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A screenshot of Mitt Romney's Iowa stump speech, with a Pop-Up Politics bubble animated in.

NPR

A screenshot of Mitt Romney's Iowa stump speech, with a Pop-Up Politics bubble animated in.

As the Republican presidential contenders make their final pitches to voters in Iowa, we hope you'll watch some of their speeches enhanced with our new, "Pop-Up Politics" treatment.

Just as VH1 used pop-up bubbles to give music videos another dimension, we're using bubbles — and sounds and animation — to give you a more contextual look at the messages being delivered to GOP voters.

The video animation project got started here at NPR after digital editors became fans of the pop-up series I did while at The Texas Tribune, an online startup in Austin. Before the 2009 launch of the Tribune, newly-hired reporters were asked to come up with a list of story ideas, and one of my ideas was not a "story" at all.

A month later, with the help of photographer Justin Dehn and animator Todd Wiseman, both of whom remain multimedia ninjas at the Tribune today, we debuted Texas stump speeches, interrupted by dozens of bubbles.

Digital Managing Editor Mark Stencel explained his reaction from here in D.C.: "As soon as I saw what you did in Texas I wanted to do a version for the presidential campaign — the perfect way to give people a chance to both hear from the candidates at length while also providing some context on the substance, the rhetoric and the stagecraft."

A week ago we launched an experiment in personalized listening we've dubbed the Infinite Player. The idea was to create a continuous listening experience similar to radio that also takes into account users' individual tastes.

The audience response has far surpassed anything we'd hoped for and we'd like to thank everyone who has taken the time to try it out. We are grateful for your feedback. We've heard from people on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Tumblr and through the contact form on the player itself. It's even received a little press from Read Write Web and the Nieman Journalism Lab.

While the player is experimental — and still a little buggy — testers' responses have been overwhelmingly positive on the overall direction and experience. We were not sure how the public radio audience would respond to something like this; you've convinced us it is clearly worth developing further.

While we look into next steps for extending the player, here are notes on a few specific questions raised in the initial wave of feedback.

Many people have pointed out a bug in Google Chrome that stops the player from advancing to the next story. For anyone using Chrome, you'll have much better luck if you use the player in its own browser window. The problem occurs when the player is in a tab that's in the background. While we don't yet know the cause, we will try to fix this issue in a future version.

There have been many requests to make the player work in other browsers — particularly Firefox and IE — and to offer a mobile version. The reason it's out first in Chrome and Safari is because both of those browsers have native multimedia support that made it possible to build the player quickly. We'd like to expand the list of supported browsers going forward, including mobile browsers (which doesn't preclude the possibility of an app at some point). The player, unfortunately, does not currently work on mobile Safari (iPhone and iPad). We have had some luck getting it to work on a few Android devices, including the Samsung Galaxy S II. If you're an Android user you may want to gamble and try it to out.

Some people have expressed concern about the thumbs up / down buttons. The fear is that use of the buttons will so narrow the pool of stories that it will seriously degrade the experience, preventing important news stories, or stories outside a certain range of topics, from appearing in the player.

We've actually worked very hard to prevent this from happening. What we're ultimately going for is an experience that keeps users informed and surfaces stories that are fun to hear based on individual preferences, while also leaving room for serendipitous discovery. You always hear the newscast first, and it repeats hourly (same as on the radio). The stories that follow are influenced heavily by both your ratings and the judgement of editors at NPR. Use of the buttons will improve the player's ability to suggest stories you'll like, without creating an echo chamber.

As we continue working to refine the player, we will take into account the many feature enhancements users have suggested. Some of the most requested so far are social media sharing tools, volume control and access to listening history. We are also working with NPR stations to create more localized versions of the player. We currently have KQED, KPLU, Michigan Radio. In the near future we are hoping to add KPCC, KPBS, OPB and the Northwest News Network.

Thanks again for the the invaluable feedback. Please keep it coming!

