Whole Wheat Radio

Whole Wheat Radio

Whole Wheat Radio logo
Type of site	Internet radio Independent music Community
URL	wholewheatradio.org
Commercial	No
Registration	Free and optional, required for editing but not listening

Whole Wheat Radio (WWR) was a listener-controlled, internet-only webcast and Mediawiki wiki based in Talkeetna, Alaska. It was centered around independent music aired 24 hours a day, financially and operationally maintained by an all-volunteer community as a grassroots alternative to mainstream media. WWR's listener-driven webcast and real-time interactive community distinguished it from other streaming webcasts, social music networks, and peer to peer music file sharing websites. Whole Wheat Radio was an online community radio station.

Musical offerings ranged from independent singer/songwriters, to blues, to classical, to bluegrass and newgrass, to folk. Unscheduled live on-air banter, scheduled interviews, house concerts and spontaneous conversations were often broadcast live from Talkeetna. Though Jim Kloss hosted WWR from his home in Talkeetna, listeners controlled the music and other on-air content heard throughout the day through the website's request pages. Generally 15 to 50 listeners were tuned in at any given time with occasional spikes of up 90 concurrent listeners.

Whole Wheat Radio webcast had three streams. One was for "low-speed" listeners (24 kbit/s) with dial-up connections. The next was for "medium-speed" listeners (56 kbit/s) with DSL, cable or other fast connections. The third stream was for "high-speed" listeners (128 kbit/s) with reliably fast connections. All streams utilized mp3PRO audio technology for listeners whose players support it. (An mp3PRO 56 kbit/s stream is comparable in audio quality to a 128 kbit/s stream while requiring only one-half the bandwidth.)

To listen to the Whole Wheat Radio webcast, request songs and/or contribute to the wiki, a listener needed only a computer, an internet connection, a software music player and a browser. Listening and participating were not operating system specific or proprietary. Popular music players such as Winamp, iTunes, and Windows Media Player could all be utilized as well as the Microsoft Windows, Linux and Macintosh operating systems.

WWR's technological innovations facilitated the growth of a small virtual community that was driven by the audience and not station management. Known as Wheatheads, regular listeners interacted in an entirely wiki-based "live collaboration room". There they could request, rate and tag music; send original music; write to artists and create wiki pages.

An example of technology reaching the world from a small rural town in Alaska, WWR's low-profile adult format succeeded without typical web advertising or competitive musical hype. Typically, WWR reached more SHOUTcast listeners on a daily basis than any other webcast originating in Alaska.[1]

The webcast ceased broadcasting on October 20, 2010.

Music

Whole Wheat Radio featured the music of several thousand independent artists not associated with the RIAA. Major artists who are household names generally have contractual obligations which do not allow them to submit their music for airplay on stations which do not pay RIAA royalties. Therefore, WWR did not air their music. The phrase "indie music" often refers just to the genre of independent rock in the wider world, but Whole Wheat Radio's emphasis was on independent acoustic musicians, including singer-songwriters, folk, jazz, blues, and classical, who have retained the right to submit their music for airplay without receiving RIAA royalties. The library also included indie rock and pop, but on a limited scale.

Music from CDs sent to WWR were ripped to MP3 files and entered into a music library mySQL database. Tracks were ranked by listeners using a 1- to 5-star rating system. Each song was also tagged and categorized by genre, keyword, subject matter, arrangements, keys, musical instruments featured, etc. There were more than 20,000 tracks in the Whole Wheat Radio music library. Unpopular tracks were automatically removed from the library based on listener's rankings.

All tracks in the music library were listener-requestable through the Whole Wheat Radio wiki. Songs could be requested individually, or in music sets or blocks based on the requester's criteria. For example - one could request a 20-minute block of female singer-songwriter music added to the library within the last six months, with an average 4-star rating, with the tag "Mood-Pretty."

The requested songs were queued for airplay from the main computer in Talkeeta. Dynamic pages on the website showed information about the artist, listener rankings, artist website, etc., simultaneous to playing of the track. Links to the artist's website and CD Baby (where proceeds from CDs sales are paid directly to the artist) were displayed.

