Mobile Radio Simplified. Accessible. Relevant.

Against a lot of advice as well as my own desire to make CelleCast a neutral media channel where different views can be presented, I want to speak up in open advocacy for the people of Iran in their struggle for liberty. And I want to relate it to the theme of the Fourth Speaker in our presentation of the power of mobile media. First of all, let me say that what I see going on is extraordinary. I am the kind of guy that gets all choked up when I read and hear stories relating to our own American revolution. The risk, the bravery, the principles at work in the character of our founding generation here in America stirs emotions like little else. Quite often I wonder and actively seek out modern manifestations of that same type of character playing out today. Unfortunately it is hard to find in our own country anymore. Most Americans today are under a spell of complacency/entitlement/fatalism, accepting a continually growing corporate state. Something our founders would not tolerate. That we would endure intense hardship to make the world a better place for future generations is a vanishing virtue here. But in Iran, the hardship of the people under the shadow of the clerics oppression has brought out that virtue. Back in June when the protests began, I expected the resistance to subside within two weeks. Like many, I turned my twitter icon green and in August turned it back. Then I kept hearing more reports. Resistance from a people with little resource, no weapons, and an unsympathetic US state department. What is this? What drives them? How can we help them? Could we not do for them what the French did for us 235 years ago? I heard amazing stories. I heard that Iranian people from all generations were hitting the streets at risk of arrest, property confiscation, and being cannon fodder for the Basij. Older Iranians would actually make themselves human shields to protect the younger ones from being shot (opposite of what terrorists do in FORCING others to shield them). The protests have continued into a near permanent state now, and I am getting emotional over this every time I think about it. Our twitter icon has been a permanent green for a while now, with our call-to-action number on it. But what else can we do?

One of our founding principles of CelleCast is to empower people with a way to speak out in situations where tyrants suppress the the voice of the people. What a perfect example we have in Iran. Iran has an educated population and a culture that predates muslim extremism, yet a completely ideological islamic government that controls the media and actively suppresses any and all dissent. Unless you have been completely asleep politically for the last year, you are aware that the people there are using social media to get around these barriers. This is critical. No dictatorial authority can stand without control of the media, and the new social media revolution is all about circumventing top down control and getting raw content out from the shadows where people can consume and process it themselves. Blogs are getting out written accounts, bypassing newspapers. Cell phones and digital cameras are getting out video accounts, bypassing television. AND cellecasting CAN get out audio accounts, bypassing radio.

Why CelleCasting?
The value of cellecasting for the people of Iran is that they create audio reports from any phone, which get published immediately and can be plugged into any site and copied by various bloggers and media outlets. Users simply need to be able to dial a phone number to publish what they witness. This empowers EVERYBODY. During peaks in the demonstrations, the regime blocks the internet, cell data channels and routinely confiscates recording equipment from people in the streets. With cellecasting, every last phone is a recording device! Creative workarounds have been deployed to protect protesters identities as they are exposed as active users of social media. What better protection could there be for the leaders than every last person being seen as equally dangerous? I am Spartacus!!! The biggest barrier we have right now in making this start to flow is awareness.

Talk Radio Opportunity
Just about any organization out there with a conscience (with the exception of the Obama administration) has at least started to openly condemn the violent, oppressive crackdowns in Iran. Once our own president finally gets involved, and starts working to bring more pressure on the government there, lots of play-it-safe people will start to come out of the woodwork and stand with us for the people. Please don’t wait til then. Please go on the air and help us promote the power of cellecasting to the people of Iran. Tell your listeners to send cellegrams to their families in Iran.. to email them our dedicated number, and record an episode for the effort that we can post on our audio tweet program.

I am watching a video from http://bb2009.uscannenberg.org/ that cuts off early and has no scrubber, so take my frustration into account as you read this.

Mobile Voices Part 1
A case study in new media beyond broadcast, the Mobile Voices project empowers first generation immigrants in Los Angeles to publish multimedia stories about their lives and communities directly from mobile phones. This panel will explore questions of media production through demonstrations of the Mobile Voices project by some of its participants.