The NPR product team talks a lot about two ways people interact with audio: engaged listening and distracted listening. Engaged listening would be something like this:

Enlarge Library of Congress

Library of Congress

There's listening and really not much of anything else going on (except perhaps looking for other things to listen to every now and then). We believe we've done a pretty solid job capturing this use case in our digital products. If finding and listening to audio is first and foremost in your mind, we offer tons of podcasts and program audio clips. You can queue these stories up on a playlist to run consecutively, or just hunt around individually to find the ones you want. You can even sync your playlist across browsers. All this requires a lot of the user's attention.

That model works very well for some people in some cases; but it's a far cry from the roots of radio in which the listener simply hits a button and listens. We've been referring to this second mode as distracted listening. Audio is playing in the background. You may be listening quite intently. But you're also doing other things, like driving, or the dishes.

Enlarge Library of Congress

Library of Congress

The explosion of Internet-connected devices has created listening opportunities almost everywhere. Phones, tablets, computers, home stereos, car stereos, and TVs can all now connect to the Internet, vastly expanding the ways people find and listen to audio. Many of these new use cases lend themselves particularly well, if not exclusively, to this distracted listening model.

NPR and its member stations already offer some great options for this use case. The radio, of course, is the most obvious. NPR station streams are also available on desktop and mobile devices. But new platforms have created an opportunity to explore completely different approaches to distracted listening.

Today we are launching (in beta) an experiment we're calling the Infinite Player (works in recent versions of Safari and Chrome; registration required).

NPR

NPR Infinite Player

It's dead simple: you press a button and it plays. First you hear the latest NPR newscast. That's followed by stories we think you'll like from NPR's three main focus areas, news, arts and life, and music. The only controls are skip, pause and 30-second rewind.

We're calling it the Infinite Player because it will continue playing stories until you turn it off, just like the radio.

Taking a cue from popular products already using personalization (think Facebook, Zite, Flipboard, Pandora, YouTube's LeanBack), the player allows you to indicate whether you're interested in a particular story or not. If you are, we'll try to give you similar stories. If you're not, we'll do our best to find others you'll enjoy. The player should deliver the type of serendipitous experience you expect from NPR, with recommendations based on your input, NPR editors' judgment and story popularity.

The real value of the NPR experience is the local / national partnership with member stations. We are working with NPR Digital Services and a number of stations to release versions of the player that combine both local and NPR audio into a seamless experience. You can try out three of them here: KQED, Michigan Radio and KPLU.

Please keep in mind that the Infinite Player is an experiment. And it's in beta — at this time the player only works in Safari or Chrome (works best on Chrome in its own window). We'd love to hear your feedback on the experience, the content, the technology and anything else you want to share with us about the Infinite Player. Enjoy!

Inspired by old-school skunkworks, Google's 20-percent-time policy and, most directly, RSA's animation of a talk by Dan Pink about employee motivation, NPR Digital Media staff members recently jumped into Serendipity Days for the second time.

The goal of the Serendipity exercise is to "tap the creative ideas of the overall team and create a vehicle for getting small, cool projects/research explored." Put another way, we sought the quality of serendipity: "the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident."

Our first sessions took place in May; with a few logistical issues smoothed out and even broader participation, we met again in the last days of September.

The rules are Outback Steakhouse simple: take one-and-a-half-working days to investigate whatever you feel like investigating. You may work alone, or in a small team. Give a three-minute presentation on what you found, and leave a link in the wiki to any artifacts: design comps, wireframes, functioning software prototypes. Can't get something to work? That's good, too: fail fast.

NPR has launched a new app for the Google TV platform. The app — featured in the Google TV Spotlight Gallery (video only works in Chrome) — makes it easy for users to watch NPR's best video and multimedia slideshows on a big screen.

We've made great strides in the past few years expanding our ability to tell compelling multimedia stories. NPR now has an award-winning team of visual journalists in-house. Their work spans all genres — from hard news, to music, to food. NPR.org even has a photo blog, the Picture Show, and, earlier this month, NPR Music won an Emmy for a video feature called Project Song.

Naturally, the NPR app on Google TV contains videos from NPR Music and its station partners, including Tiny Desk Concerts, studio sessions and live concerts. It also has a selection we're calling "Radio Pictures." Covering a variety of topics, it contains videos, audio slideshows and even a few animated reports.

