It's ready! Northstar rail audio tour

My audio tour of Minnesota's new Northstar Commuter Rail Line is ready to go. The service has been running for five days and now riders can learn a bit about the towns and cities along the way. This tour talks about some of the buildings along the route (like Minnesota's first car factory and its first nuclear power plant) and about the history of the corridor, which Canadian fur traders were traveling in oxcarts 190 years ago.

Download the audio tour here. (.mp3 file, 9.8mb...right-click to download)
Here's an enhanced iTunes version with chapters if you have an iPod. (left-click to go to iTunes)

This audio file is meant to be used on the train, starting at Target Field in Minneapolis. It's one 20 minute file, broken into 5 chapters...one for each station. At the end of each chapter, it asks listeners to pause the audio until they leave the next station. There's about 20 minutes of information in all for the 51 minute trip.

I hope to create a second podcast for the inbound trip, but at the moment none of those morning trips happens during daylight hours.

If you listen to this podcast, I would LOVE to hear feedback. There's a lot more I want to do with this tape (add interviews and natural sound), and I want to know what you'd like to hear in the next version.

Podcasting Northstar

On Monday, I got to take a preview ride of the new Northstar Commuter Rail line from Minneapolis to Big Lake.  For train geeks, the opening of the new line (it opens to passengers on Monday, Nov. 16) marks a hopeful new era for rail travel in Minnesota. 

Practically, though, Northstar is about commuting to work...and not much more.  The timetables are set to get people into Minneapolis in time to get to work and to get them back home shortly after work is done.  Don't plan to stay downtown for a few drinks or a show because the last train out leaves at 6:10pm.

Nor should you expect to take a day trip from the city to beautiful Elk River.  Downtown ER is a really nice place, with a great view of a meandering Mississippi River...but the Northstar station isn't anywhere near downtown.  If you're daytripping, you'd better have someone ready to pick you up at the station.

All that said, Northstar will be great for thousands of commuters who want to avoid traffic on Hwy. 10 and relax a bit on the way to and from work.   My project is to create a podcast for people who ride the line to learn about the places they'll see along the way. 

The corridor from Minneapolis to St. Cloud along the east side of the river is full of history:  it was one of the main oxcart trails to St. Paul from the Red River Valley from the 1820s to 1870s.  Elk River housed the nation's first nuclear power plant.  Big Lake was a major source of ice for Twin Cities ice boxes.  Anoka is still home to Minnesota's first major mental health treatment center.

And of course there are the railroads.  The Northstar runs along track laid by the St. Paul & Pacific Railroad in the 1860s.  That track later became a key part of James J. Hill's Great Northern empire.  Passenger trains ran along the line for over 100 years (actually, one still does: Amtrak's Empire Builder makes one run per day in each direction on its route from Chicago to Seattle).  The rails are now owned by BNSF and that company's engineers will man the Northstar trains.

There are stories about American migration, agricultural and industrial development and our changing approach to living and working to be seen and heard on this train trip.  I'm trying to compile those stories into a podcast that's both place-specfic and easy to digest.  This isn't a lecture, it's a journey.

I hope the project will be done in the next couple weeks for any new riders of the line to enjoy.  Because I critique a lot of podcasts here, I'm going to try to take a lot of my own medicine in the writing and producing.  Wish me luck.

(Photos are mine.)

Scenic byways are made for audio touring

I'm working on a more complete list of audio tours along the Mississippi River. See Northeast Minneapolis, Wisconsin's Great River Road, and Quad Cities for some good examples. But I know there are more out there. I'm thinking of you, St. Louis...

Tonight, my search brought me to this driving tour page from the National Scenic Byways Program. It lays out a great, take-your-time style 2-day Mississippi River trip in Wisconsin. What's more, it almost precisely follows the route of the Great River Road Stories audio tour I wrote about in May -- still the best audio driving tour I've sampled so far, with interpretation of the cities, landscape and history all along the way. These sites are prefect companions for one another and it makes my wonder why more byways don't have this sort of grassroots audio tour.

The Scenic Byway Program is relatively new. It started in 1992. There are 125 designated routes all over the U.S. that meet a certain criteria. From the Byways.org:

The U.S. Secretary of Transportation recognizes certain roads as All-American Roads or National Scenic Byways based on one or more archeological, cultural, historic, natural, recreational and scenic qualities.

If you must travel by car, these routes are a great alternative to the Interstate highway system. The program stimulates local economies, highlights scenic or historical sites, and it helps the towns along the way work together -- like the Wisconsin Great River Road Stories group did. Oh, and the Byways are apparently becoming more bike friendly (though road biking isn't encouraged on the Wisconsin road yet).

Just last week, the Department of Transportation announced 41 million dollars of new spending on the Byways, including a lot of money focused on interpretation. Signs and visitors centers are great, but I think all 125 of these routes should have audio tours about the sights and cities along the way. After all, you're sure not going to watch YouTube videos in the car.

(photos from byways.org)

Canoeing the Mississippi on the radio

I don't spend much time "on air" in my job. I'm more comfortable calling the shots on the other side of the glass from the microphones. But the latest place-based project at Minnesota Public Radio was my idea and I took the opportunity to voice one of the stories myself.

During the week the Ken Burns documentary "The National Parks: America's Best Idea" aired on PBS, I wanted to air stories about the National Park Service sites in Minnesota. Five days, five parks -- how perfect.

The full series is here. Three of our reporters in greater Minnesota were nice enough to be part of the project and they made three surprising stories about places I think most of our neighbors don't even realize exist in our state: Voyageurs National Park (which still has a tense relationship with its neighbors), Pipestone National Monument (which still offers a working -- and sacred -- rock quarry) and Grand Portage National Monument (which is a grand experiment in dual management -- half federal government, half Native American tribe).

Last Friday, on the last day of the series, I went into the broadcast booth to talk about my experience in Minnesota's most unusual National Park site, the Mississippi National River and Recreation area (which has virtually no land of its own, but enviable access to millions of visitors). Here's the audio:

I know this is broadcasting rather than placecasting, but there is a close relationship and the same qualities of presentation, information and surprise are key to both. But with broadcasting, it's more important to paint pictures for the audience and include sound to put them in the location. (With placecasting, of course, they're already there!) In this case, the sound of kids having a blast in the canoes is priceless.

