Blog community, and the 3 Blind Mice[15] community. Listeners share their favorite sites, blogs, podcasts, and anything else they find interesting. If there is a good concert being webcast somewhere else it will be shared and listeners may tune into together to listen.

To quote a longtime listener Flying Trout "Whole Wheat Radio isn't a home-page, it is home!"

[edit] Wheatheads

Longtime listeners who spend a lot of time listening to WWR are affectionately referred to as "Wheatheads". Wheatheads get to know each other in the chat, watch each others musical requests and sometimes draw together in the drawing room. John Walkenbach, well known Excel author, is a Wheathead and often posts humorous WWR related items to his blog.

[edit] Wheatstalk

Wheatstalk is a summer solstice gathering of Wheatheads in Talkeetna to celebrate music and friendship. The first Wheatstalk was June 21, 2005 and featured the music of 3 Blind Mice. Due to moving and renovations 2006 saw no Wheatstalk, but a Wheatstalk is planned for 2007.

[edit] House concerts

Whole Wheat Radio began presenting and live-webcasting house concerts in July, 2004, after a 24'x28' cabin (dubbed the Wheat Hole) was built to make enough room for an in-house audience of 50. The construction was motivated by frequent contacts from traveling artists looking for a venue in Talkeetna. There are few opportunities to perform or hear singer-songwriter music in rural Alaska; Kloss and Golton wanted to find a financially feasible way to present some of these artists, and realized that building a simple, economical space would add the opportunity to webcast the concerts live on Whole Wheat Radio increasing the audience size by as many as 90 more online listeners.

Both the in-house and internet attendees pitch in during the concert to pay the artist with online donations or CD sales. Whole Wheat Radio gives 100% of the night's income to the performer.

House concerts are recorded with high audio quality and later posted as audio magazines for download via RSS feed.

Performers have included Jack Williams, Johnsmith, Mark Erelli, Peter Mulvey, David Goodrich, Cliff Eberhardt, Stephen Fearing, 3 Blind Mice, Danny Schmidt, Robin Hopper, Anne Pence, , Radoslav Lorkovic, Diane Zeigler, Brooks Williams, Larry Zarella, and Kristina Olsen.

[edit] Funding

Initially, WWR was paid for as a hobby from Kloss's personal funds. As webcast and webhosting expenses increased, he decided it was no longer possible to maintain WWR without financial assistance from listeners. A small notice was put on the website indicating the amount of money needed to keep the station on-the-air for the current month. Listeners reacted by sending more funds than were needed and a public accounting page detailing where the funds were being spent was created. WWR also began referring listeners to CDBaby to purchase CDs in September of 2003. WWR earns $1 for every CDBaby referral that results in a CD sale. This income is also publicly accounted for.

Whole Wheat Radio's operating expenses are paid entirely by listener donations, proceeds from the CDBaby referral program and donations from listeners who sell WWR related merchandise in their personally managed businesses. In contrast to many user funded websites, all monies collected are accounted for publicly by Golton so listeners can see where their money is spent. Donations are typically made online using Paypal either as scheduled monthly donations or one-time donations. Listeners also donate computer equipment, artwork, fixtures, furniture, food, coffee, soaps and various other items. In 2003, WWR was accepted under an official non-profit arts umbrella but opted not to participate because of potential on-air content control issues and because their finances were already healthy without additional grant funding.

WWR has no paid employees. All development time and facilities are donated by listeners, artists, Golton and Kloss. 100% of house concert proceeds are given to the performing artists. WWR does not have official fundraising pledge drives. Instead, the monthly funds needed to operate the station are posted on the website. Listeners frequently donate until the monthly financial requirement reads $0.00 on the website.

[edit] History

The original 12x12 Whole Wheat Radio cabin
The original 12x12 Whole Wheat Radio cabin

[edit] 2002 - The original 12x12 cabin

Whole Wheat Radio began as "Radio Free Talkeetna" in August 2002. Programmer Jim Kloss started the live interactive webcast immediately after high speed DSL access arrived in the small village of Talkeetna, Alaska. His partner, singer/songwriter Esther Golton, soon joined in the project with the two broadcasting live on the stream from her self-built 12'x12' cabin which was heated by wood, lacked running water, and utilized an outhouse. The tiny cabin did have the three essential elements for internet connectivity: electricity (via an extension cord), a telephone line, and a resident computer programmer.

The website associated with the live stream quickly incorporated a live chat, information and links to the music being played, as well as information on the whereabouts of listeners based on their IP address. Kloss wrote the software in an outdated version of MS-DOS QuickBasic that dynamically controlled the playlist based on changing criteria.

