TingRadio

MattisManzel 15:00, 7 March 2006 (CET): In the first hours of March the 7th 2006 I saw some hints in the #seti23 irc-chanel that there is a new transmission of Veedelsradio. Great, I thought, the day was pretty over anyhow, lets listen. I opened the wiki-page, and after a while clicking around on the different realplayer and winamp links without success somehow my beep-player opened and I heard something. Guido and cosmea moderating, playing music. I actually thought it's a recorded internet-radio program, something they had done yesterday as it said so about the next transmission on the page. Cosmea was in the #seti23 channel, so I wrote some comments about the progam imagining her sitting at home reading them. But suddently the program reacted on my comments and I realized that this must be a live-stream. Nothing so special, you might think, just another lamer who's not in controll of his devices, and you're surely right. So far the intro. It was fun, me writing, them talking. There was also kudde1 and a girl in France, me in Italy, the stream coming from Cologne. Cool. Veedel is Cologne-dialect for Viertel, thats quarter. A local internet-radio for a quarter of Cologne. No idea by whom and how - maybe I just had been taking a leak when it came up - but suddently there was the idea of combining the radio-show with teamspeak, the VoIP application (the only one with an old-fashioned citizen-band-like push-to-talk-function) we had been sucessfully using with the last couple of tings before the whole ting-thing more or less had collapsed. Cosmea named the nijusan.dyndns.org server and I logged in there. Pushing my talk button and saying something nothing happened. Hmm. It took about one minute until I first heard my own voice in the streamed internet-radio. The sound quality was very bad, much worse than in a direct voice communication on teamspeak and the latency (if you can still call it like that) was several 10.000 times higher than usual, but heck, it worked. During the program this 1-min-latency shrunk down to somewhat 25 seconds, no idea what they did up in Cologne to improve it. We were all pretty stunned, silently thinking about the potential of such interactivity for global human communication. Bertold Brecht who - in the late 30ties - has had visions about the application of radio as a mean of communication if only the receiver could also be a transmitter, Bertold Brecht was rotating in his grave. On the text level such exist nowadays as wiki. On the audio level it seems possible too now. Solving the technical problems - sound quality, shinking down the latency - and combining with collab-editor, maybe even with music played live by musicians from different corners of the world opens up into numerous possibilities not only for entertainment but for all kind of exchange of information. This is not only applicable for a town's quarter, this is global. It could run 24/7, it could leave instant and permanent traces by exporting the results of the parallel collab-editor sessions to wiki, results that every new session could be build upon. We basically have no idea yet about what could grow out of this, I think. Exept that it will be pretty communicative. When people communicate, when they talk to each other, they do not shoot each other, true? Cross language, cross-national, cross cultural. Education, teaching and learning, ..., ..., bla (enough for now). Maybe even the little kiosk downtown Cologne who's owner sponsors Veedelsradio will become famous, who knows?

Excuse my passion please. For some people it's embarrasing, I know. Some people think it's not serious. But even these people wouldn't even get up in the morning, out of their beds and into the day, if there wasn't a bit of it in them, some passion, some hope.

I had to name this page somehow, ting-radio came to my mind when I got up today (it wasn't quite the morning anymore). I liked it. It's the opposite of for a quarter, innit? It's global, potentialy global. Surely it's nothing but a proposal, made by a participant the day after. Thanks a lot to the Veedelsradio-team. Well done folks!