Mark Ramsey Media LLC - sync radio and digital media

Their site is better than most but it still falls down because it assumes that the station needs to develop and control the content. That makes it hard to keep content fresh, new and interesting.
Look at Myspace, Tagged, Flickr or any of the personal web page/social software sites. The content comes from the users. They keep coming back to see what others have done and to post and comment which keeps the conversation going.
Should radio sites look like that? Sure! They’ve got several advantages over the web only sites. First the target is the station audience, suggesting users share both an interest in common auditory content, common geography and overlapping social networks. On air conversation provides an easy way to build knowledge of the site and to reinforce its use by.
And as you said ‘The Challenge to CHR’ – make people famous. What better way to do that than provide a site where listeners can talk to each other, and you, and where you can use page view traffic (and other metrics) to identify what’s ‘cool’ and interesting – and make it more so through on-air recognition.

Peter, let’s you and me keep some secrets, okay?
I don’t publicize my EVERY thought in this blog.

hmmm . . it’s not like radio folk lack experience letting listeners have a voice with open forums and chat rooms online.
Ultimately – for some reason – they all turned into depressing pits of people trashing the station for playing this song or that song or that jock or whatever.
I’ve yet to see it turn out well for radio stations.
Why is that?

There’s a raft of techniques and technologies required to make online communities work – just as there is to keep on-air auditory programming fresh & interesting.
You can’t plug a simple discussion board, designed to support communities of like-minded people or explore clearly defined topics and expect that that will work in an unstructured environment. But that’s what most stations do and it’s no wonder they fail.
The advantage for stations, if they learn the techniques, and understand how to marry on-line and on-air content is the opportunities to engage, monetize and delight the audience explode.
It’s not just communities and how that builds connection; it’s events like games that require physical and online clues to solve, to communal dinner parties (like 1000 plates) with the station as the soundtrack and the web as the connection point for planning and sharing.
But it doesn’t come without investment and commitment. That said it’s a lot cheaper to do this than it is to move to HD and I believe that it changes the game in a way that plays to radios current strengths and technologies – rather that being yet another auditory stream out of who knows how many.

Almost every web discussion forum turns into a flame- and troll- and c**pflood-fest. This is primarily because there’s more to it than installing discussion software and letting things go crazy. There are examples of fora that have largely avoided this.
Slashdot could be called the “talk radio” of technology; a lot of the abusive content is effectively hidden through a moderation system run by the editors and users (the balance between the camps has, to my knowledge, never been disclosed). And guess what, the software it runs on is absoultely free (as in both free of charge and freedom).

Using moderators is one of the techniques – there are others. And you’re right that there are a lot of ‘free’ utilities out there that can be used to experiment and build with.
The caution I’d give – and this isn’t meant to dissuade stations from trying things – because I truly believe that tying online personal expression and on-air recognition will bind local stations and their audiences in ways that make stations a vital part of peoples lives again. And trying things is how stations are going to learn what does and doesn’t work.
The caution is to remember that what works for Slashdot, may not work for smaller, less motivated audiences. Slashdot targets a worldwide audience that has a visceral belief in open source. They actively participate and willingly give up their time to guide discussion because they believe in a cause.
That’s different from what most stations will face both because the audience is smaller and the motivations different. The issues will be how to build participation and content quickly and how to foster community and a sense of ownership. It will be about what to share and how to share it and it will be about what is private and what is public. Each of these issues is associated with numerous online techniques and practices.
What stations need to do is immerse themselves in web communities, they need to understand how various approaches relate to their audience and market, and they need to adopt an approach (similar to many web communities) that it is better to have tried, failed and learned, than to never have tried at all.