If you're interested in the nuts and bolts, Google TV provides helpful templates for quickly creating a channel. For our app, NPR's design and user experience folks heavily customized the look and feel of the channel. Our development team coded all the necessary CSS and powered the app with calls from the NPR API.

It's new territory for us and we'd love to hear what you think about the app. Pass along any comments — positive or otherwise — you might have to our product team via our contact form.

Enlarge Creative Commons, State Library of New South Wales collection

Good production support is like the third girl from the left at the bottom of this human pyramid: rock-solid, handled with aplomb and grace (Look at her feet!)

Creative Commons, State Library of New South Wales collection

Good production support is like the third girl from the left at the bottom of this human pyramid: rock-solid, handled with aplomb and grace (Look at her feet!)

Every day NPR sends hundreds of stories out to the Internet and millions of users. They read, listen to, comment on, and share those stories on NPR.org, and on partner sites that ingest our content via our APIs. Every day there are also behind-the-scenes system hiccups, publishing blips, and technical potholes that we fix before they can turn into site-eating sinkholes.

If the release of new code is the grinning pixie madly waving her shiny pom-poms at the pinnacle of a human pyramid, production support is the dependable, strong-backed, even-tempered folks who make up the base. Without them, the pixie wouldn't have a prayer of getting up there.

In this post, we'll give you an overview of our production-support process, some recent changes and plans to make it stronger.

Where Are The Errors Coming From?

• Seamus: NPR's content management system. Our writers, editors and producers use Seamus to build stories and blog posts, input rundowns and send out breaking news emails.
• API interface: Essentially provides a structured way for other computer applications to get NPR stories in a predictable, flexible and powerful way.
• Web pages: NPR public Web pages showing NPR stories, series, topics, programs and music events.
• Scripts: Run automatically by back-end systems on a predetermined schedule, or run manually as needed.

Who Asks The Tech Team For Support?

• Inside users: NPR staff who can build a story or blog post in Seamus and publish to the NPR web site and API interface.
• Outside users: Includes Web site visitors who can access the NPR web site and the API interface. NPR's User Care team handles the majority of problems these users have, but they send us the odd or hard-to-solve issues.
• Invisible users: NPR's system-scheduled tasks. If a task fails, an email reporting the failure is automatically sent to the tech team.

Current Production Support Model

Generally speaking, users ask for production support via email. When a user encounters an issue in the system, they send an email to a specific email address to ask for help. At least one developer is assigned to monitor and respond to these emails. This production support person usually responds to an email within 10-30 minutes and often solves the problem the same day. If it's a bigger, more complicated issue, the developer working on production support asks the user to file a ticket in Jira so the fix can be prioritized and scheduled for an upcoming release.

If something is really wrong – like npr.org slowing to a crawl or crashing – we usually know and respond within a couple minutes. NPR staff bombard the support email address, call development team managers, and sometimes even jog over to our desks to warn us. In this kind of production emergency, one of the Digital Media managers will make sure the correct people are working on the problem and send out status emails to the Digital Media team every 10 or 15 minutes until the problem is fixed.

The tech team isn't large enough to match the almost-around-the-clock staffing of the editorial team. For emergency help during hours when the tech team isn't working, an editor can call a support line staffed 24/7 by NPR's IT staff, who use a table of problem scenarios to determine the next steps. For example, if a user can't log in to Seamus, a system administrator gets a call. If it's a publishing error on a breaking news story, IT reaches out to the developer on call.

In addition to reacting to support requests from our users, we also have a variety of system monitors and dashboards that alert us to issues as they arise (or just before they do) well before we get any reports from outside of the team. Our system administrators use several different monitoring packages that give us insight into system health of our Web servers, databases, and our API.

Future Production Support Model

Recently, we started using Splunk to index our log messages and help us search and analyze our systems. We're now catching a lot of issues before they become widespread, critical problems, just by regularly looking at reports each day on the Splunk dashboard. Following every release we look at the responsiveness of our systems using Splunk to be sure it's in line with the baseline established before the release. We'll also try to note any patterns forming around warnings and errors that may be a result of code in the release and address them before they become problematic.

