I'm honored Dave has invited me to be on his panel. The
discussion here is a sign that we're going to have a great
session, seeing as there's plenty of intelligent thinking
happening.

My background is broadcasting and broadcast technology. Since
I was 15 I was building transmitters, making my Mom drive me
around the neighborhood to determine my 'reach'. It didn't take
long before I built a small mixing board, hooked up a
microphone and was spinning my friends requests on my local
pirate station. Growing up in The Netherlands, where there was
no commercial broadcast landscape until the 90's drove me to
move on to large 'professional' pirate radio organizations in
Amsterdam, where I also helped out with the 'technology' first
(rebuilding german army surplus kit into 150 watt FM
transmitters). Later we discovered the joy of VCR's and
technology, using the combination to break into Central Cable
installations with a smalll amount of output power and a
strategically placeed directional antenna. What did we broadcast
at the time? Porn, it was all that was available on VHS, and
ofcourse porn was what drove VCR sales at the time as well.
I went legit in the 80's eventually winding up at MTV in the States,
which was even more frustrating, because MTV is a part of the
'machine', not the revolution the claim to be leading. The internet
was perfect for me when I first learned about gopher in the 80's,
now I could combine my (limited)_on-air precense with a 24/hr
open channel! When cable and ADSL came around I looked at
these devices and said "time to broadcast".

There are many hurdles to broadcasting/publishing on the
internet, most importantly, in contrast to broadcasting via
'traditional means' your costs increase with each new audience
member you acquire.

I've been working on cracking that problem for several years now
and have several solutions, but clearly it's not the next new
thing......

Education seems like the perfect industry for commercial
success on the internet. Unlike commercial broadcasting, where
scarcity of resources is used by radio and television spectrum
'owners' to make money, educational materials are usually
spread as widely as possible by the authors; mimmeographed
for kids to take home, copied on blackboards and notebooks etc.
Just looking at my 11 year old's schoolbag shows there's room
for improvement amidst the plethora of sheets of paper notes,
assignments and memos that are created on a daily basis. I
was fortunate enough to meet her 5th grade teacher Peter Ford
early during last schol year and we set about proving you can
integrate internet technology into education without it being
ABOUT the technology, but just using the technology to improve
basic skills, such as writing, presentation, structural thinking
and communication. The best part is that a 'project blog' is
accessible from anywhere online, so that parents, other
teaschers, grandparents and ofcourse peers can see and
comment on the work. Any educator will tell you about the
importance of an audience for a pupil to present their work to,
not just 'do a project' to get a grade.

The technology we chose was Userland's Frontier/Manila
combination, Peter and I were able to create and maintain
class6f.com which has received attention from educators
around the globe. We're so exited about us, the ex-VJ and Lower
School teacher combo who can make and create anythiong they
can dream up, that we've launched schoolblogs.com, where we
intend to build out our community of weblogs in education to
eventually offer SchoolBlogs as an affordable managed service.
Time for the old aggregators of educational content, that would
be the BigCo publishers, to move aside imho.

Weblogs are a big part of the web's future from where I stand. It's
the simple, affordable way to 'broadcast' your message without
having to jimmy the transmitter wires, or know where to point the
antenna. Syndication protocols such as RSS are perfect for
group sharing of links and enclosures, vreating ad-hoc
distribution networks, better and more efficient than emailing.
In the end, what I love about the internet is that it DOES work as
a broadcast platform, only you can't control it. Steve Ballmer's
monkeyboydance video and the sequel, 'developers.mpg' have
been distributed around the globe via email, webserver,
newsgroup and god knows what distribution technologies,
always finding it's way to those who will most appreciate
it...handed down (or is it up?) from someone who you know, who
got it from someone they know and so on until six degrees of
separation has been achieved :-)

So, let's put this to the test. Tonite I'll post a REALLY funny
picture of myself, that has never been digitized, let's see how far
and wide it gets. Oh yeah, I'm naked in the picture.
AC