Whole Wheat Radio
Encyclopedia
Whole Wheat Radio was a listener-controlled, internet-only webcast
and Mediawiki
wiki based in Talkeetna
, Alaska, centered around independent music
aired 24 hours a day, that was financially and operationally maintained by an all-volunteer community as a grassroots alternative to mainstream media. WWR's listener-driven webcast
and real-time interactive community distinguished it from other streaming
webcasts, social music networks
, and peer to peer music file sharing websites. Whole Wheat Radio was an online community radio station
.
Musical offerings ranged from independent singer/songwriters, to blues
, to classical, to bluegrass
and newgrass
, to folk
. Unscheduled live on-air banter, scheduled interviews, house concert
s and spontaneous conversations were often broadcast live from Talkeetna. Though Jim Kloss hosted WWR from his home in Talkeetna, listeners controlled the music and other on-air content heard throughout the day through the website's request pages. Generally 15 to 50 listeners were tuned in at any given time with occasional spikes of up 90 concurrent listeners.
Whole Wheat Radio webcast three streams. One was for "low-speed" listeners (24 kbit/s) with dial-up connections. The next was for "medium-speed" listeners (56 kbit/s) with DSL, cable or other fast connections. The third stream was for "high-speed" listeners (128 kbit/s) with reliably fast connections. All streams utilized mp3PRO
audio technology for listeners whose players support it. (An mp3PRO 56 kbit/s stream is comparable in audio quality to a 128 kbit/s stream while requiring only one-half the bandwidth.)
To listen to the Whole Wheat Radio webcast, request songs and/or contribute to the wiki a listener needed only a computer, an internet connection, a software music player and a browser. Listening and participating were not operating system specific or proprietary. Popular music players such as Winamp
, iTunes
, and Windows Media Player
could all be utilized as well as the Microsoft Windows
, Linux
and Macintosh
operating systems.
WWR's technological innovations facilitated the growth of a small virtual community that was driven by the audience and not station management. Known as Wheatheads, regular listeners interacted in an entirely wiki-based "live collaboration room"; request, rate and tag music; send original music; write to artists and create wiki pages.
An example of technology reaching the world from a small rural town in Alaska, WWR's low-profile adult format succeeded without typical web advertising or competitive musical hype. Typically, WWR reached more SHOUTcast
listeners on a daily basis than any other webcast originating in Alaska.http://yp.shoutcast.com/directory/?s=alaska
The webcast ceased broadcasting on October 20th, 2010.
. Major artists who are household names generally have contractual obligations which do not allow them to submit their music for airplay on stations which do not pay RIAA royalties. Therefore, WWR did not air their music. The phrase "indie music" often refers just to the genre of independent rock in the wider world, but Whole Wheat Radio's emphasis was on independent acoustic musicians, including singer-songwriters, folk, jazz, blues, and classical, who have retained the right to submit their music for airplay without receiving RIAA royalties. The library also included indie rock and pop, but on a limited scale.
Music from CDs sent to WWR were ripped to MP3 files and entered into a music library mySQL database. Tracks were ranked by listeners using a 1- to 5-star rating system. Each song was also tagged and categorized by genre, keyword, subject matter, arrangements, keys, musical instruments featured, etc. There were more than 20,000 tracks in the Whole Wheat Radio music library. Unpopular tracks were automatically removed from the library based on listener's rankings.
All tracks in the music library were listener-requestable through the Whole Wheat Radio wiki. Songs could be requested individually, or in music sets or blocks based on the requester's criteria. For example - one could request a 20-minute block of female singer-songwriter music added to the library within the last six months, with an average 4-star rating, with the tag "Mood-Pretty."
The requested songs were queued for airplay from the main computer in Talkeeta. Dynamic pages on the website showed information about the artist, listener rankings, artist website, etc., simultaneous to playing of the track. Links to the artist's website and CD Baby
(where proceeds from CDs sales are paid directly to the artist) were displayed.
