By Andy Carvin

If you work at an NPR or PBS member station, you can now apply for a scholarship to attend PublicMediaCamp, scheduled for October 17-18 in Washington DC.

We expect to award no more than 10 scholarships. Each of the station scholarships will cover basic travel-related expenses to attend PublicMediaCamp, as well as a $2,000 stipend towards that same station hosting a local PublicMediaCamp. One application per station, please.

Scholarship Travel: Each station scholarship will cover basic travel-related reimbursements for one or two participants designated by the station to attend the PublicMediaCamp occurring in Washington DC Oct 17th and 18th. If sending two individuals to the unconference, one should be an employee of the station, but you have the option of having the second be a representative of a community organization that you will partner with to plan and host your local PublicMediaCamp. Such travel expenses may include: airfare, lodging, food and other expenses allowed by CPB travel guidelines.

Local Event Stipend: In accepting a scholarship, the recipient station also commits to hosting a local PublicMediaCamp before September 1, 2010. An additional $2,000 stipend will be given scholarship recipients to offset organizing and hosting that local PublicMediaCamp. Note: Scholarship recipients (and all interested stations) will receive detailed information, documented processes, and tools to aid in hosting such events.

Criteria: NPR and PBS will be selecting scholarship recipients -- pending CPB approval -- based on the applicant's experience with local community collaboration and ability to host a local PublicMediaCamp, and to create a balance of station market sizes and types (radio/TV).

Deadline: Applications will be accepted until 5 p.m. ET on Wednesday, September 30, though will be considered on a rolling basis effective immediately. Please submit your information using this application form as soon as possible. Scholarship recipients will be notified immediately after being selected, and will be provided with information and process for booking and reimbursement of travel.

By Demian Perry, Robert Spier and Daniel Jacobson

The NPR News iPhone app launched on August 15 and the feedback has been tremendous! But we are not content to leave well-enough alone... Today, we launched our first upgrade to the app (version 1.1). Many of the changes in this version were implemented based on your feedback via the NPR Facebook page, Twitter, other posts on this blog, iTunes reviews, etc. We built this app for you, the users, so we took your comments to heart.

This release includes a lot of improvements. Most of these are "behind-the-scenes" changes to improve performance, minor layout issues and smaller feature enhancements. But there are some major additions as well, including:

Sharing Tools
With this release, you are now able to share stories via e-mail, Facebook and Twitter. All three sharing functions are performed within the app itself, so you can continue to listen to the story while you share it.

Audio Controls
One of the most frequent comments about the app has been that there was no way to pause the audio and continue where you left off. This version adds the pause button to on-demand audio, such as programs and news segments. We also added "scrubbing", which allows you to fast-forward or rewind within either program- or story-audio segments.

Image Enlargement
For any story that contains a photo, we have added the ability to tap on the image to see a larger version of it.

Again, most of the changes for this are directly a result of your feedback. If you would like to see other features in the next version of the app, which we are already working on, please let us know. You can write us directly at techcenter at npr dot org, tweet us at NPRTechTeam or post comments to this blog.

By Andy Carvin

For those of you who have been following our posts on PublicMediaCamp, I just wanted to let you know that registration is now open, as is the official PublicMediaCamp Web site. On October 17-18 in Washington DC, NPR and PBS will team up with The AU Center for Social Media and iStrategyLabs to host this unconference, focusing on exploring new forms of collaboration between public broadcasters and their communities. The event will kick off what we hope will be a series of local PublicMediaCamps hosted by stations and other community partners.

Registration is free, and you should sign up as soon as possible; we've got room for around 350 people and we're almost one-third full in just the first 24 hours of registration. If you plan to attend, please be sure to visit the Web site and its wiki, as that's where we'll be planning the sessions. You can also join the PublicMediaCamp Google Group; we expect conversations to kick off there some time next week.

By Jon Foreman

Please welcome the latest NPR API-powered app: it's the NPR gadget for iGoogle. You can check out the gadget for yourself by adding it to your iGoogle page.

Produced in collaboration with Google, the gadget offers maximum convenience to iGoogle users since content can be consumed entirely within iGoogle. It is possible to scan headlines, listen to audio, read stories, share stories, set up custom feeds, display the headlines of a favorite topic and even play the 'Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!' news quiz all within the confines of a customized iGoogle page.

Most of the items displayed in the gadget are delivered via the NPR API: headlines, story text, story audio and related story links. Items that don't make use of the API are the The Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! quiz which is driven by a custom XML document, the sponsorship banner powered by JavaScript and the hourly news and program stream which are direct links to an mp3 file and stream respectively. Stories in the gadget can also be shared with friends -- this is powered by iGoogle's latest social features.

Here are some screen shots of the gadget:

Home View

Continue reading "Introducing The NPR Gadget For iGoogle" >