Public Broadcast Cart
I love this. Totally love this. I don't know what it is about these sorts of projects, I'm honestly not even sure yet what it is that defines "these sorts of projects" but they fill me delight and inspire me to reach out and try similar things. I think this needs to be a personal priority, to distill to the essence what it is that fascinates me about these ideas.
Public Broadcast Cart is a shopping cart outfitted with a dynamic microphone, a mixer, an amplifier, six speakers, a miniFM transmitter and a laptop with a wireless card. The audio captured by the microphone on the cart is fed through the mixer to three different broadcast sources. The mixer simultaneously feeds the audio:
- to the amplifier that powers the six speakers mounted on the cart
- to an FM transmitter transmitting to an FM frequency
to the laptop that sends the audio to the thing.net's server from which the audio is broadcast on line at http://radio.thing.net
On a similar note I notice that ArsElectronica hosted an "International Competition for Cyber Arts", including the category of "digital community". I see a lot of familiar names winning prizes or honorable mention including NycWireless, del.icio.us, WikiPedia, WikiTravel, GPS::Tron, CreativeCommons, Bush in 30 Seconds, Kuro5hin, Lomography and many many more I haven't had the pleasure of learning about yet. Interestingly the MeatBall Wiki community applied but sadly didn't make it through. Regardless it's good to see the positive feedback loops being reinforced.