Musicians submitted their music by sending a CD to Whole Wheat Radio. If a CD fit the overall WWR music genre requirements, the entire CD was put into the music library. This distinguishes WWR from most radio stations or webcasts where a program director
is responsible for choosing which tracks get airplay. All tracks on an artist's album were available for listeners to request.
Each day an artist was spotlighted on WWR. One of his/her songs played each hour, a prominent link to his/her WWR page was displayed and the artist was often discussed on-air.
Because Whole Wheat Radio was a listener-interactive experience, listeners often participated in the building of Whole Wheat Radio by contacting independent artists and requesting CDs to be included in the library on behalf of Whole Wheat Radio.
The Ranting and Raving News Muffin: Somewhat regularly, except in the summer, Kloss and Golton would go live on-air at 11 a.m. (Alaska time) on weekdays for "The Ranting 'n' Raving News Muffin" show which featured news, music, opinion, humor and slices of life. The shows were often referred to simply as "Rants" because listeners considered loud outbursts of emphatically expressed opinion to be the most memorable highlights of the show. The Rant was one of the earliest (Oct. 2004) live shows recorded for a live internet audience and then made available within minutes for podcast listeners.http://www.wholewheatradio.org/wiki/index.php/Blog:2004/10/03_-_Whole_Wheat_Radio_Audio_Blog_Podcast
Live Interviews: Other live broadcasts included Golton interviewing musicians who were visiting Talkeetna on-air. The interviews usually included live performances, and were recorded for rebroadcast.
House Concerts: In addition to its normal musical webcast, WWR webcast live house concert
s held at Whole Wheat Radio facilities in Talkeetna.
Spontaneous Live Broadcasts: Frequent spontaneous live broadcasts included coverage of events such as flooding in Talkeetna in 2006, neighbors dropping in, open mics while cooking steaks on a campfire in the yard, and Friday night merriment.
Live broadcasts were often recorded for rebroadcast and some were later available for download.
, music and live broadcasts were streamed in MP3 format to a SHOUTcast
server in California to which listeners actually connected to the audio stream. The main website was hosted in New York on a LAMP
server and communicated on a constant basis with both the SHOUTcast server and a non-public server in Talkeetna in order to react in real-time with users.
All technical software aspects were based on open source
or standard technology. Most of the coding was done with PHP
and MySQL
databases. For listeners and website users WWR was platform independent — listeners tuned in using almost any audio player, and accessed the website with any browser.
Kloss was WWR's core code developer although since migrating to a wiki format, users played an increasingly large part in both screen layout, design, and testing. Code development was done without formal requirements or testing procedures. As an aspect of community involvement, users were code testers. During active development the site was frequently unstable which enhances the 'community bonding' experience.
Previous to March 2006, the website with its real-time chat and request/tracking interface ran on proprietary PHP/MySQL code written by Kloss. In March 2006, after seeing how successfully Wikipedia created an active community of contributors, he began testing and migrating to MediaWiki
. By writing several customized hooks into the wiki code, Whole Wheat Radio was able to give users access to customized real-time variables containing information about what is currently playing for placement on any wiki page. WWR was the first website/webcast to integrate a live chat, which understands wiki markup, and real-time music requesting into a wiki.
With the wiki format, development of the website opened to the WWR community which then voluntarily maintained much of the website.
WWR was the first webcast to allow listeners to insert text-to-speech into the audio stream by typing messages into a browser chat interface. Also, using text-to-speech technology the system, known as "EJs", is programmed to read stored or off-site information on the air such as horoscopes and philosophical tidbits.
In 2004, WWR was the first webcast set up with a phone-in line on which listeners leave voice messages (Phonegrams) that almost immediately play in the stream.