Musicians submitted their music by sending a CD to Whole Wheat Radio. If a CD fit the overall WWR music genre requirements, the entire CD was put into the music library. This distinguishes WWR from most radio stations or webcasts where a program director is responsible for choosing which tracks get airplay. All tracks on an artist's album were available for listeners to request.

Each day an artist was spotlighted on WWR. One of his/her songs played each hour, a prominent link to his/her WWR page was displayed and the artist was often discussed on-air.

Because Whole Wheat Radio was a listener-interactive experience, listeners often participated in the building of Whole Wheat Radio by contacting independent artists and requesting CDs to be included in the library on behalf of Whole Wheat Radio.

Live broadcasts

A volunteer reading on-air at Whole Wheat Radio

The Ranting and Raving News Muffin: Somewhat regularly, except in the summer, Kloss and Golton would go live on-air at 11 a.m. (Alaska time) on weekdays for "The Ranting 'n' Raving News Muffin" show which featured news, music, opinion, humor and slices of life. The shows were often referred to simply as "Rants" because listeners considered loud outbursts of emphatically expressed opinion to be the most memorable highlights of the show. The Rant was one of the earliest (Oct. 2004) live shows recorded for a live internet audience and then made available within minutes for podcast listeners.[2]

Live Interviews: Other live broadcasts included Golton interviewing musicians who were visiting Talkeetna on-air. The interviews usually included live performances, and were recorded for rebroadcast.

House Concerts: In addition to its normal musical webcast, WWR webcast live house concerts held at Whole Wheat Radio facilities in Talkeetna.

Spontaneous Live Broadcasts: Frequent spontaneous live broadcasts included coverage of events such as flooding in Talkeetna in 2006, neighbors dropping in, open mics while cooking steaks on a campfire in the yard, and Friday night merriment.

Live broadcasts were often recorded for rebroadcast and some were later available for download.

Simulcasts

Throughout its history, WWR has been sporadically simulcast on other internet and terrestrially based webcasts and radio stations including Robin Valley Community Radio, AM 1690 in Omaha, Nebraska.

Technology and innovations

From the Talkeetna studio, where the music library was housed on Windows computers, using Winamp, music and live broadcasts were streamed in MP3 format to a SHOUTcast server in California to which listeners actually connected to the audio stream. The main website was hosted in New York on a LAMP server and communicated on a constant basis with both the SHOUTcast server and a non-public server in Talkeetna in order to react in real-time with users.

Previous to March 2006, the website with its real-time chat and request/tracking interface ran on proprietary PHP/MySQL code written by Kloss. In March 2006, after seeing how successfully Wikipedia created an active community of contributors, he began testing and migrating to MediaWiki. By writing several customized hooks into the wiki code, Whole Wheat Radio was able to give users access to customized real-time variables containing information about what is currently playing for placement on any wiki page. WWR was the first website/webcast to integrate a live chat, which understands wiki markup, and real-time music requesting into a wiki.

WWR was the first webcast to allow listeners to insert text-to-speech into the audio stream by typing messages into a browser chat interface. Also, using text-to-speech technology the system, known as "EJs", is programmed to read stored or off-site information on the air such as horoscopes and philosophical tidbits.

In 2004, WWR was the first webcast set up with a phone-in line on which listeners leave voice messages (Phonegrams) that almost immediately play in the stream.