At first the musical fare consisted of Kloss' personal collection of major-label artists. After learning about potential royalty payment issues with the RIAA and webcasting, Whole Wheat Radio soon switched to webcasting only independent musicians not associated with the RIAA. Kloss and Golton were surprised to discover a wealth of musicians whose CDs rarely receive airplay, and quickly became strong advocates for the discovery of professional and semi-professional, seldom-heard independent artists.

By December of 2002, Kloss and Golton realized that the project had outgrown the moniker of a small town in Alaska. The name of the webcast was changed to Whole Wheat Radio in order to symbolize a non-structured form of live radio that mimics the courseness and nutritional value of whole, unprocessed wheat flour.

Kloss was intrigued by the interactive possibilities presented by combining a radio station with a website. In Whole Wheat Radio's first year, he added many features including listener requests that play automatically, text-to-voice semi-intelligent "EJs" (Electronic Dee-Jays), the Say-It button, which allowed listeners to type messages into the chat and have an EJ say their words over the air, online games that involved collecting a valueless commodity called "wheatberries", personalized listener profiles, the ability to easily post links and photos in the chat and a group drawing room among other things. Listeners enthusiastically participated in these interactive features, often suggesting new ones for Kloss to program.

[edit] 2004 - Construction of the Wheat Hole

Construction of the Wheat Hole
Construction of the Wheat Hole
The interior of the Wheat Hole
The interior of the Wheat Hole

As WWR became more well known in the singer-songwriter community, musicians began contacting Golton about the possibility of performing in Talkeetna. Because there was a lack of reliable year-round venues in the small village, Golton and Kloss began discussing the possibility of constructing a small venue specifically to host concerts given by these independent musicians. Even though the village itself did not have enough residents to make regular concerts financially viable, being able to webcast these events live to a worldwide internet audience who might potentially purchase CDs gave the plan feasibility.

The summer of 2004 saw the construction of a new building next to the original 12'x12' cabin for holding house concerts and webcast gear. The new 24'x28' 'Wheat Hole' (a listener-suggested play on the phrase 'Whole Wheat') was constructed in large part by Talkeetna musician, Larry Zarella. On July 30, with only partially covered exterior walls, Jack Williams performed at the first WWR house concert. The interior of the building has never been completely finished - there are still no stairs from the lower floor to the balcony where the WWR equipment is housed. During house concerts a folding ladder is raised and lowered by audience members in order for Kloss to go between floors.

[edit] 2005 - First Wheatstalk

June 21st - Wheatstalk 2005


[edit] 2006 - Conversion to wiki

On March 15, 2006 Kloss installed MediaWiki's standard wiki software on the WWR site. In the following months, he customized the entire wiki and webcast operation using standard MediaWiki hooks. The significance of this innovative use of wiki software is found throughout highly customized listener created pages which include special WWR variables. By hooking into the wiki output buffer immediately before display, WWR is able to replace any variable preceded with $wwr_ with information directly from the mySQL databases. These databases typically contain information about what is currently happening with the on-air stream. So, for example, users can post the name of the currently playing song on any wiki page simply by placing the variable $wwr_currentlyplaying on any standard wiki page.

By means of this customized wiki software hook, listeners are also able to post wiki markup language anywhere in the live chat and have it rendered as a fully functional wiki page. This allows users to teach each other wiki markup in a live classroom environment. There are frequent live demonstrations of how to use the wiki as well as the customized WWR wiki variables in the chat.

The applications for this sort of customized wiki programming are far reaching. With Kloss' PHP code and standard Mediawiki software, programmers can allow wiki users to access any kind of static or dynamic data contained on the webserver, either in flat files or mySQL databases, and post that data in any format on any wiki page.

As of early 2006, WWR was the only wiki-based webcast on the internet, as well as the only wiki with user controllable output buffer variable substitution integrated directly into mySQL databases.

[edit] 2006 - Purchase and renovation of the Wheat Palace

In 2006 Kloss and Golton purchased and began renovating the 10-acre former Talkeetna Old Tyme Saloon, 7 miles from downtown Talkeetna. Historically, the Wheat Palace is on the same site used for several initial Talkeetna Bluegrass Festival events in the early 1980s. Listeners dubbed the large log cabin's 36' x 48' public space the "Wheat Palace" in contrast to the original 12'x12' WWR cabin. Webcast operations and house concerts are expected to move to the new facility in late 2006. Future plans include continued webcasting, house concerts, annual Wheatstalk gatherings and technological seminars with nighttime concerts featuring independent musicians.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

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