Oh yeah...the fifth park is the St. Croix National Scenic River. We share that one with Wisconsin (kinda like Brett Favre, eh?). We didn't send a reporter there, but we had a good phone conversation with one of the rangers there.

(image from MPRNewsQ.org)

Central Park cell phone tour

The folks at Walking New York tweeted about cell phone tours in Central Park last week, and since they posted a handy photo, I decided to call the number give it a try.

The random tour stops I sampled are well done. They feature some big New York personalities (such as restauranteur Danny Meyer, actor Mandy Patinkin and TV star Alec Baldwin) reading short bits of history related to the stop you're at.

The information at The Dairy covers the history of the building there, some info about poor public health in the early 1900s, and isn't afraid to talk about the corrupt Boss Tweed administration that turned the building into a popular watering hole.

The Central Park Conservancy created the tour and offers a good printable map of the tour stops.

These are really just actors reading scripts, but the scripts are pretty well written and the actors are top-notch. Some personalize their scripts (Mandy Patinkin spent a lot of time on the carousel as a kid. Who knew?) The information is mostly historical, but it also offers advice about how to enjoy the park and what to find inside the buildings you see. The scripts avoid hyperbole and tourist-propaganda. Other than an introductory music stinger, these stops don't use background music or sound effects and I don't miss either one.

The tour doesn't take advantage of location as well as it could. Even though the creators know right where you are, most stops don't direct your eyes to particular details of the landscape around you. But stop #9, for example, does point out some details (flowers nearby) that you might otherwise overlook.

The length of each stop seems just right and the cell phone interface is very easy to work with. This is a really nice addition to Central Park that both visitors and residents will find interesting.

The New York Times CityRoom Blog gives its take here.

(photo from brettsea on yfrog)

Killing time during Ken Burns

(9/29/09 UPDATES at bottom)

I know I should be watching The National Parks: America's Best Idea with rapt attention, but I find myself able to multi-task just fine. So tonight I've been exploring Yellowstone via Google Earth -- flying through the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, looking for bison in the open fields, being underwhelmed by the geysers (note to self: some things are better photographed from the ground than from space).

But I was surprised to stumble across this 3D building.

If you've been there, you'll know it's the beautiful Old Faithful Inn, just steps away from its namesake geyser.

So now I'm wondering...what other 3D buildings are there in National Parks? I flew to other parts of Yellowstone with no luck. I went to my favorite lodges in Glacier NP, but only saw grainy rooftops. I'm sure the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island are in 3D (everything in New York is in 3D now, isn't it?), but what other monuments, lodges or national icons are in 3D in our National Parks?

Go hunting and let me know.

UPDATE:
Here are some other good 3D renderings from national parks.  First...Devil's Tower National Monument in Utah.

This one surprised me...from Mesa Verde in Arizona:

And, of course, Mt Rushmore in South Dakota.  Even in person, this place is a little creepy.  It's even stranger in Google Earth:

So what else is out there?  Keep looking and let me know...

One good Yosemite tale

The first episode of the long-awaited National Parks documentary from Ken Burns premiered tonight on PBS featuring, almost exclusively, two parks: Yosemite and Yellowstone.

Watching it reaffirmed what I've known for a while: that I really need to go see Yosemite. Visiting Yellowstone with my family a few years ago was life-changing. I hear Yosemite can have the same effect.

So now I'm going hunting for Yosemite placecasts, and the first thing I ran across was a nice bit of audio storytelling from the National Parks Conservation Association. In 2007 and 2008, it produced a well-done series of podcasts about parks across the country. The first episode was about Buffalo Soldiers in Yosemite. Apparently, while the park was under state jurisdiction (before it became a national park), a regiment of african-american soldiers guarded the area from locals who weren't happy about the land being so stringently protected. I have a feeling this tension will be a theme of the whole Ken Burns series.

In fact, the ranger featured in this podcast, Shelton Johnson is also quoted extensively in the PBS series. He dresses up as a Buffalo Soldier and surprises visitors with the stories of what the park was like "back then" and with the fact that African-Americans were involved in the early history of this place. At one point, Johnson says that African-American visitors find this bit of living history especially welcoming in a place where they didn't expect to see many other non-white visitors.

(That was a point I hadn't really thought about before this week, when I was interviewing the superintendent of the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area. I'm working on a radio story about school kids taking canoe trips down the river in St. Paul and one of the things that Superintendent Paul Labovitz told me is that the visitors to his park are much more diverse than other parks...mostly by virtue of proximity to an urban area. He said the park service is aware of who is visiting its parks and wants to make them more appealing and welcoming to all groups.)

I don't know why NPCA stopped making it's Park Stories podcast after only a handful of episodes, but I wish it would start again. They were good introductions to various parks without trying to be exhaustive overviews. Instead, they highlighted one particular story in each place. I know there are thousands more stories just as interesting that need to be told. Audio is a great -- and relatively easy -- way to tell those stories.




(photo from NPCA by Jim Williams)

Audio guides: the public is skeptical

I just stumbled across the best audio tour-related rant I've seen yet on the Internet.

Loic Tallon is a museum designer who blogs at Musematic.  Back in June, he titled a post: "I never take audio guides. I can't stand them."  This wasn't his personal opinion, but an oft-overheard line from museum visitors who have been burned too often by bad or poorly-implemented audio guides. 

While he first tried to argue with the people who said this, he came to realize the sentiment was widespread enough to indicate a real problem with the way this technology is maturing. From the post:

I’ve come to believe that it’s not the visitor’s fault that they can’t stand audio guides. They’re actually the victims in all this; the museums are the culprits.

Let me explain how I see it.... A visitor arrives at a museum and, before breaching the gallery threshold, is obliged into an early decision.  “Would you like to take the audio guide?” the museum asks.

It seems like a simple question.  But if we stop and look at this from the visitor’s perspective – a reasonable action considering audio guides are a visitor service – they’re probably asking themself: “Well, why in the devil is there an audio guide, and why should I take it?  Especially if they want me to pay extra for it!”