Podcasts/Audio Magazines

WWR was the first webcast to podcast as well as include other people's podcasts in the WWR audio stream. The first WWR podcast [3] was created on October 3, 2004 [4]. On October 12, 2004 Doc Searls [5] mentioned Kloss's blog entry "The Bridge Between Webcasting And Full-Fledged Radio"[6] and called WWR "...one of the legendary internet webio stations". For several months, daily "rants", which listeners only heard live for the previous two years, were recorded and within minutes automatically posted as podcasts. WWR produced the first podcasts of live house concerts. Hundreds of hours of audio which were available as podcasts are archived for on-demand listening on the WWR website.[7]

Shortly after making the first podcasts of the "rants" available, taking podcasts and RSS feeds a step further, Whole Wheat Radio became the first to use podcast "channels." On October 12, 2004 [8] Kloss created several subscription channels (e.g.: Rants Channel, Comedy Channel, Podcaster Tips Channel, Music Channel and All Channels) to enable listeners to be able to control what content they received in their podcast aggregator. Listeners were then able to have more control of their feed. By subscribing to a particular channel rather than having listeners download everything that Whole Wheat Radio put into podcast form, wasting listener's bandwidth and Whole Wheat Radio's bandwidth, they could subscribe solely to a feed of interest e.g. Comedy only or House Concerts only.

Although WWR continued to produce public podcasts on occasion, Kloss indicated he plans to reintroduce audio magazines in 2007 as a free feed to approved subscribers. He believed this would reduce server loads significantly and increase the accuracy of listener statistics by ensuring that a greater number of magazine downloads are done by humans who intend to listen rather than by bots, aggregator sites and outdated podcast feeds.

Audio experimentation

WWR experimented with many technologies designed to incorporate grassroots audio into the stream itself. Examples include:

1. Multiple listeners being able to talk live on-air via Paltalk
2. Multiple listeners being able to talk live on-air via various IM voice services
3. Live audio shows originating from other sources (i.e. live shows from Kulak's Woodshed) being broadcast on WWR
4. Automated inclusion of listener FTP uploads of audio material into the webcast
5. Automated inclusion of podcasts into the webcast
6. Automated text-to-speech announcements when listeners have updated their blogs
7. Listener telephone calls (Phonegrams) being a part of the normal webcast
8. Automated text-to-speech announcements of listener horoscopes, weather forecasts and 'today in history' notes

Latterly, only Phonegrams and text-to-speech announcements were heard on a regular basis. Occasionally, new experimental audio sources obtained in real-time from the internet were included in the stream. Based on listener's overall reaction, airing of that particular audio source wes either continued or not.

Wheatstalk

Wheatstalk was a summer solstice gathering of Wheatheads in Talkeetna to celebrate music and friendship. The first Wheatstalk was June 21, 2005 and featured the music of 3 Blind Mice. Due to moving and renovations 2006 saw no Wheatstalk, but a Wheatstalk was planned for 2007.

House concerts

Whole Wheat Radio began presenting and live-webcasting house concerts in July, 2004, after a 24-by-28-foot (7.3 by 8.5 m) cabin (dubbed the Wheat Hole) was built to make enough room for an in-house audience of 50. The construction was motivated by frequent contacts from traveling artists looking for a venue in Talkeetna. There are few opportunities to perform or hear singer-songwriter music in rural Alaska; Kloss and Golton wanted to find a financially feasible way to present some of these artists, and realized that building a simple, economical space would add the opportunity to webcast the concerts live on Whole Wheat Radio increasing the audience size by as many as 90 more online listeners.

Both the in-house and internet attendees pitched in during the concert to pay the artist with online donations or CD sales. Whole Wheat Radio gave 100% of the night's income to the performer.

House concerts were recorded with high audio quality and later posted as audio magazines for download via RSS feed.

Performers have included Jack Williams, Johnsmith, Mark Erelli, Peter Mulvey, David Goodrich, Cliff Eberhardt, Stephen Fearing, 3 Blind Mice, Danny Schmidt, Robin Hopper, Ann Pence, Radoslav Lorkovic, Diane Zeigler, Brooks Williams, Larry Zarella, and Kristina Olsen.

Funding

Initially, WWR was paid for as a hobby from Kloss's personal funds. As webcast and webhosting expenses increased, he decided it was no longer possible to maintain WWR without financial assistance from listeners. A small notice was put on the website indicating the amount of money needed to keep the station on-the-air for the current month. Listeners reacted by sending more funds than were needed and a public accounting page detailing where the funds were being spent was created. WWR also began referring listeners to CDBaby to purchase CDs in September 2003. WWR earnt $1 for every CDBaby referral that results in a CD sale. This income was also publicly accounted for.

