Tonight's show is about community-driven radio stations.

Recently, Doc Searls suggested that a use for internet radio could be to broadcast news-like talk shows, generated from posts on blogs. Kind of like All Things Considered, with listeners from your blogroll. Then Mitch pointed out that he's got some of the resources required to make this happen, and is looking for energy. I've some energy to spare, so I've transcribed an evening of thoughts here.

I've recently been searching passionately for a way to coordinate and assemble a gigantic, influential community of people; I think that this can help. There's a lot going unsaid to the government these days, at least not that they're influenced by; I'm searching for ways to change that.

I'd like to see a spider that maps the paths between all the different blog posts it can find, using Trackback and hyperlinks. Reads an entry, links over to somewhere else, reads that. Has a weighted preference for Trackback pings, and has a chance of staying at that page that goes up the longer it stays at a page, checking links, so it'll eventually just kind of trawl the whole network for news, in a connected fashion.

Give it the list of blogs from your favorite collection of blogs, and keep track of things that it finds that are blogs and add them to the list, too. Just make sure the blog's method of providing content is supported by the radio software. RSS feeds of excerpts, RSS feeds of full articles, a source, with three or four headlines, mix them together, or do waves of long articles, followed by short articles.

For programs like All Things Considered, you could pick a blog post and have it read all the trackback results from it in order. Or pick a liveTopics category, filter out the blog posts, and set it on random until it completes them -- or date-ordered.

I can record an hour show each day on a CDR, which makes a month of archives about $5. That's cheaper than cassettes, and I can listen to the morning radio show during the day -- and at the end of the day, I can go back to a specific entry and click on links I heard about.

Distribute a very cheap circuit board design for a micro-FM transmitter, instructions for assembling it either cheaply or in a waterproof container. It doesn't have to look nice, it just has to work. A house at a time, and I'd listen to blog radio in my house continuously.

Move the revolution to software that runs on the user's desktops: an application that watches for new articles. Use NNW to find new, unread articles, reads them aloud, and reads them as they occur. Pull the music from the user's active iTunes playlist, playing them a song at a time, pausing when necessary; all controlled via some master AppleScript that muxes them, following its own playlist.

Blog radio is one of those ways to improve communication and build community, and perhaps fix the radio world forever. Why listen to the big commercial station when you have better music (and blog posts!) waiting at home? Just tune it with your FM radio, and off you go. Adding in the blog aspect means that you, too, can make your thoughts heard, if you just care to make a blog.

Share playlists with other users; there's software now to uniquely identify music without concerning about file format, and you can share starting point in the article world pretty easily -- say, on your blog -- and congratulations, you just got your writing aired on the radio.

Thanks for listening.

You could associate this with a pure-news feed list, or a mixed feed list, or whatever's your fancy in the RSS reader. Drive it from the RSS reader, make it utterly simplistic to do; integrate with the popular ones, cooperating with their authors if necessary (I suppose).

Thanks to Doc Searls for "Real Public Radio"; to Ratcliffe Blog for "BlogOnRadio: America's voice".

Someone mentioned that this has some relation to pirate radio; I kind of agree. The personal distribution method provides a nice way to avoid harassment -- the FCC can't attack you for micropower distribution, not when you're listening to your personal music.