http://www.physorg.com/

Maybe they could hire you to do a 30 second recap of each report, so I could just hit “play” and listen/watch the 10-20 top topics on their main page (which changes daily), instead of having to read each one.

Video on the cheap may be the answer; it’s how I came to TWiS.

A labor of love is its own reward, but more lucrative situations could be in the offing, I’m guessing.

TV helps, but its future may be limited.

And the herd sometimes appreciates the cognoscenti.

It’s the best hope for progress.

Lead, follow, or get out of the way - words to live by.

I’m glad to follow TWiS.

The other thing though, is action. How do I take action from the info you’re supplying? Right now, the info is interesting, but all I can do with it is drop nuggets of it at meetings and cocktail parties, but that’s not enough.

If I hate short-legged dogs and my kid doesn’t have achondroplasia what can I DO with the information from your recent podcast? Can I use it as the basis of action in another part of my life?

http://img146.imageshack.us/img146/1827/fotoflexerphoto1.png

http://img193.imageshack.us/img193/797/fotoflexerphotop.png

Is Forum the only word hinting at community?

Then perhaps compare with
http://img43.imageshack.us/img43/2765/picture7eid.th.png

I don’t have any particular answer off the top of my head, but I know of one communicator, who impressed me with his tech use and ability to keep communication and audience - Gary Vaynerchuck. And his recommendation was go with the useful media solution that suits your personal preferences/style/abilities.

How to change our ways - change the interface with your audience.

How to make even better science content that can contend with what the major publishers are pushing out - If the aim is better not more, then I guess it kind of depends what you want to cover, how, and to whom.

(e.g. Bang goes the theory - a new BBC programme v recently on iPlayer - a new take on passing on some science info (with an interview with Craig Venter on his amazing boat))

How to foster the growth of a truly awesome science-y community - Community I guess needs a hub to be at - hard sometimes to do that through an old school forum vBulletin style.

Sounds like you’ve kind of already worked out what you want - “to create a community-driven science media channel based on TWIS.”" The community needs ownership and investment for the entire endeavor to thrive”
“I want to rebuild the TWIS website to reflect the community and its many interests, and allow the growth of parallel scientific content in the form of blogs, audio, and video programming. I want to find the science reporting superstars among the minions, and have them call TWIS their home.” “I want to create what Naomi termed an incubator for science reporting through TWIS.”

Kind of sounds like the rough idea is there, but needs pinning down. Maybe throwing up a wiki and letting us loose with it might get some ideas?

Crowd sourcing needs bite size pieces and a focus, but can work very well.

@tomtubbs

When it comes to incentivizing a fan-group you don’t need to set up any point systems, or dangle any chotchky-carrots, or anything like that. Merely becoming influential within the group is motivation enough for most.

Read Seth Godin’s Tribes. It’s short and sweet. Here’s a teaser from his blog on throwing the concept of product marketing on its head by letting one’s “tribe” determine what’s needed:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/01/tribal-manageme.html

I have specific ideas for TWIS, but a lot of other writing to do right at this moment…

I think your idea about user generated science media is a good one. But I think you could take the idea a lot farther. Check out James Burkes (http://k-web.org) to see what I mean.

Cheers,

Kevin

Since it can be done entirely informally, and assuming I’m not the only one who likes the idea, it could be implemented immediately without any preparation (”Thanks to Joe Schmoe for sending us the pointer to this study. As a reward, Joe Schmoe gets 5 TWISlets…”) and then expanded later or dropped depending on the response it got.
—
And on an unrelated note, between the higher quality (and/or smaller file size) compared to mp3 and the fact that the recent browsers coming out can play them natively, I’d love to see an Ogg Vorbis feed for the This Week in Science media.

I would be willing to help, but have no background in either science or media, so I am not sure how I could help.

Some quick ideas for existing TWIS

1) List on the forum the news stories that did not make the on-the-air cut. Let minions vote for which of these is the best story and report on that the next week.

2) Pick some story, or issue each week (that you can discussion), on which you and Justin disagree. Let minions vote on who they agree with.

3) Poll each month for story of the month. Let a volunteer minion report on that story.

4) Monthly Talkshow, or some other interactive service, TWIS discussion show. I am not to fond of chats. I think a moderated discussion works best.

I thought I’d come remind about it and expand on the idea since 140 characters can do only so much.

Its quite clear to me, and from the comments above, that what people like is the personal chemistry and the type of discussion that Kiki and Justin are having. To change that formula would/could be disastrous, adding other people into the discussion, except in interview-form, won’t work. I haven’t heard or seen of any show that does it will and even the few times TWIS takes on-air callers the difference in audio-quality, tone and speed can be jarring.

Thus if you want to have the community take a more active part, it should be in the form of directing Kiki and Jackson to the topics that are most interesting. Since TWIS will never be breaking news it makes sense to have a large portion, or all, of the topics up for discussion decided by the listeners - in advance. This way some of the research and fact checking can be done by the community aswell and ready comments and further questions asked in the attached discussion-thread.

The Reddit-software is open source and there are Digg-”clones” that are also open source so the software part of the equation doesn’t need massive engineering.

So in closing, this way we’d be able to direct Kiki and Justin to the topics we most want them to comment, discuss or inform the listeners about. Without joining the discussion and potentially breaking a well-working formula.

Thanks for a great show!

…Henry

The one TWIStribution I’ve done so far[1] took me quite a while - I’d actually found myself wanting to contribute from the first call for them, but not having a particular topic in mind initially it was a while before I came up with something to try. (Then a little longer to get over the virtual stage-fright of trying to record for the first time something to be heard by thousands of people all over the world, many of whom are probably smarter than me and for all I knew would be utterly bored with my submission…but never mind that. Like a new roll of toilet paper, after the first one the rest should be a lot easier.)

If there were a system to help guide contributors on topics and content that are interesting to the TWIS Empire it might help. Rewards would be nice too, though I wouldn’t think they’d have to be explicitly systematized - being able to participate is itself a reward in my opinion. (Though if you wanted to go nuts, you could partially systematize it. How about a virtual currency that can be exchanged for permission to download digital tracks from a compilation CD, physical CD’s, T-shirts, live guest host slots, rides in the TWIS hovercraft, etc. You could call them “TWISlets[2]” or something…)

It might even be worth trying to recruit a selection of potentially interested participants who could register general topic areas they feel they might be willing and able to speak on. Then if during the week you or Justin run into an interesting bit of news that you don’t have time to dig into yourself, you can send off a message to people who look like they might be able to do a bit of research and possibly recording on the subject, asking if they can come up with a contribution on it for the next show.

I’ve got a mess of other random thoughts bouncing around my brain at the moment as well, but I’ll try to form them into something at least slightly coherent before I post them as well.

[1] Early November 2007, as I recall. I was the “Microbial Fuel Cell” guy.

[2] I was going to say “TWISlers”, but then you probably wouldn’t be able to offer the virtual currency in candy form later if you wanted due to threat of trademark lawsuits…hey, got to keep your options open.