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.