WWR was the first webcast to podcast
as well as include other people's podcasts in the WWR audio stream. The first WWR podcast http://www.wholewheatradio.org/wiki/index.php/Audio_magazine was created on October 3, 2004 http://www.wholewheatradio.org/wiki/index.php/Blog:2004/10/03_-_Whole_Wheat_Radio_Audio_Blog_Podcast. On October 12, 2004 Doc Searls http://doc.weblogs.com/2004/10/12 mentioned Kloss's blog entry "The Bridge Between Webcasting And Full-Fledged Radio"http://www.wholewheatradio.org/wiki/index.php/Blog:2004/10/08_-_Podcasting_-_The_Bridge_Between_Webcasting_And_Full-Fledged_Radio and called WWR "...one of the legendary internet webio stations". For several months, daily "rants", which listeners only heard live for the previous two years, were recorded and within minutes automatically posted as podcasts. WWR produced the first podcasts of live house concerts. Hundreds of hours of audio which were available as podcasts are archived for on-demand listening on the WWR website.http://www.wholewheatradio.org/wiki/index.php/Category:Audio_magazine-All
Shortly after making the first podcasts of the "rants" available, taking podcasts and RSS feeds a step further, Whole Wheat Radio became the first to use podcast "channels." On October 12, 2004 http://www.wholewheatradio.org/wiki/index.php/Blog:2004/10/10_-_Podcast_%22Channels%22 Kloss created several subscription channels (e.g.: Rants Channel, Comedy Channel, Podcaster Tips Channel, Music Channel and All Channels) to enable listeners to be able to control what content they received in their podcast aggregator. Listeners were then able to have more control of their feed. By subscribing to a particular channel rather than having listeners download everything that Whole Wheat Radio put into podcast form, wasting listener's bandwidth and Whole Wheat Radio's bandwidth, they could subscribe solely to a feed of interest e.g. Comedy only or House Concerts only.
As the term "podcast" became popular, Kloss insisted that the term itself would be relatively short-lived as more competitors were introduced for the iPod. He coined the phrase "audio magazine" sometime before April, 2005 http://www.wholewheatradio.org/wiki/index.php/Blog:2005/04/05_-_%28Audio_Magazine%29_Thought_For_The_Day believing it better described the content and subscription idea implied by podcasting.
Kloss eventually became disillusioned with the direction of mainstream podcasting. Rather than becoming a well-thought-out alternative to mainstream media, he believes it quickly succumbed to the same ratings pressures and hype inherent in corporate media outlets. He wrote several blog entries http://www.wholewheatradio.org/wiki/index.php/Category:Blog-Audio_Magazines concerning what he considers inaccurate podcasting download statistics and poor technical practices in the podcasting world.
Although WWR continued to produce public podcasts on occasion, Kloss indicated he plans to reintroduce audio magazines in 2007 as a free feed to approved subscribers. He believed this would reduce server loads significantly and increase the accuracy of listener statistics by ensuring that a greater number of magazine downloads are done by humans who intend to listen rather than by bots, aggregator sites and outdated podcast feeds.
Latterly, only Phonegrams and text-to-speech announcements were heard on a regular basis. Occasionally, new experimental audio sources obtained in real-time from the internet were included in the stream. Based on listener's overall reaction, airing of that particular audio source wes either continued or not.
. Along with online discussions of daily activities, listeners shared an auditory bond. All the listeners heard and made requests from the same music library. This was in direct contrast to a static, solo, "on-demand" audio download experience which is not shared with a real-time dynamic community. For this reason, many listeners tended to listen all day or for long periods of time, creating a very "sticky" website with much long-term user loyalty.
With the introduction of a wiki-based website in 2006, an additional focus on volunteerism was created. Listeners taught each other how to use wiki markup language and how to make musical requests. They created image intensive userpages and talked semi-privately with one another on their discussion pages. Because independent music is little known in mainstream culture and because WWR did not adhere to mainstream radio guidelines, the community remained relatively small. Therefore, listeners had an opportunity to get to know each other in a personal way on a website they trusted.