As of October, 2008 a total of $42,357.69 in donations had been raised to fund operations. Over $22,000 in combined in-house and online sales and "tip jar" had been generated by 35+ house concerts, all of which (minus Paypal fees) was paid to the performers. 3,023 albums had been sold to listeners via CDBaby click-thrus.

Whole Wheat Radio's operating expenses were paid entirely by listener donations, proceeds from the CDBaby referral program and donations from listeners who sold WWR related merchandise in their personally managed businesses. In contrast to many user funded websites, all monies collected were accounted for publicly by Golton so listeners could see where their money was spent. Donations were typically made online using Paypal either as scheduled monthly donations or one-time donations. Listeners also donated computer equipment, artwork, fixtures, furniture, food, coffee, soaps and various other items. In 2003, WWR was accepted under an official non-profit arts umbrella but opted not to participate because of potential on-air content control issues and because their finances were already healthy without additional grant funding.

WWR had no paid employees. All development time and facilities were donated by listeners, artists, Golton and Kloss. 100% of house concert proceeds were given to the performing artists. WWR did not have official fundraising pledge drives. Instead, the monthly funds needed to operate the station were posted on the website. Listeners frequently donated until the monthly financial requirement reads $0.00 on the website.

History

The original 12x12 Whole Wheat Radio cabin

2002 - The original 12x12 cabin

Whole Wheat Radio began as "Radio Free Talkeetna" in August 2002. Programmer Jim Kloss started the live interactive webcast immediately after high speed DSL access arrived in the small village of Talkeetna, Alaska. His partner, singer/songwriter Esther Golton, soon joined in the project with the two broadcasting live on the stream from her self-built 12-by-12-foot (3.7 by 3.7 m) cabin which was heated by wood, lacked running water, and utilized an outhouse. The tiny cabin did have the three essential elements for internet connectivity: electricity (via an extension cord), a telephone line, and a resident computer programmer.

The website associated with the live stream quickly incorporated a live chat, information and links to the music being played, as well as information on the whereabouts of listeners based on their IP address. Kloss wrote the software in an outdated version of MS-DOS QuickBasic that dynamically controlled the playlist based on changing criteria.

At first the musical fare consisted of Kloss' personal collection of major-label artists. After learning about potential royalty payment issues with the RIAA and webcasting, Whole Wheat Radio soon switched to webcasting only independent musicians not associated with the RIAA. Kloss and Golton were surprised to discover a wealth of musicians whose CDs rarely receive airplay, and quickly became strong advocates for the discovery of professional and semi-professional, seldom-heard independent artists.

By December 2002, the name of the webcast was changed to Whole Wheat Radio.

In Whole Wheat Radio's first year, Kloss added many features including listener requests that play automatically, text-to-voice semi-intelligent "EJs" (Electronic Dee-Jays), the Say-It button, which allowed listeners to type messages into the chat and have an EJ say their words over the air, online games that involved collecting a valueless commodity called "wheatberries", personalized listener profiles, the ability to easily post links and photos in the chat and a group drawing room among other things. Listeners enthusiastically participated in these interactive features, often suggesting new ones for Kloss to program.

2004 - Construction of the Wheat Hole

File:180px-P1030038.JPG

Construction of the Wheat Hole

As WWR became more well known in the singer-songwriter community, musicians began contacting Golton about the possibility of performing in Talkeetna. Because there was a lack of reliable year-round venues in the small village, Golton and Kloss began discussing the possibility of constructing a small venue specifically to host concerts given by these independent musicians. Even though the village itself did not have enough residents to make regular concerts financially viable, being able to webcast these events live to a worldwide internet audience who might potentially purchase CDs gave the plan feasibility.

