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Doc Searls' IT Garage -

News, ideas and real world stories about how IT folks solve their own problems

Lighting a fire for public radio in Santa BarbaraJuly 9 2007

Where are you going to go for live information when a life-threatening wildfire bears down on your town?

That was the question on the table over dinner the other night. The person asking it was my friend Michael, a botanist, a founding figure in Santa Barbara County's wine industry, and an observer of wildfires since 1964, when he helped fight the Coyote Fire and evacuate residents from its path. His last experience was in 1990, his own home was spared destruction by the Painted Cave fire by a fortunate shift in the sea breeze. Between those experiential bookends he also witnessed the Romero Fire of 1971, the Sycamore Fire of 1977, and the Wheeler Fire of 1985.

So he knew what it meant two Saturdays ago, when he saw dense brown smoke coming from what appeared to be Mission Canyon. Within five minutes he saw ash raining on the beach. Naturally, he turned on the radio. There was nothing. Not on the local news station. Not the local talk stations. Not any of the music, sports, Spanish and religious stations that pack the rest of the dial. He checked on local TV, and found nothing there. He got on the Web, checked with the Santa Barbara City and County fire departments, and InciWeb, which is the Official Source for wildfire information. There was nothing on any of them.

Hope for local TV in a Giant Zero worldApril 11 2007

Terry Heaton, the most Net-savvy of TV news gurus, has asked me to put together a few paragraphs of future-proofing-type thinking for TV news executives on the eve of the NAB convention. Here's what I wrote back in an email, backed up here on the Web.

OK, here goes...

The TV news system isn't broken. It's just one system struggling to thrive in the midst of many new systems that will only get more and more useful both to TV news operations and to viewers. Those systems include blogging, videoblogging, podcasting, tagging, videoblogging, rivers of news, and many other emerging practices. It's too easy, however, to get snowed by all the technical possibilities here. Better to look a four larger factors that will put them in context.

Cells in the skyApril 10 2007

Brad Templeton has a killer idea: using commercial airplanes as broadband cells in the sky, or specifically, a mesh network at altitude. A sample of his thinking here:

Airliners fly so often these days, spaced often just 40 miles apart along the oceanic routes. It should be possible with modern technology to produce a mesh network that transmits data from plane to plane using line of sight. Two planes should in theory be able to get line of sight at 30,000 feet if they are up to 400 nautical miles apart. The planes could provide data and voice service for passengers at a reasonable price, and also could relay for ships at sea and even remote locations.

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Hey telcos and cablecos: Create local S3s!March 15 2007

Let's connect these two dots: (1) Cisco buys WebEx for $3.2 billion; and (2) Scoble says "Watch what happens after Ray Ozzie jumps into the market" where "Amazon S3 charges right now about $.15 per gigabyte of stuff delivered".

The first item tells us there is big value in services that run on the Net. The second item tells us there is leverage in abundant storage on which back-end busienss services can be hosted.

So here's an idea for telcos and cablecos: leapfrog Amazon, Google and Microsoft by putting Big Storage as close to customers as possible, and then work partnering deals with local outsourced IT companies to provide back-end services to local individual and business customers.

The ITFS opportunityFebruary 23 2007

So I was just talking with Bob Belle-Isle of VPT Vermont Public Television about a hunk of spectrum that is ripe with opportunity. It's called ITFS, for Instructional Television Fixed Service. It was created 43 years ago by the FCC for educational purposes. Nonprofits with educational credentials, such as school systems and public television organizations, are in good position to be first movers in utilizing the twenty ITFS frequencies (which begin just above wi-fi, at 2.5GHz) for modern wireless purposes, and not just the one-way transmission that was imagined back in 1963.