We're slowly shifting from a reactive, user-driven error-reporting model to proactive, system-driven maintenance checks. System stability will become increasingly important as NPR moves to more robust, round-the-clock reporting. Our goal is to reduce the number of live errors to miniscule levels and for editors to use the support email address less and less over time. There will always be behind-the-scenes system hiccups and publishing blips, but in the future we hope to fix more of them before the editors ever see the problem.

If you've ever wanted to connect your iPhone, iPod or iPad to the audiophile heaven that is your living room without cords or adapters, then it's time to get excited.

With the release of iOS 4.3 on Apple's mobile offerings, you can stream media content from apps on your iDevice to any setup hooked into a WiFi-enabled Apple TV. Both the NPR News and NPR Music iPhone apps will have this capability, as will as NPR for iPad.

But enough hype. How do you get Robert Siegel's voice of rich mahogany into your speakers? Let's walk through it. And don't panic; it's actually quite easy.

Before we can get to the good stuff, you will need to update both your mobile device and your Apple TV with the latest software. Once you've updated to iOS 4.3 and Apple TV software version 3, connect both devices to the same wireless network. You will need the latest version of your NPR app, as well.

With all the new software in place, you are ready to embark on your new Airplay-enabled NPR experience.

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An example of enabling airplay inside the NPR News app.

NPR

An example of enabling airplay inside the NPR News app.

Turn on your TV and select the appropriate input for the Apple TV. While that is loading, launch the NPR app of choice on your iPhone or iPad and select a story to hear. As the piece begins to play, you should see the familiar audio controls appear with an additional button - It's a white rectangle and a triangle, which together look sort of like a TV - this is the Airplay icon. If your Apple TV has finished booting up, tap the Airplay icon. You should be prompted with a dialogue box. Select Apple TV to begin streaming NPR from your iDevice.

Sit back and enjoy.

You should hear the story start to play almost instantly over the speakers connected to the Apple TV. The Airplay icon in the NPR app will be highlighted blue. While active, you're small screen will function kind of like a remote control. To disconnect, simply tap the button, and when prompted with the dialogue box again, select your device instead of the TV.

As of right now, Airplay video won't work in NPR apps. But expect to see an update enabling this feature soon.

Need more info? Visit our mobile page or you can learn more about iOS 4.3 from Apple.

We're happy to announce NPR News for Android 2.0 is live in the Android Market.

NPR

The new homescreen for the NPR News Android app.

Last summer, we submitted designs to the open source community to discuss how to best move forward with the app. Listening to feedback from our users, we've added favorite stations, more programs with live streams, and an overhauled player. A retooled interface brings more universal navigation, slicker interactions, and revamped graphics.

The overhaul took longer than we expected to get off the ground. But now it's here, we think you'll like it.

For those of you more technically inclined, we are still working on getting the source back into the repositories of the original code site. Some complicating factors have temporarily prevented us from doing so. But be assured the code will be available in the near future and the project will remain open source.

Tell us what you think. Feedback from the people who use the app is the catalyst for moving us forward. Find us on Twitter @nprandroid or send an email to npr-android@googlegroups.com.

Enlarge Steve Jurvetson/Flickr

A similar engine replacement

Steve Jurvetson/Flickr

A similar engine replacement

A lot of work has been going on recently under the hood of NPR's API. A quirk of the versioning system we use for the API is that only the native format, NPRML, has our version attached. One reason for that is that many formats, such as RSS, have a "version" already specified for them, while NPRML was originally derived from an internal XML-based format NPR uses. We've made some fairly major changes recently. Even though the bulk of them are not very visible to the outside world, they seem to warrant at least a small version bump, and so we rolled out NPRML 0.94 on Wednesday the 16th of February, 2011.

We've been calling this the "API Refactor," though it's more extensive than changes for which the term refactor is usually used, and wasn't prompted by any major problem with the running system, but by the knowledge that major changes will be needed as we expand usage of the API.