Coming soon on KHIT and this blog, discussions everything relevant to the Health IT industry and health care more broadly.
- Live streaming interactive web radio;
- Thought leader interviews;
- Free topical multimedia content;
- Guest bloggers;
- Growing and up-to-date esource links;
- Podcasts -- including, for example, an annotated mp3 library comprising every word of HIPAA and its 45 CFR regulations, broken into convenient topical chapters.
I've been listening to NPR for decades, just about every day (I'm a contributing member of KNPR in Las Vegas). Whatever listeners may think of their core socioeconomic news topical "slant," they set the bar very high for seamless, compelling radio across a breadth of programming.
Born in 1946, I grew up on the tail-end of the radio era. I loved it. I recall doing my homework at night with my radio on in my bedroom. Top 40 tunes, drama serials and comedy shows, news...
"LSMFT. There's never a rough puff in a Lucky."
A different world now. I had some surreptitious Luckies out in the shed while I was a 5th grader in East Hanover, NJ that cured that itch forever. Ugh.
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| Radio show transcript, 1949 (pdf). I was 3. |
Wow.
While we now have every sort of imaginable communications media, simple audio presentation is as useful today as it was 60 years ago. You can "multi-task" while listening, and a related virtue is that it requires active cognitive "visualization" participation -- unlike television, where visual content is simply passively delivered to you. In addition, ask yourself: how much YouTube (or Vimeo etc) corporate or entrepreneurial A/V content do you see out there that is simply "talking heads" waste of bandwidth? to wit.
Moreover (and, just like video to be fair), technology now accords us access to convenient, essentially unlimited audio program archives via podcasts (the vast majority of them free). I first began doing those not too many years ago in support of my friends' band, right here at home on my iMac (I also served as their independent blogger and photographer; a great, fun period in my life).
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What in my work background leads me to this initiative? Well, for one thing, see my independent REC blog.
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| RegionalExtensionCenter.blogspot.com |
See also my related work at HIPAAcast.net.
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GRETSKY, THE GREAT ONE, SAYS
"Skate to where to puck will be!"
Copy that.
Like a lot of webcasters, I could (and will) do KHIT in my PJs from my study. I already have the gear I need. And, all it would take equivalently on the road would be a Powerbook, small mixer, a couple of headset mics, and a quiet hotel room or conference space to do interviews.
But, what if, part of the time...
Can you say "rolling, active billboard and audio studio"?
Tastefully sponsored. Make sure to build and operate it as eco-friendly as possible (biofuels? LNG? H2?). Maybe towing one of these behind the bike rack?
Or a Volt, or Tesla, or Cooper? I think you get the idea.
Moreover, a mobile webcasting audio studio won't require nearly the kind of near-zero dB flat-response internal acoustics architecture customary in the brick 'n mortar music studio settings.
Let's "Bring it." Bring to our heroic underserved clinics, to the major HIT conferences, to our med schools, to the cutting edge institutions...
Consider...
Nothing particularly radical here, conceptually.
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| We don't need anything nearly this fancy to do great audio. |
We need to talk. And we need to do.
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BACKSTORY
We have such cool no-substantive-barriers-to-entry digital desktop/laptop A/V tools nowadays. A Mac, a mic or two, a Live365 or BlogTalkRadio account, a phone line, and, presto, you're a "host."
Which is all fine. But, I come by it honest.
Fresh out of high school, I first set foot in a recording studio in New York 48 years ago (where the "Four Seasons" had recorded. We were dazzled).
In 1980, after trapsing all over the U.S. and Canada performing for a "living," I cobbled together my own hole-in-the-wall studio in Knoxville, TN.
Literally. Inside a bare cinder block facility, I framed the interior walls, put up the drywall and paneling, erected the sound damping, laid the carpet, built the drum kit baffles and camera shoot set,
and set about to work with my then- partner, Dr. Michael K. Smith, chasing the entrepreneurial dream. I was Vice President, General Manager, Producer, Director, Editor, CRM Programmer, Accounts Payable Clerk, Accounts Receivables Clerk, Shipping Clerk, and Janitor.
We cut songwriter demos (including my own) and produced a wide variety of audio and video instructional materials across a bit more than decade (in particular a line of "exam cram" test preparation programs. We thought we were gonna be small business Big Stars).
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| My wife took that pic of me in 1974 in Seattle |
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| Some of the songs recorded in hole-in-the-wall studios |
PressType dry transfer sheets, X-acto knives, acetates, and a darkroom upstairs. Those were the days. It was fun. All the moreso because we managed to not go bankrupt.
You can do all of this anymore in a quiet room on a MacBook.
And/or aboard the KHIT Tour Bus.
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More to come...