Nothing wrong with the projects goals, but the net affect of these kinds of schemes is to ride on the wave of mobile technology seeming to create a new practical application for it, but in reality, they are simply using the public interest in mobile technology to draw attention to their cause. The way they are doing this simply does not scale. If they wanted it to scale, they would contact us and use our Field reporter toolset and create an audio community on the spot that could be pointed to, listened to, added to, etc.

Looks like there was some grant money that simply needed to be spent. Go USC!

In all seriousness, there is a real need to bridge the gap between capability and acceptance of mobile storytelling, and I can certainly report on how it has gone for us in enabling event-based cell phone citizen journalism. Currently, the lifecycle of these kinds of deals is very short. When we quickly put ours together for the Obama inauguration and the April 15th Tea Parties, there was tremendous interest but little follow-through. The practical tools for enabling citizen journalists to contribute is all there on our website, but without practical application of the technology from social organizers, the whole situation feels like an awkward junior high dance where we really want to dance and don’t mind saying so, but those who can use the service already have a well funded entourage in tow that has keeping appearances at the top of their priorities. Show me the platform! Where are the stories?

Now, I would still love to dance with USC and other organizations, but at this point of seeing way too much posturing in the various industries we have tried to work with, simply calling them out like this appears to be the next best approach. I could be wrong and we were simply not findable amidst a sea of choices or the desire for video and pictures nullifies our otherwise highly elegant, easy to use, audio only solution. But it certainly seems to me that dialoging with a young, hungry and community minded startup like CelleCast is a highly effective way to move forward in mainstreaming audio social media. everyone has a story, and we want to continue to empower people to tell it right over thier phones, have it publish immediately on a branded project program page, as well as spread via Twitter. All the parts are there.

Always open to feedback,

Andrew Deal

One of the key founding values of CelleCast is to empower people to not only get more from radio on demand on their mobile phones, but also to speak TO the media and to have their voices heard. When we learned of the repression of reporting in Tehran not only of journalists, but of citizen reporting by the shutting down of internet resources as well, I knew that we should open this channel for the people of Iran. I only wish I did so a week ago. Let them try to shut down an entire bank of phone numbers! All anyone has to do is to dial 001 (415) 707-3003 from their mobile phones or landlines anywhere in the world and tell the truth of what is going on in Iran. We feel a viral campaign to get this number into the hands of people in the streets in Iran will be as easy as the system is to use. For every Iranian savvy enough to record and post video and pictures with their mobile phone, I’ll bet there are 50 who would dial up our number and make their own radio report if they felt there was a sympathetic audience on the other end.

I am calling upon all our radio partners to share this channel with their audiences! They should not think of it as competing with their own phone number, as what I need them to do is to simply tell their audience to text the number to friends and relatives in Iran as well as any Iranian who wants to share their voice.

We hope to gather hundreds of voices in the next few days and will continually alert the media of the talkback publications on CelleCast. The raw audio can be heard on our twitter timeline and we expect a whole lot of retweeting to take place.

Although not overtly political, our blog is all about our efforts in enabling passionate voices that are crying out to reach people in new and exciting ways. Therefore, with all the Tea Party business going on and the rising groundswell of a new protesting generation, we feel it is a good time to introduce the new CelleCast citizen reporting tools we have been working on this year. The Tea Party movement is young and full of new passionate voices looking for ways to empower ordinary people to speak their mind and be heard.

Largely dismissed by the mainstream media, this movement is organizing mostly online through Twitter, Facebook and new video sites like PJTV. Talk Radio is playing a strong role as well, and altogether, there will be over 500 Tea Party protest rallies tomorrow nationwide. The need for tools that can go into the hands of people and turn them into reporters as well as simply giving them a way to vent is obvious. Talk Radio can only receive one screened caller at a time, and by my estimation, there are thousands more than don’t just want to blog or write tweets, etc. They want to speak. They want to be heard, and there is a heightened sense of frustration that they are being ignored by a disconnected elite class at the top.

Enter CelleCast.

Starting tomorrow, what we specifically have to offer is the ability for people standing in the crowd to be able to call in and record field reports on what they are seeing happen at their local Tea Party. We looked for a good partner to work with in this effort, and discovered that Pajamas Media was making headway in its call for citizen reporters. Well it was natural, and it was overnight, but we joined forces with them to enable their still growing list of hundreds of citizen reporters to post field reports using their cell phone. Check out the Tea Party Coverage Program on CelleCast.