Time was when just having "multi-media" technology at an exhibit was novel.  It isn't anymore.  You have to be purposeful in explaining why a visitor needs or might want to consider taking the audio tour.  At some places, it is essential (Tallon refers to the excellent audio guide at Alcatraz, for example)...at most others, it is a nice supplement to other interpretation already in place.  So museums have to tell visitors what the advantage of the guide is.

...if we provide no information, and simply advertise to visitors that ‘audio guides are available’, we’re actually encouraging visitors to draw on personal notions of whether they like audio guides in order to decide whether to take it or not.    

Tallon also reiterates what I gather is a guiding mantra amongst museum techies: "It's not about the technology." Here's my favorite part of the post:

Like the cinema, the audio guides itself is not, and should not be presented as, the deal clincher.  I know that ‘sexy’ technologies like multimedia tours, and IPodTouches/IPhones currently act as deal clinchers, but like an I-Max, after a couple of experiences, I’m sure the novelty will wear off.    

In this funny and insightful piece, Tallon stops just short of what I think is the logical conclusion of his argument:  The content rules and the presentation matters.  People are tired of sticking speakers in their ears and hearing boring or silly factoids about the stuff around them.  If audio is going to help your exhibit, it needs to take advantage of the power of the medium: voice, story, music, pacing and even -- gasp -- silence.  Reading a guidebook into a microphone doesn't cut it anymore.  Interviewing the curator about the exhibit won't do it. Visitors expect, and deserve, an engaging experience -- and an explanation up front of what that experience will be like.

One more thought on Museums.

When it comes to creating place-specific audio, museums are leading the way.  They are WAY out in front of historic sites, tourist boards and chambers of commerce in creating audio enhancements to the visitor experience.  This makes sense.  Museums are hyper-planned, self-contained environments that are designed by professional interpreters (many of whom blog and write and meet about new technologies all the time).  The most successful trends in placecasting will no doubt have their roots in museum interpretation.  All the same, I'm most interested in what is happening out of doors.

To me, the exciting part about the idea of placecasting is meeting people where they are at...in the real world.  When there are no interpretive signs or tour guides around, mobile audio takes on new importance and new potential.

More from Cleveland: Crittercasting

After posting a maybe less-than-flattering video about Cleveland a few days ago, I'm pleased to say there is positive placecasting going on in the Forest City, too (seriously, that's an actual Cleveland nickname).

The Cleveland Metroparks Zoo just announced its new cell phone audio tour is live and ready to take your call as you wait for that critter over there to wake up. Like most museum tours, it's not really a tour at all, just a series of sign posts telling you which number to punch into your phone. There are 33 stops at the moment (according to this press release), though the medium is inherently expandable.

Though I'm not in Cleveland at the moment, I dialed the number while watching my own cat sleep. After a quick welcome and not-so-quick advertisement for a local cell phone company, I was asked to entering a stop number. I chose the numbers at random because I can't find a list of the stops anywhere -- including the zoo Web site, which makes no mention of the audio tour at all (but why should it if its meant to be listened to on-site?). The items I heard were interesting, brief and specific to the animal or building at that location. Each tells a story -- why the animal is endangered, or how it is cared for by vets -- that was concise and didn't seem likely to duplicate the signs around the exhibit. One stop I heard even featured a zoo employee talking about her favorite memory of a given zoo building -- a nice, genuine touch. My cat, by the way, remained asleep throughout.

The main presenter is a voice actor who is full of energy. But my main beef with this project is that he seems to make up a new cartoonish voice for each stop along the way. I found most of these phony accents to be over-the-top and distracting from what were otherwise decent scripts with good information. Maybe these voices are meant to engage kids...but without any sort of character development (and who has time for that?), they just seem random and unnecessary.

Fortunately, most tracks invite feedback from the listener, telling them to press a button to leave just this kind of comment. This acknowledges the new and experimental nature of the project, and also made use of the dynamic possibilities of the cell phone medium, which got me thinking...

Cell phone tours have the obvious disadvantage of poor audio quality (compared to podcasts delivered on mp3 players) and air-time charges. But they hold a distinct advantage in their ability to be updated quickly and universally. Indeed, the zoo's marketing manager, SueAllen, told the Plain Dealer newspaper, "these can change on a daily basis." And you can understand why this is important to a zoo, where exhibits are changing all the time based on the weather and the health of the animals (this isn't so much a problem in art museums where the sculptures rarely have to visit the vet). A change to any stop on cell phone tour will be realized by every single visitor who calls the number after the change is made. In contrast, any site trying to dynamically update podcasts that users download ahead of time will face problems with all the "stale" versions already downloaded.

Another very slick feature of the Cleveland zoo cell phone tour is the option to see behind-the-scenes video. At stop number three, the narrator (in an inexplicably German accent) told me to press the * button to receive a text message link to a video of a gorilla getting an ultra sound. It worked like a charm. A few seconds later, I was watching a YouTube video of this remarkable procedure on my iPhone. This is truly value-added content and the possibilities for placecasting are magnificent.

While I still think clear-crafted audio is the key to placecasting success, optional video can allow visitors into places they'd never get to see otherwise. Guide By Cell is the production company behind this project. It caters to non-profits and seems to have a lot of tricks up its sleeve.

If you know of other zoo audio tours, please let me know.

Placecasting battlefields

At it's most basic, I describe placecasting to people as having your own personal park ranger whispering in your ear as you walk around a place.

I found the most literal application of that description so far when I started previewing the audio tour podcasts at CivilWarTraveler.com.  This company has partnered with the National Park Service at Gettysburg, Harpers Ferry, Antietam, Appomattox Court House and other sites in and near Virginia to make audio tours of certain important parts of the vast battlefields (think the Peach Orchard at Gettysburg or the Burnside Bridge at Antietam).


The free podcasts on this site feature on-site recordings of real rangers and historians talking about the very spot where you are standing.  They point out features if the land around you, and off in the distance.  They describe how the battle progressed around this point and then they tell you (roughly) how to get to the next tour stop.  A printable map is available -- and essential -- for each tour.    