The summer of 2004 saw the construction of a new building next to the original 12-by-12-foot (3.7 by 3.7 m) cabin for holding house concerts and webcast gear. The new 24-by-28-foot (7.3 by 8.5 m) 'Wheat Hole' (a listener-suggested play on the phrase 'Whole Wheat') was constructed in large part by Talkeetna musician, Larry Zarella. On July 30, with only partially covered exterior walls, Jack Williams performed at the first WWR house concert. The interior of the building has never been completely finished - there are still no stairs from the lower floor to the balcony where the WWR equipment is housed. During house concerts a folding ladder is raised and lowered by audience members in order for Kloss to go between floors.

2006 - Conversion to wiki

On March 15, 2006 Kloss installed MediaWiki's standard wiki software on the WWR site. In the following months, he customized the entire wiki and webcast operation using standard MediaWiki hooks. The significance of this innovative use of wiki software is found throughout highly customized listener created pages which include special WWR variables. By hooking into the wiki output buffer immediately before display, WWR is able to replace any variable preceded with $wwr_ with information directly from the mySQL databases. These databases typically contain information about what is currently happening with the on-air stream. So, for example, users can post the name of the currently playing song on any wiki page simply by placing the variable $wwr_currentlyplaying on any standard wiki page.

By means of this customized wiki software hook, listeners are also able to post wiki markup language anywhere in the live chat and have it rendered as a fully functional wiki page. This allows users to teach each other wiki markup in a live classroom environment. There are frequent live demonstrations of how to use the wiki as well as the customized WWR wiki variables in the chat.

The applications for this sort of customized wiki programming are far reaching. With Kloss' PHP code and standard Mediawiki software, programmers can allow wiki users to access any kind of static or dynamic data contained on the webserver, either in flat files or mySQL databases, and post that data in any format on any wiki page.

As of early 2006, WWR was the only wiki-based webcast on the internet, as well as the only wiki with user controllable output buffer variable substitution integrated directly into mySQL databases.

2006 - Purchase and renovation of the Wheat Palace

In 2006 Kloss and Golton purchased and began renovating the 10-acre (4.0 ha) former Talkeetna Old Tyme Saloon, 7 miles (11 km) from downtown Talkeetna. Historically, the Wheat Palace is on the same site used for several initial Talkeetna Bluegrass Festival events in the early 1980s.

2008 - Local involvement

Upon opening in September, 2007 the Wheat Palace was made available on a free/donation basis to local community/arts/music groups as well as continuing the tradition of hosting house concerts. Events and groups which have used the space include the Talkeetna Playground, dance classes, Red Cross CPR/first aid classes, art shows, home crafters, craft classes, musicians practicing and public and private service group meetings.

2010 - Shutdown

On October 20, 2010, the Whole Wheat Radio official website was replaced by a message from Jim Kloss, Whole Wheat Radio founder, stating that he was stopping all audio streaming and shutting the website down, saying in his goodbye note that "I no longer love this job."

Awards

• SEOmoz Web 2.0 Award - 2007 honorable mention in the music category.

Reception

• CD Baby's president Derek Sivers recommends Whole Wheat Radio.

References

• Talkeetna's Whole Wheat Radio Signs Off The Web. Anchorage Daily News October 28. 2010.
• ABC News: "The Playlist: Great Online Sources for Finding New Music" 2006
• Anchorage Daily News article November, 2004
• Podcastplayer.org News: Talk to the web with Whole Wheat Radio March 22, 2005
• Wired Magazine article May, 2005
• Doc Searls - Welcome abroad October, 2004
• Christopher Carfi - Finding Community On The Radio Dial February, 2006
• The Scope Interview with David Francey, August 3, 2006
• John Walkenbach - J-Walk Blog
• Talkeetna's anti-radio burns online Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman, November 2, 2007
• Organic Broadcasts Anchorage Press, February 14, 2008
• Wheat Goes Live Anchorage Daily News, March 15, 2008 associated Flash slideshow
• Grassroots radio connects Talkeetna to the world - KTUU television interview, March 12, 2009