Just wanted to give all of you a head's up that I'll be on All Things Considered this Sunday, March 30. Host Andrea Seabrook got a kick out of all of the Bit Torrent analogies we came up with yesterday, so she figured she might as well have me on air to talk about them. I don't know the exact time I'll be on air, but it'll probably be in the middle of the show. It broadcasts in many places at 5pm ET on Sundays, so that would mean looking out for me between 5:20pm and 5:40pm ET, give or take. Check your local listings to see when it airs. If you can't figure out when it's airing locally, you can always check out the live stream offered by WAMU here in Washington DC, which also airs the show beginning at 5pm ET.

Thanks again to everyone who contributed analogies. When we recorded the segment I talked about several of them, but we'll have to wait and see what gets edited in or out. -andy

So I was leaving NPR to grab some lunch and I bumped into a colleague as I was exiting the elevator. She grabbed me for a moment and asked me, "If you had to explain Bit Torrent to a five-year-old, what analogy would you use?"

Apparently, she's working on a radio story about Bit Torrent, the peer-to-peer protocol created by my fellow TR35 alum Bram Cohen. Not that our target audience is made up of toddlers, but given how not all of them are necessarily tech-savvy, it makes sense to come up with an analogy that translates well to a broad audience.

Before we get to the analogies, here's a quick technical overview of what Bit Torrent is. Like I just mentioned, it's a protocol for enabling what's known as peer-to-peer software, which means that rather than downloading a piece of content from a single source, your employ software that checks in with other users within a network who may have bits and pieces of what you're looking for. So if what you wish to download is an hour-long video, the software checks for anyone that might have it. One person may have one section of the video, another person may have a second section, and so on. The software assembles the bits and pieces of the video from all the sources that have it, so eventually you download a complete copy of it for your own personal use. And because your computer is part of this file-sharing network, other users who seek out the same content can automatically download what you've assembled on your computer to their computers as well, share-and-share alike.

It's not terribly complicated, but would the average NPR listener be able to follow all of that without saying, "Huh?" Maybe, but maybe not. And so I get grabbed outside of the elevator by a colleague searching for a good analogy.

As I walked back and forth to lunch, I came up with two potential analogies, both of which take place in a rural setting.

Coming Soon: A New Baby!, originally uploaded by andycarvin.

For those of you who have been wondering why Susanne has been getting sick so much over the last month that my mother-in-law has been staying with us to look after Kayleigh, I might as well spill the beans now. Susanne is pregnant again, due at the end of September!

This Monday was the beginning of her second trimester. That means she's 13 weeks along. We've known for almost two months but haven't advertised it too much given our history with difficult pregnancies. We were actually getting ready to shell out the bucks to begin IVF treatment when we found out she was pregnant. Talk about a pleasant surprise! Unfortunately, the surprise came with extreme morning sickness - so much so that Susanne lost over 15 pounds and had to be put on an IV and a medicine pump. The IV came out last month, and yesterday she removed the pump, so for the first time in six weeks, she's now wireless and untethered. She'll still have to take anti-nausea meds for a while longer, but the worse is over.

We're absolutely thrilled to be expecting another baby, and the timing couldn't be better, as we're in the process of buying a house in Silver Spring. We just accepted the seller's terms and are sending in a home inspector next week. If all goes well, we'll close the deal on April 28. Our second baby, our first home - talk about a momentous year! :-) -andy

I'm back in Austin, TX for a couple of days of NPR meetings, so last night I convinced my colleagues to make the 45-minute trek outside of the city to the Salt Lick, an old-time barbecue joint with some of the best BBQ in the area. While we waited for our table, I thought it would be a great occasion to break in my new Nokia N95 video phone. Using the streaming service Qik.com, I was able to stream a live video as I toured the barbecue pit, watching cooks slapping briskets onto the fire and slathering them with their tangy sauce. (I also managed to let the video keep recording after I thought I hit the stop button, so the end of the video is kinda funny.) This video is an archive of the live event.

As far as I'm concerned, being able to stream live video from a mobile phone to the Internet is an absolute game-changer. I'm hoping I can get some of these phones into the hands of NPR colleagues so they can test them out in the field, but imagine the possibilities when everyday people can press a button on their phones and start broadcasting. I keep thinking of the Tibetan protests that took place against the Chinese government, or the Burmese monk protests last year. In both cases, there was a limited pool of video available, and much of it came up after the fact. Imagine if a protestor - or a whole group of them - were able to broadcast what was going on around them in real time?

It's very much an extension of the mobcasting concept I advocated three years ago. Back then, I talked about using open source tools to allow protestors and citizen journalists to post audio and video to blogs and RSS feeds as events unfolded:

[W]ith the proliferation of video-enabled smartphones, it seems that it would be a natural progression to mobilize the millions of people who are buying these tools with an easy, no-nonsense way to capture socially-relevant footage and get it online in near-real time....

...A quick example: imagine a large protest at a political convention. During the protest, police overstep their authority and begin abusing protesters, sometimes brutally. A few journalists are covering the event, but not live. For the protestors and civil rights activists caught in the melee, the police abuses clearly need to be documented and publicized as quickly as possible. Rather than waiting for the handful of journalists to file a story on it, activists at the protest capture the event on their video phones -- dozens of phones from dozens of angles. Thanks to the local 3G (or community wi-fi) network, the activists immediately podcast the footage on their blogs. The footage gets aggregated on a civil rights website thanks to the RSS feeds produced by the podcasters' blogs. (Or perhaps they all podcast their footage directly to a centralized website, a la OneWorld TV but with an RSS twist.) This leads to coverage by bloggers throughout the blogosphere, which leads to coverage by the mainstream media, which leads to demands of accountability by the general public. That's mobcasting.

Back then, though, we were limited to somewhat crude mobile podcasting tools like Audlink.com and Audioblogger.com, both of which are now defunct. Today, we're seeing the deployment of new services that allow for near-real time audio and video posting, like Utterz and Kyte.tv. These services also incorporate social networking features that allow users to track each other's content, comment on it, and cross-post it to various social media sites, like Twitter or Facebook. And now with Qik, near-real time becomes actual real-time. Rather than waiting for you to finish recording your content before posting it from your phone, Qik streams it with just a 5-10 second delay. That's not so different than the delay you see in "live" broadcasts on TV news or radio.

In some ways, the term mobcasting is more appropriate than ever: groups of people using mobile phones in coordinated actions to cover an event without any easy way to censor them. It's both exhilarating and intimidating at the same time. It's just a matter of time before there's another government crackdown, police beating incident, voter intimidation or other incident that authorities wouldn't want the rest of us to see. But we will see it. Live. -andy

Man With Burger King Crown, Unassembled, originally uploaded by andycarvin.

Photographed on the Red Line, approaching New York Avenue heading into Washington DC.