I love that these are real rangers steeped in the history of the place, and I really love the way they point out the physical features around you.  The ranger at Gettysburg's Peach orchard talks about this peach trees the National Park Service just planted there, and then he directs your eyes to the important Little Round Top hill off in the distance.  If you visited here and only had interpretive signs to read, you would miss so much. 

Civil War buffs will love these podcasts for the specific value they add to each location they cover.  People NOT already into battle history, however, could have a hard time listening to a whole tour (they range from 20 to 60 minutes, though most run about half an hour).  This is because compelling storytelling is not necessarily the strength of rangers and historians.  In the couple of tours I previewed, the tour guides throw a LOT of facts about distances, geography, casualties and regiment numbers at the listener without necessarily couching them in an immersive narrative about how the battle progressed.  But being live and off-the-cuff helps keep the energy up (as opposed to scripted podcasts read in a studio).


The audio production is also only so-so.  They're recorded outdoors on-site, where wind noise is always a problem.  Some of the tour guides also pop a lot of p's as they talk into the microphone.  Both of these things can be hard on listeners after a while, especially when listening in headphones.  The rangers also sometimes gloss right past the instructions for getting to the next location, so the printed map is a must. 

Next week marks the anniversary of the Battle of Antietam (Sept. 17, 1862), and there will be a lot of rangers, historians and other interpreters on the battlefield.  There's no substitute for that kind of personal contact.  But if you have to walk the hallowed ground on your own, these are some of the most effective place-centered audio tours I have found yet.  

(Photos from National Park Service)

Today from Twitter: trying again

Searching "audio tour" on Twitter today reveals these gems:

• A couple of commercial audio tour producers are advertising their product on Twitter today. One company, UK-based HeartBeat Guides, sells mp3 audio guides of popular tourist cities all over the world. Their product is clearly aimed at tourists and a typical download appears to be around $10. From the site: "HeartBeatguides are a magical mix of atmosphere and vital information for the visitor." The samples offered do appear to have excellent audio production (which, strangely, seems to be a rare in commercial audio tours), full of ambient sound. But I can't tell how well the mp3s actually guide visitors through the city. It appears to present guide-book style general information in audio form without embracing a particular place. So maybe it's better for pre-travel listening or listening to on a bus or in the hotel before a day of adventure. But it's very hard to tell these things from a sample. (via iPod_Travel)
• The other self-tweeting company is called Visual Travel Tours. It also sells tours of spots around the globe, but they are much more multi-media. Customers can download printable text and photos, or audio/video guides to run on your iPhone -- then there's the happy medium which includes text and video, but no audio. The samples indicate the audio production here is more rudimentary with a single narrator reading a script. But the information presented seems to be more directly tied to place, and I think this has to do with the writer. VTT gets experts on a given place to write the scripts, so there is a more personal touch. I want to talk more with the creators about this very interesting placecasting model. (via VTravelTours)
• For the second time in a row, my Twitter search has brought up a mention of Civil War audio tours. In both cases, the tours referenced were by CivilWarTraveler.com, I'm a Civil War buff myself, and I would have LOVED to have placecasts of the battlefields I visited back in high school. These are very good and I'll write more about them tomorrow.
• People have been taking audio tours of Prestongrange since 2004. What is Prestongrange? "Prestongrange is a site of major importance in the story of Scotland's Industrial Revolution." The tour includes stops at a brickworks, a kiln and a cornish beam engine. What is a cornish beam engine? Look it up. The audio tour seems pretty important to the site, given how promanently it's featured on the Prestongrange Web site. The narrator is John Bellany, "one of Scotland's most noted living artists, who was born in nearby Port Seton." So next time we're in Scottland, let's use the digital revolution to help us better understand the industrial one. (via deb_max)
• Finally, it looks like today, 9/10, is the day for audio touring in Istanbul. A creative group called C-U-M-A (which also appears to organize flash mobs, among other pursuits) is handing out MP3 players so people can tour the city at certain times today. The audio tour doesn't seem to be available for download, but it sounds interesting. It "intends to frame Istanbul not just from an artist's point of view but through the insights and voices of designers, urban planners and artisans. Wish I could be there. (via evrenuzervb)

And that's it for today's Twitter hits. I'll try again in a few days. Happy touring. And I'm always looking for more tour recommendations.

The wheels on the theater go...

I love it when artists embrace place.

The current show at New York City's Foundry Theater, "Provenance of Beauty", is about the South Bronx, peformed in the South Bronx -- on a bus that is rolling through the South Bronx.

THE PROVENANCE OF BEAUTY is a poetic travelogue performed on a bus touring the South Bronx. As we travel the streets of the neighborhood, Rankine's evocative text points out and reflects upon the sites that pass by outside the windows.

THE PROVENANCE OF BEAUTY. from Sunder Ganglani on Vimeo.

It looks like there is a mix of live action and recorded media. From their Web site:

The audience boards the bus in Spanish Harlem, puts on headphones and for 90 minutes eavesdrops on the voice - both live and recorded - of this historic place. PROVENANCE is an experience that both responds to and redoubles the landscape - its sites, history, present and future - mapping out a poetic cartography of a neighborhood - of any neighborhood - in its eternal state of evolution.

Good placecasting ought to be an artform. I love the sound of an innovative project like this.

Village Voice profiles the project here. And one of my favorite NPR reporters, Robert Smith, has a radio story about the performance on All Things Considered this afternoon.

**UPDATE: Listening to the NPR story this evening, it sounds like this is really more audio tour than performance. It's full or stories about the people and buildings along the route. In fact, it sounds a lot like the ArtShare Northeast Minneapolis tour that I've written about a couple times here: created by artists, full of oral histories, focus on an unexpected place. The big difference is that this one is on a bus. And that brings up a good point that Robert Smith makes in his story:

"It's a strange experience; the play is about the South Bronx, but we never get off the bus, never get to interact with the scenes we see. Much of the talk is about the issues of gentrification, but what could be more gentrifying than a brainy theater piece in a tour bus?"

