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NPR One

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151–160 of 181 posts

Re: NPR One

#151
post #40
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Podcasts (especially on android) is still remarkably broken for most people. I have installed an app and subscribed to several podcasts for a number of people who are below average in their tech literacy. They all fail at being able to consistently manage the app and get the content they want. Finding and subscribing to a new podcast, even if they know which one they want and can get to the website is an almost 100%…

I suppose you could offer an app in addition to an RSS feed, but honestly I've never encountered someone who didn't know how to download a podcast. If they are primarily worried about people having trouble downloading podcasts for whatever reason, it seems like they could have saved themselves a lot of work by just contacting some of the biggest podcast apps on the market (BeyondPod I think is the biggest) about maki…

Fragmentation is also choice and the potential for new and better things to emerge.

I think the user facing side of RSS and the other metaphors and conventions around podcasts are broken. Discovery is broken. So, I'm ok with fragmentation. Maybe there is a better way out there to be discovered.

Re: NPR One

#153
post #104

Why does the app need microphone access? I missed the blurb when you first open the app and can't seem to figure out how to replay it now.

Certain ads will allow you to interact with them via your microphone for hands free driving or whatever. It's new and you'll probably start seeing it more in other apps but this is the first time I've seen it in an app.

To all current and future app developers using microphone-ad-interaction: die in a fire.

Re: NPR One

#155
post #27

Cool, hopefully it will replace the All Songs Considered audio stream (which is great). Side note: Is it just me, or this "scroll to reveal stuff in steps" is a bit frustrating? It seems to be used more and more often and I am sometimes puzzled by the fact that I'm missing the scrolling step. I try scrolling and get either too far (which shows half an image coming from above) or don't get anywhere (which makes me scr…

Yes, this is annoying to me too. When you scroll that NPR site, it starts with normal scrolling and then turns into a strange mode where your scrolling intermittently does apparently nothing or changes the whole page or even shows horizontal scrolling of part of the screen. This is not how scroll is meant to work and it goes against all patterns trained for decades. It also detracts from usability as now I am confined to the order and flow that designers want, not that I want, PageUp/PageDown works weird, quick skimming is impossible, etc. Reminds me of some of Apple products - looks nice, works great if you are exactly the use case they designed for, very frustrating or useless if you want to do something the designers did not foresee.

Re: NPR One

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's nice that we have a source of news that is not beholden to advertisers or corporate interests (although the number of 'This content was made possible by donations from...' I hear at the end of the larger shows is a bit worrying). Cognitive dissonance is a hell of a thing, ain't it? The vast majority of NPR's funding comes from advertisers, excuse me, underwriters. Edit: Well fuck me I'm wrong. Carry on, citizen…

> The vast majority No, it doesn't. From what I can see, it's more like 17%. http://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finances

17% is for member stations. In the NPR chart, corporate sponsorship is 25%. I'm not sure if this includes the 17% of 37% that they get from member stations, but I would assume that it does not, thus getting the amount of corporate money in NPR's own revenue to about 31%. Nowhere near vast majority still, even if we assume that "other revenues" and "grants and contributions" may have some corporate money too. I see no way it could be over half with any sane set of assumptions unless I'm completely misinterpreting the data in these diagrams.

Re: NPR One

#158
post #27

Cool, hopefully it will replace the All Songs Considered audio stream (which is great). Side note: Is it just me, or this "scroll to reveal stuff in steps" is a bit frustrating? It seems to be used more and more often and I am sometimes puzzled by the fact that I'm missing the scrolling step. I try scrolling and get either too far (which shows half an image coming from above) or don't get anywhere (which makes me scr…

The npr page for some reason becomes actually extremely straightforward and normal if your browser is really narrow (discovered when using my portrait monitor).

It just makes all the images stuck in place and scrolls like a normal fucking webpage. I put it on my standard widescreen one, and yeah, pg-up/pg-dn, up/dn just completely destroyed the page.

Re: NPR One

#159
post #39

Beware if you use google or facebook to login to it (what the fuck do you need to login in the first place) it requires the right to get your friends lists and to post content on your behalf.

I tried using Google login, and it wouldn't proceed unless I created a Google Plus profile.

Re: NPR One

#160

Good stuff, but your feed will be 'hadcrafted'? No it won't. That specifically means a human being involved in structuring your feed at the other end I seriously doubt that's the case. Words have meanings beyond their emotional marketing value, subverting them for commercial ends will eventually erode the trust of your audience.

You don't know that there's not a human being at the other end curating the list, do you? It's plausible that there's manual selection involved in each day's playlist.

As I said already 'I seriously doubt that's the case.'
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