Comments on: Broadcasting the Twittersphere

By: Sylvie Noel

Sylvie Noel — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 18:09:54 +0000

While it’s true that a lot of Twitter is forgettable, dismissing Twitter for that reason would require that we also dismiss blogging because the majority of blogs are boring personal crap. There are people who use Twitter in an intelligent and interesting manner.

Having said that, it’s true that a lot of it is of little interest outside the author and his/her circle of friends/family. But let’s forget about that for a bit and consider the idea of social broadcasting. How would it be advantageous over the other methods that people already have to access Twitter (internet/phone)? Would social broadcasting be more appropriate for other types of media than writing (I’m thinking YouTube videos, e.g.).

I’m back from vacation and thinking about these issues again ^_^

By: Administrator

Administrator — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:55:47 +0000

Tony,

Please first note that I express my personal views here and not those of my employer.

I am not sure I understand where we disagree.

Is it when I say “sacrifice a couple of DAB stations” ? I realize now that I was unclear. I simply meant that the Twittershpere would fit in the place of one or two radio channels WITHIN a DAB multiplex. So I’m actually suggesting here that DAB would be used for the delivery of such application. I even forgot that the Tweets could probably be compressed quite a bit so that the resulting bitstream would certainly be under 100kbps!

With regards to the application itself, I am not suggesting that it would necessarily make sense as is, but I believe that there are potentially some variations on this theme that could. When you think about it, Twitter is a broadcast application. Millions of broadcasters disseminating their thoughts 140 characters at a time. There must be something to make with it…. social broadcasting (in the sense if social networks) ?

Francois.

By: Tony Orwin

Tony Orwin — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 10:47:28 +0000

I can not believe that an organisation with the status of the CRC can countenance such an ill informed and outrageous waste of valuable broadcast bandwidth as to allocating it to the transparent frippery of Twitter.

The fact that Canada for a wide variety of reasons, – not lest of which has been the cross boarder (US) pressure to adopt the proprietary HD Radio or Sirius / XM satellite based systems) rather than the more universally accepted Eureka 147 DAB based digital Radio Solutions – is no reason to pick it off as a target to reduce its spectrum.

Elsewhere in the world DAB is seeing an upturn in popularity with new systems being rolled out – or existing ones expanded / updated. It is a great shame that Canada (and the USA) is being left so far behind.