Today from Twitter

What happens if I plug a couple placecasting terms into the Twitter search box to see what people are talking about today?

• I learn that the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia has made a nice audio tour of their museum for kids.  You can rent an iPod when you're there or download the tracks as MP3 for free before you go.  You can also hear the tracks easily on their Web site while you look at the images you'd see in the museum.  Each audio stop is brief and open-ended.  Most end with a question like "What do you think will happen next?"  (via ArtGalleryofNSW, image from their Web site)
• I see that both Cantigny Park and Museum in Illinois and the Tennessee Department of Tourist Development are apparently considering creating cell phone tours.  Today they asked Twitter followers for feedback.  Hey, Tennessee, I think audio touring would be a great way to develop your tourists!  (via McCormickMuseum and TNVacation)
• It seems Plan2Go -- which appears to be a travel agency in Cyprus -- has discovered that the Grand Canyon offers cell phone placecasts along the South Rim.  The tweet reads "Grand Canyon cell phone audio tour implented (sic)".  I can't tell how new the tours actually are, though the LA Times was excited about the first ones in 2008.  At any rate, it's all news to me and I'll make a point to dial up and review the tour someday soon.  Cyprus and the Grand Canyon are 7,070 miles apart.  Roughly. (via plan2go)
• Finally, I learn there is a company in Belgium that sells audio tours of Antwerp, Brugges and Maastricht for 6 euros.  It's called Head to Foot and its tweets lead me to believe the team spends a lot of time out of the office. There are lots of companies like this in Europe, which works out well because there are so many walkable cities there!  But I question how many are very well done...  What's your experience? (via headtofoot)

Those are my discoveries from the last few hours of tweets.  It just proves that, indeed, people all over the world are thinking about placecasting.

How not to placecast

Let's set audio aside for today and enjoy some recent gems of video placecasting:



(h/t Matt Weston)
And from my own backyard:



While these videos may fall short when it comes to interpretation, they nonetheless capture a genuine sense of place.

It's a good reminder that people's impression of place is rarely dictated by tourism bureaus. In fact, overly-polished place-propeganda can backfire against communities that aren't being honest about their true nature.  Irony, disappointment and surprise are all a part of the way we experience the world around us.  

I think to properly interpret a place to people in that place you have to recognize what they're really seeing, really hearing and maybe what they're really smelling.  Then you have to help them understand WHY their experience includes those things. 

For example, I'd love to make a walking tour of International Falls, Minnesota someday.  And the first item on the tour would be, "What's that smell?"  Not to insult the town, but to recognize the first question that is logically on every visitor's mind.  Once that's out of the way, the tour can proceed without distraction.  (The answer, by the way, has to do with two paper mills in town and the holding ponds where they store wet pulp.  But go to International Falls anyway, it's a great little town right next to Voyeageurs National Park.)

Civic Tourism in Northeast Minneapolis

(UPDATE 8/29: The walking tours are available for download here: http://www.newalkingtours.com/)

I'm excited to attend the launch party this weekend for the new neighborhood walking tours of Northeast Minneapolis. I wrote about the project here. The folks at ArtShare pulled together a diverse group of volunteers to comb the community for stories and present them to neighbors and visitors alike via walking tours.

It seems the artists who conceived this project already understood something that the tourism industry has only recently started mulling over. It's called Civic Tourism.

I stumbled across this description today for an upcoming conference in Colorado:

"Civic Tourism’s mission is to 'reframe' tourism's purpose from an economic goal to a tool that can help the public enhance what they love about their place. It provides a forum for citizens to decide if, how, and for what purpose the ingredients of place (cultural, built, natural) can be integrated to create a dynamic, distinctive, and prosperous community. Ideally, Civic Tourism involves all stakeholders to build strong partnerships..." (emphesis added)

In other words, place matters because it is what every member of a community has in common. Communities that embrace place will have stronger internal ties (call it "culture") while appealing to visitors seeking an authentic experience.

But isn't that obvious?

I think the hyper-development of places like Wisconsin Dells, Branson, Missouri or Pigeon Forge, Tennessee indicates otherwise. Places once visited for their unique natural features now sprout indoor water parks and T-shirt shops. These attractions are economically successful, but they do not enhance the place around them (indeed, usually quite the opposite).

The Civic Tourism conference organizers seem to be proposing a different way to measure the benefit a communiy receives from the appeal of its place.

(As a journalist, I can't help but compare this notion to civic journalism -- the movement to treat readers and the community as participants in journalism rather than just consumers or advertisers. I also wonder if its fate will be the same...a good idea that is nearly impossible to implement in the context of a successful business model.)

Northeast Minneapolis is an up-and-coming neighborhood that isn't drawing tourists yet, but it is getting visitors from the rest of the city. So let's see what happens when the community is proactive about embracing place. I bet business can learn quite a bit from the artists.

The ArtShare walking tour release event is Saturday 8/29 from 10 to noon. Details here.

More on civic tourism here: http://www.civictourism.org/

When placecasting becomes overkill

Right idea. Totally overbuilt. Watch...

The driving force behind placecasting (see my concept post) is that people are hungry for information about the world around them. Technology that knows where we are can help us get answers to those questions while we're in that world. BUT, one important guiding principal is that the technology should not actually obscure the real world.

Thus, the woman on a beautiful ocean overlook who chooses to look instead at a kiosk computer screen is kind of missing the point. Take away the giant kiosk and replace it with a 3G cell phone with the right app, and I bet she could have gotten the same information without encasing herself in a cocoon of overbuilt technology. I wrote about this a couple months ago.

That said, it's exciting that more and more people are working on this notion. In fact, my simple placecasting idea seems to be just one cornor of a larger concept called Augmented Reality. I'll be looking through more of Wired Magazine's coverage of this evolving notion to see where audio might fit in.

(h/t Wired Magazine via Steve Mullis)

More Mississippi: River walking tour in the Quad Cities

Cities up and down the Mississippi River are re-embracing their riverfronts for tourism and business. I just found a nice walking/biking tour of the river in the Quad Cities. (Quick, can you name all four...??)

