Ideas for Fan-Created Public Radio Websites

Every so often I come across a site or Twitter account that really helps people either navigate public media offerings or surfaces public media content in an interesting way. Here are several:

• NPR My Ride – find a list of member stations between two cities (Twitter)
• NPR.Today – an NPR player based on the clock
• Public Radio Map – outlines of all of the station boundaries from the FCC
• WBEZ Bot – tweets what’s playing on WBEZ (similar to the bot we created, @findmystation)

I would love to see more of these pop up. You can learn a lot about audio — and how to think about audio — by building something that can help your local public radio station. Here is information about the Public Media Platform and how to get started digging around a hypermedia API. And here are several ideas, if you’d like to build something but don’t know where to start.

• A site that shows the last X pieces published in public media.
• A site that shows the most shared published in public media over X time frame.
• A site that surfaces a public media interview related to any particular day on a calendar. (Use the Wikipedia API. Start here.)
• A site that shows me public media interviews related to a particular historical event.
• A site which features the earliest public media interview conducted with X.
• For that matter, there should be a repository of the first time X was mentioned on public media — whether X was sushi, Saddam Hussein, or any other word from the latter half of the 20th century. Ooh. This might require machine learning.

I have many more ideas and am always trying to think of ways to resurface already existing content. If you also like thinking about this, let me know.