TingRadio

This idea has also been presented on community-wiki: ting-radio

We are used to radio. We switch it on and we are used to listen to prepared radio-shows, pre selected music, more or less intelligent words, commercials, jingles, ... Let's forget about all that. Ting-radio ain't radio in that sense. Rather imagine the accoustic events in a certain location. If you take a location in real-life you hear the sounds and noises that are produced by someone or something close by. Other sonds and noises elsewhere exist, but you do not hear them as they are too far away. A kinda "clever selection" based on the laws of physics. Let's say for example the russian parliament: You are likely to hear 1. political talk, 2. in russian language. There might as well be silence at nighttime or the sound of a vacuum-cleaner when people prepare the hall for the next meeting. It's local. You do not hear somebody talking some hundred meters away.

Ting-radio is a "location" too. It has a url, the stream-server's url. Whoever logs into this url can hear, no matter where in the world this person is located. What do you hear? You hear what is fed into the stream. again this is independent of physical location. Ting-radio is an experiment.

To unfold the potential of it we should have wiki pages - maybe we can use ting-wiki - and the permanent possibility to use a collab-editor.

Infrastructure - What do we need

 * a 24/7 stream-server
 * a 24/7 teamspeak-server
 * a 24/7 collab-editor standalone server (sobby - for gobby, likely)

What do you need
Everything here is quite optional. U need a way to get in touch. U can use serveral ways at once or just one of them. You can a) Listen to the Radio, b) use TeamSpeak, c) edit the Ting with the collab-editor, d) join us on irc or e) use this wiki to get in touch.

The actual ip's of the several servers (ts, radio, irc and last but not least for the collab-editor) will be announced within the Ting. The differ from time to time.

According to using Radio _and_ ts at once' u have to know: There is an enormous "latency" on the Radio stream (up to 1 minute). Therefore the Radio will usually be streamd to the teamspeak also. So u may listen to both, radio & ts, at once, just using your ts-client. Radio will be mono then. But u may also listen to the Radio in better quality and stereo with winamp, realplayer or whatever. If u start ur ts-client then, u have to "mute" the Radio-MC in ur ts-client or u will hear all double.

cross-plattform

 * a microphone

Linux

 * vlc or beep-player or ?
 * teamspeak-client
 * collab-editor

Windows

 * vlc or winamp
 * teamspeak-client
 * collab-editor

= TingRadio 1 =

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!

Ting-radio is not another radio-station. It is a way to let listeners participate on a radio-show or to even let them entirely perform it on their own. Such participation can happen on two levels.
 * text. Write proposals for what to talk about, comment on the show or write text to be read out. This takes at least a chat-application (like irc), better a collaborative-editor (like gobby). In a collaborative-editor you see as many cursors as participants are logged in. Everybody can edit the text whereever and all participants see all changes made in real-time.
 * voice. Speak into your microphone at home and your words go out (almost) in real-time into the radio-show's life-stream. This takes a VoIP-appkication. To prevent overlap and disturbing noises it has to have a push-to-talk functionality. People only hear your voice as long as you push a predefined key on your keyboard. When you release this key your microphone is muted again. Teamspeak has such a push-to-talk functionality.

To allow potential chaos to organize from insides and turn into an interesting radio-stream it takes the participants to run and work with these applications simultaniously. So you agree on who is next to speak on the text level while listening to the show. Ting-radio is no styled radio-program, it is rather a technical setting that allows for a spontaneous developement of a life-streamed "radio-show". the conditions are similar to the fact that a bunch of musicians does need a practize-room and instruments and amplifiers as basic technical requirement to play a jam-session together. Fullfilling these requirements doesn't mean at all that people will be able to collaborate. But not fullfilling these requirements guarantees that there will be no collaboration. It's a process for all to learn and a single dickhead can mess up a common attempt completely. Ting-radio is an experiment.