The folks at RiverAction do a lot of education and programming along the river here and they've put together a cell phone tour that takes you on a loop from Davenport, Iowa to Rock Island, Illinois and back, starting at the famous Arsenal Island. (If you want to see Moline and Bettendorf, you'll have to head upstream on your own.) According to a rough Google Map I made, the full tour route is about 3 miles. A printable map of the route is available here.

But there's no need to do this tour in the order from start to finish. Each stop gives information about a couple of the sites nearby (the clocktower on the island, the lock & dam, the Rock Island Line railroad -- even a stop on Main Street), but it weaves no larger narrative from stop to stop.

I appreciate that you can spontaniously take the tour with your cell phone when you see the signs on-site, but that you can ALSO download MP3s of the tour stops before you go and listen on your iPod. As more and more organizations turn to cell phone tours, the smart ones are posting the audio on-line as well. It's strange that the MP3s in this case are still just telephone-quality audio, but the content is just voice reading a script, so fidelity isn't critical to the experience.

I listened to a few of the stops on this tour and was impressed with the breadth of information -- from history to architecture to the environment. Stop #1, for example, talks about the history of iconic clock tower on Arsenal Island, but also includes information about an eco-friendly parking lot nearby. The tour stops are heavy on superlatives (the first..., the biggest..., the most...) and statistics without always putting them in context. It also often fails to take advantage of the fact that it knows exactly where its listeners are standing. There isn't much "look at this...", "you'll notice that...," or "now turn around to see...". These kinds of devices are really engaging to users and are a unique advantage placecasting has over broadcasting.

I spend a fair amount of time in Iowa, and I look forward to getting to the Quad cities to enjoy this good tour on-site.

Link to the Quad Cities Riverway Audio tour

New audio tour at Ellis Island

One of the best audio tours I ever took was at Ellis Island. It was full of music, interpretation and oral histories. It made the mostly-empty rooms of this amazing site come alive.

I think it was narrated by Tom Brokaw, who could make a dictionary sound interesting...but I'm pretty sure the writing was solid, too.  I recall spending so much time listening to the audio "extras" included on the device that I nearly missed the boat back to NYC.

That was in 2000. I see now that they've just updated the tour. I wonder if it's as good as I remember it.

Shared via AddThis

Web project needs our help: take photos of your local Main Street!

(If I'm writing about placecasting, maybe this is placeumentary?)

Main Street is NOT the most popular street name in the U.S. (#1 is actually Second Street...go figure), but is IS right up there on the list. And how many times have we heard politicians and pundits refer to "Main Street America" and "Main Street Values"?

The creators of Mapping Main Street heard that, too, and they wanted to find out just what Main Street America looks like and sounds like.  Turns out there are over 10,000 answers to that questions...and these folks are going to visit each one.  At least, they'll visit them with our help.  MMS is asking for your stories, photos or videos about a Main Street near you.  Not sure if your town has one? There's a search box on the  Mapping Main Street Web site that will find the Main Streets nearest you.


What a great idea! I'm excited to see such a down-to-earth emphasis on flyover country. I hope this project gets attention from users and the media (maybe politicians, too??).

Now I wonder why the project isn't asking for audio submissions as well.  They have a good way of uploading photos and videos.  So why not audio?  We know they respect audio as a medium...the creators are radio producers AND there's a great companion series of radio stories that launched yesterday on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday.  The story is about Main Street in Chattanooga, TN, which -- at least in parts -- is a popular place to pick up drugs and prostitutes.  The story talks with the people who live and "work" on Main Street and trust me, these aren't the folks politicians are probably talking about.

I may go hunting for stories along the Main Street in Minneapolis, which is tucked away along the riverfront across from downtown...it is NOT a major street.

Fort Vancouver audio tour

Here's one you won't find on-line, even if you try.

Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, in Vancouver, Washington features a recreated 1860s fur trading post on the banks of the Columbia River.  They created a very good audio tour of the post buildings a few years ago -- before everyone had an iPod.  So you have to check out a little audio player as you enter the post.  The site's Web site has some podcasts created by its ambitious chief  ranger, but the audio tour isn't available for download.  

The full tour takes about an hour and it introduces us to the buildings on the fort site by telling the stories of the people who used them.  The fort commander's big white house is brought to life by telling the story of the officers' dinners he would host in the main dining room (and of the intimate lunches his wife hosted elsewhere in the house).  

Each stop on the tour is a couple minutes long, and some stops give you the option to hear more information about a particular subject by keying in a number on the device.  Otherwise, it tells you where to walk next and when next to hit the "play" button.

The narrator is excellent and the script is obviously written for the ear.  It uses place well, often beginning with a statement like "Notice the expensive china on the table..." to focus your attention on one detail and then it broadens the narrative to make a larger point (in this case, it used the china to explain why certain luxuries were important to the people, even this far out on the frontier).  The tour goes through the main buildings on the fort and talks a bit about modern-day archeology.  It uses music and sound effects to good effect without going too far overboard.

I especially like the point as I walked between two buildings where the tour guide asks, "How many logs do you think make up the fort wall?"  It acknowledged where I was and gave me a chance to look up and consider the scene in front of me in a way I wouldn't have otherwise.

When I visited, it was late on a weekday afternoon and there were very few visitors rangers around to interpret the site.  So the tour was a huge help in understanding the hidden meanings behind the sights I was seeing.

In many ways the dedicated player is better than an iPod because it pauses automatically after each track and has an easy interface for getting more information.  You don't want to spend too much of an audio tour explaining button-pushes and logistics.  This device was well-suited to its content...and vice versa.   Still, I wish it was available for download so people could come prepared...or listen to tour stops they missed after they leave.


There's more to this site than just the Hudson Bay Company fur trading fort, so plan on a few hours if you're visiting this neat park.

Update: Great Smoky Mountains audio tour

Another impressive audio driving tour!

I'm back from the mountains and pleased to report on another solid example of smart placecasting. The Great Smoky Mountains audio driving tour I wrote about last month was still relevant and informative, despite being several years old now.

I was disappointed that no one at the National Park Visitors Center seemed to know anything about it. I asked in the bookstore and at the desk and was told that no audio tours were available because it's too hard to know how long it will take someone to drive the park's mail road.