Anyone from around the country will be able to hear the reports after a basic screening, and the best will be included on Pajamas Media comprehensive coverage. People calling in can also hear the reports and post audio comments to them as Talkbacks, which is similar to posting a comment on a blog post. All opinions are welcome. The posts will update various Twitter statii as well, making for a sort of audio petition ideally, pushed out in real time, but also retrievable and sharable in various ways. We are hoping the CelleCast contribution will help make a difference in terms of the people being heard, and that is reward enough. We are not taking sponsors for this program for tomorrow, as we feel that this is our chance to contribute to increasing the national dialog.

For the scores of people looking not just for worked up Youtube video of the Limbaugh address to the CPAC on Saturday, it is now available in audio form for you to download to your iPod here (1,2,3) as a podcast and more conveniently, available to anyone on CelleCast. All you have to do is dial 415-707-3003 and listen instantly. The cellecast of the 90 minute address is put into a format designed to be heard over the phone for a special reason. Namely, so that all who hear it can simply press 3 during the speech to weigh in on the issues put forward. What will happen to national politics when you give everyone a microphone and a way to share it with friends?

We believe that it is not enough to simply listen, fume and write back in a comment form. Talking Back forces people to articulate more substantively on why they believe what they believe and it, fostering a more constructive and civil forum to actually solve the problems America faces.

I personally believe that way less people will comment on this story via voice because 90% of the twitter posts so far show people are either totally in the tank for Rush, or think he is totally evil. Politicians of course have to run from him because they basically operate in the theater of fear of loss. The people however can use this event to advance the dialog and transcend demagoguery. I challenge you all therefore to hear it and contribute a thoughtful reply on the subjects brought forward.

Lets talk!

Is recovery really only possible through unprecedented spending levels?

Is Rush Limbaugh really just a bigot… or worse, a racist?

Is the timing really of such a critical nature that it is right to suspend the normal congressional deliberative process?

What exactly is the compassion contrast between a liberal and conservative world-view?

Make your case! The nation wants to hear your response.

Moderated responses will show here.
The unfiltered responses will show on our audio tweet twitter timeline or on each subscribers individual twitter status.

We wanted to do our part to help the wireless nation celebrate and share their thoughts on the inauguration. So, at the last minute(last Thursday) we created the Inaugural ALL CALL Cellecast as a way for the millions attending to have handy access to on demand radio for the mobile phone. Of course it works fine for those elsewhere, but the point was to make a program that suits people on the ground who don’t have smart phones, nor time to sit still and read. Having a radio is such a good idea in a place crowded to the gills, but who would carry another device?

Well the experiment worked pretty well. One of our partners, Jon Elliott from Air America jumped on board and gave us a couple updates to it and some on-air promotions. We got great feedback from a lot of people saying that if we had only had more time to prepare, it could have grown into a big hit. Well, it was a medium hit, and doing it spawned us putting up our own official twitter page, and getting lots of followers right away. We met some great people this way. More than I normally do through my personal twitter account.

We also tied new program updates and talkbacks to twitter in a stronger way, leading us to further explore the concept of the audio tweet. Micro-podcasting is not just smaller audio bytes, but audio responses and mini-reports tied to others in a meaningful way. Our talkback tool is a perfect fit for this. I will blog ore about this soon and what it means to radio’s evolution. Suffice it to say the concept already has legs as far as we are concerned.

We also made our system so we can empower field reporters to post full-fledged episodes from their phones with a simple push of a button. No need to have a special code.. All they have to do is leave a talkback just like everyone else, but just choose a different sending option based on their account being tied to a program partner. It works great too! Afi Scruggs from Cleveland brought a busload of schoolchildren to the inauguration and posted some cool reports in an audio journal style that will mean much to her and the parents on the trip. Also, Marianne from Mass reported well as she, like many there, tried to get a good view on the mall.

We look forward to developing these event based cellecasts even further in the new year, and always welcome your feedback.

Oh yeah.. why the picture of the cat? I know it is completely irrelevant to the post. We really would hate to think that businesses across the country would ever have to knock on the door of government to prosper. I just got off track while searching trends on twitter and discovered the Obamacon. Fun stuff.