That's a good point, but there are a few good solutions if that's the biggest problem (most involve trusting your listeners to know how to use the "pause" button). Fortunately I had downloaded these audio tours from iTunes before I came. (By the way, don't try to download these using your iPhone unless you have wi-fi access...the files are too big to use the wireless 3G network.)

What's remarkable is that this audio tour, produced by the Great Smoky Mountains Association, actually does try to take you real-time along Newfound Gap Road (US Hwy 441) without needing to pause the tape. For this reason, it's in two parts, so if you haven't made it to the gap by the end of part one, you can stop it 'til you get there. Traffic can be very heavy on this windy road, but for us, the timing of the audio tracks were nearly perfect!


The audio driving tour assumes you're starting in the parking lot of the visitors center and starts with some rudimentary driving tips, but quickly dives into some more interesting history and interpretation of the park. It doesn't try to keep up with the sites of specific route you're on, but is rather an orientation lesson for the park as a whole. So you'll be disappointed if you want it to explain what the tallest peak is at a particular wayside or what that creek you just crossed over is called. If all you're going to do in the park is drive this road and do this your, you'll come away with a great overview of the layers of stories in the park. If you're going to stay awhile, it's a great way to start your visit.

The narrator is solid and personable, but the highlight of the podcast are the experts it uses to talk about the history and ecology of the park. They are talking off-the-cuff about specific topics, rather than reciting a script or basking in generalities. There are also some refreshing oral histories when the tour talks about what life was like for people who used to live in what is now the park. The production quality is high and mixed with Appalachian music throughout. In fact, it ends with several minutes of music to get you to the end of the road.

Oh, and if you notice there are 4 segments of the tour, don't be confused...the tour is the same on the return trip, just re-mixed for people starting their journey from the other side. So if you want something to listen to, consider buying a music CD in the visitors center and supporting the Association that created this audio tour back in 2002.

The park has several roads in it and is a good one for taking driving tours, but none of the rest have audio components. Instead, they have excellent pamphlets that you can but for $1 or 50 cents at any visitors center. On these roads, there are numbered signposts that indicate when to read a certain section of the pamphlet. Most of these are excellently written...it's a shame none have been translated into audio as a CD/podcast would be an easy way to present the research and writing that has already been done.

Next trip: Great Smoky Mountains

I found another little audio driving tour while researching my next vacation destination. Great Smoky Mountain Association has a series of podcasts about Great Smoky Mountains National Park, including a two-part driving tour along the main park road from Gatlinburg to Cherokee. It's actually four parts, but I'm assuming the south-to-north podcasts are the same at the north-to-south, repackaged. I'll take a listen while I'm there and find out for certain.


View Placecasting: Audio tours I've found in a larger map

I'm going to start collecting tours like these on a Google Map as I find them and get time to plot them. The very basic beginning of this undertaking is here. Eventually, I'd like to make a one-stop map where people could look for relevant audio content. As I and others have discovered, there's no great system for geotagging audio content. This means the explosion of mobile, location-aware devices can't really take advantage of the great place-based sound work people are creating around the globe.

By the way, if you know of other good place-based audio, please post them in the comments or use the link on the right to add an item of your own to the list I'm finding.

Update: Wisconsin driving tour

I had a chance to listen to the Great River Road Stories audio driving tour last weekend on my way home from Illinois, and I was really impressed.  As I wrote last month, the production quality is so-so, but the information was really interesting and the oral histories were compelling.

In one case, I listened to a tug boat captain explain how he navigates his barges into the river locks.  It's trickier than I ever imagined and as I listened to him, I drove passed a lock & dam and could see just how narrow an opening he has to deal with.  And a few minutes later, I passed a barge heading down the river.  It was like a personalized story just for me...a driver alone in the car.

This experience further proved to me that being on location matters.  Stories that aren't worth my attention elsewhere can take on new layers of meaning when told in a particular place.  I'll always associate that story with the images of my drive...but the podcast producers just had to give me the audio and tell me where to press play.

Audio driving tour: the Mississippi River in Wisconsin

Radios were put into cars because audio is so good for multitasking, and that's the same reasonpodcasts are now giving radio stations a run for their money.  People want something to listen to while they drive and if what they're listening to is about the world they're seeing around them, all the better!

Thus, audio driving tours are such a natural part of the placecasting concept.  Here's a set of audio tours from my neck of the woods: the Mississippi River in Wisconsin.  Thirty-three towns along the Wisconsin side of the river have banded together to create 33 podcasts about the environment and history in their area. They're calling the project Great River Road Stories and the site is full of other information about this beautiful stretch of country.  (What's really impressive is that it looks like they created the audio tours 4 years ago, when podcasting was still very much in its infancy.)


View Larger Map

From Prescott to Keiler, the tours are 4-8 minute overviews of the history of each town the listener is about to pass through.  Some towns have more interesting histories than others, of course, but by the end, a listener should have a good sense of what this landscape used to be like.  I will definitely try to do this drive sometime this summer.

As I try to use my radio training to create this kind of place-based environmental journalism, I'm going to start collecting best (and worst) practices from the tours I hear.  So, with all respect to the hard work of the team that put this impressive series together, here's my critique:

• Pro: While most of the tour is a narrator reading a script, the tour occasionally breaks up this monotony by cutting to local experts who talk about geology or history.
  
• Pro: The narrator gives clear but brief guidance about how to use the tour...in each case saying to pause the podcast until you've passed through the town just talked about
• Pro: There is a simple, unobtrusive music bed under all the sections.  I think it's always the same music, which is too bad, but it adds energy and momentum to the items and makes them seem less like lectures
• Pro: There is a great diversity of information!  History, environment and geology are all rolled in here and it's packed with facts and statistics.
• Pro: There are good human stories in many of the towns.  Clearly, the writers made an effort to tell stories of particular events.  

• Con: The narrator's pacing never changes.  He doesn't pause when he switches topics from, say, history to geology.  This leaves the listener no time to digest the points just made.  A lot of the great facts and stats will never stay with a listener at a pace like this.  The narrator uses no vocal tools to set off particular pieces of information.  When everything has equal weight, everything becomes the lowest common denominator.
• Con: The script is not written for the ear.  The narrator does a nice job navigating some long, clunky, passive sentences, but ultimately the script sounds like text lifted from a guidebook or museum display.  Ears need short, active sentences written to paint pictures in the listeners' mind.
• Con: The script rarely references what the listener is actually seeing, or suggesting where to look when the listener gets to a particular location.  This neglects one of the great advantages to this kind of journalism...you know where the consumer is and you can use that to enhance the story.
• Con: Too many numbers.  It's hard to work numbers into a narrative.  Distances, addresses, ages all need context for a listeners' brain to really understand what they mean.  If that rock is 8-thousand years old, tell me why that's impressive.  Don't tell me the address of the historical society...tell me where to turn when I drive through town.  I'll be there shortly, after all.

No matter the technology, storytelling is key.  These Great River Road Stories are a wonderful service to visitors and residents alike, and they're just a re-write away from really engaging listeners' imaginations and connecting them with the environment of this beautiful part of the country.

Link: Great River Road Stories audio tours

Plotting radio stories using Wayfaring.com

Here's what the last two weeks of stories from my show, All Things Considered, look like when you plunk them into a map.

Mousing over a marker displays the story's headline.  For more details, you'll have to double-click the map and see them at the host map site (Wayfaring.com).

I only placed the stories that actually happened in a location or that were about a topic that has a particular location (for example, the Target shareholders meeting is plotted on the Target Headquarters building in Minneapolis).  Stories about concepts were left off the map unless they had a scene of a specific place illustrating that concept (as any good radio story should have, given time enough to report it).

I created this map using Wayfaring.com, which is a simple do-it-yourself map-making Web site, with a clean, no-frills interface.  This takes the programming out of map mashups.  It also takes out a lot of the flexibility.  I couldn't find a way to embed hyperlinks to the stories in the descriptions, much less audio.  But it's a good start.  

Ideally a map like this on a journalism Web site would be sortable by date, topic and reporter, too.  But the most important function of a feature like this is that someone can zoom in on their community and find the journalism being done about it.  Using a map like this over many months could also help editors find gaps in their coverage of a particular region.

Translating this kind of map to be viewable on a mobile device should be the easy part.  Generating compelling content, as always, is what's so tricky.

New layer for mobile GoogleEarth

With the marriage of geospatial mapping + mobile Internet devices + GPS, users on-the-go can finally get answers to these questions: 

1. Where am I now?

2. What's near me?

Google's has made the answer to #2 even more robust by adding another layer to its iPhone app.  Google's blog about it:Google LatLong: Businesses layer for Google Earth on your iPhone

"You'll find businesses like restaurants, bars, banks, gas stations, and grocery stores all just a touch away."

Of course it offers address and telephone information, too. 

Adding this feature to GoogleEarth original "spin the globe" functionality, the mobile app becomes a LOT more practical than it was before.  I'll use it more in the real world than I did. (All this information is available for desktop GoogleEarth, too.)

Now, as any good journalist does, I want to ask the next question:

3. WHY does my world look like this?

That's a different layer for a different time.

Update: Hello Neighbors!

I talked to the person who came up with the Northeast Minneapolis Walking Tour project.

Jennifer, with ARTSHARE, is a performance artist who is experimenting with "performing community." The walking tours are a way to let everyone in the neighborhood get in on the performance. She also says she's "really digging" sound as a medium.

The team is made up of 10 adults and 10 teens. The sound they've gathered includes a lot of music, in addition to interviews and oral histories. Now, the task is to mix it all into compelling audio. The latest post is here: ARTSHARE: Interviews and Recording Sessions!

I was struck by a point Jennifer made at the end of our conversation. She said the group wants to structure the tours to embrace "the physical act of walking."

Most walking tours are a series of snapshots ("pause the tape until you get to the next stop..."). But how can sound voice and music be used to enhance the space between tour stops? I'll be curious to hear the answer in Northeast.

Hello neighbors!

I knew searching the Internet for audio walking tours would turn up loads of tours of London, New York and Rome (of varying quality and mission).  But I didn't expect to find one in my own back yard.

Turns out a group of residents in Northeast Minneapolis are also teaching themselves to placecast . The project's mission (it's put on by the community group ARTSHARE) is simply stated:

The Audio-Guided Walking tours will show Northeast as a collective of many experiences and a vital neighborhood with a past, present and future!

That's a tall order.  Past, present OR future could generate hours of audio in any particular location.  But this group seems to be working hard to zoom into a handful of topics that represent larger themes in their neighborhood.  The three tours they plan to produce focus on:

1. Bottineau Park -- along the river in the heart of old Northeast
2. Eccentric and Eclectic -- visiting some of the neighborhood's iconic restaurants featuring foods from all over the world
3. Trolley Tour -- follows an old street car line down 13th Ave, past art galleries, restaurants and a LOT of churches.  These folks say this street has more churches than any other in the world.  Now that's worth a tour!

View ArtShare NE Walking Tours in a larger map

The group working on the project looks like a mix of ages and backgrounds...the kind of mix the Northeast neighborhood is known for here in the Twin Cities.  From their blog :

It is our plan put together tours that show Northeast as a collective of many experiences and not a singular voice of the past, present or future.

These probably aren't walking tours for tourists.  While a scan of their blog didn't immediately reveal a target audience, it seems like they're putting together placecasts for the people who already live and work there.  This is part of the promise of placecasting...it's a tool not just for informing newcomers, but also for enriching the relationship residents have with the world around them.  There is a lot of fascinating history and energy pent up in homes, churches and businesses that isn't spilling forth into the streets.  It takes a project like this to collect it and present it to people.  Sometimes people need help getting to know their neighbors.

I'm excited to watch this project progress.  I'd like to pay them a visit as they produce the audio they're gathering from festivals, street scenes, business owners, long-time residents, new immigrants and more traditional oral histories.

I'm proud this project is going on in my home town and I wish the team good luck.  Final podcasts are due out in August.