Whole Wheat Radio became an experiment in internet community. Under the watchful eye of Kloss http://wholewheatradio.org/wiki/index.php/User:Jimkloss the community grew and changed. Listeners supported the cost of the hardware and bandwidth, and were anything but passive.
Listening to a concert live from the Wheat Hole gavea user a sense of participation. There was a tip jar, artist-signed CDs for sale, and interactive chat with the audience and artists. For example, at one concert an artist drew a painting during the concert. Listener in the chat room got together and purchased the painting to adorn the Wheat Hole as a surprise for Golton and Kloss.
If the web stream went down several listeners would broadcast a stream of Whole Wheat Radio music using their own bandwidth to keep chat users entertained until the stream was repaired.
The sense of community went well beyond the internet and the web. The depth of information and experience of the community was amazing. Whether working on sixth grade math with a young listener, discussing plumbing code, or having a structural engineer take a look at a building problem while delivering a pizza via airplane, it happened on WWR. If one of the independent artists was performing in your part of the world you could expect to not only know about it, but to meet other Wheatheads at the performance. In the fall of 2005 one of the featured artists Danny Schmidt
did a live house concert. In the summer of 2006 he once again showed up in Talkeetna, not for a house concert, but to help work on the new "Wheat Palace" and take a break from performing. The artists were also part of this global community.
WWR was also unique in the "cross-pollination" that exists between other well established internet communities such as the J-Walk Blog
community, and the 3 Blind Mice http://www.catsaway.com/ community. Listeners shared their favorite sites, blogs, podcasts, and anything else they find interesting. If there was a good concert being webcast somewhere else it would be shared and listeners may have tuned into together to listen.
To quote a longtime listener Flying Trout "Whole Wheat Radio isn't a home-page, it is home!"
s in July, 2004, after a 24 by cabin (dubbed the Wheat Hole) was built to make enough room for an in-house audience of 50. The construction was motivated by frequent contacts from traveling artists looking for a venue in Talkeetna. There are few opportunities to perform or hear singer-songwriter music in rural Alaska; Kloss and Golton wanted to find a financially feasible way to present some of these artists, and realized that building a simple, economical space would add the opportunity to webcast the concerts live on Whole Wheat Radio increasing the audience size by as many as 90 more online listeners.
Both the in-house and internet attendees pitched in during the concert to pay the artist with online donations or CD sales. Whole Wheat Radio gave 100% of the night's income to the performer.
House concerts were recorded with high audio quality and later posted as audio magazines
for download via RSS feed.
Performers have included Jack Williams, Johnsmith, Mark Erelli
, Peter Mulvey
, David Goodrich, Cliff Eberhardt
, Stephen Fearing
, 3 Blind Mice, Danny Schmidt, Robin Hopper, Ann Pence, , Radoslav Lorkovic, Diane Zeigler, Brooks Williams
, Larry Zarella, and Kristina Olsen
.
Initially, WWR was paid for as a hobby from Kloss's personal funds. As webcast and webhosting expenses increased, he decided it was no longer possible to maintain WWR without financial assistance from listeners. A small notice was put on the website indicating the amount of money needed to keep the station on-the-air for the current month. Listeners reacted by sending more funds than were needed and a public accounting page detailing where the funds were being spent was created. WWR also began referring listeners to CDBaby to purchase CDs in September 2003. WWR earnt $1 for every CDBaby referral that results in a CD sale. This income was also publicly accounted for.
As of October, 2008 a total of $42,357.69 in donations had been raised to fund operations. Over $22,000 in combined in-house and online sales and "tip jar" had been generated by 35+ house concerts, all of which (minus Paypal fees) was paid to the performers. 3,023 albums had been sold to listeners via CDBaby click-thrus.
Whole Wheat Radio's operating expenses were paid entirely by listener donations, proceeds from the CDBaby referral program and donations from listeners who sold WWR related merchandise in their personally managed businesses. In contrast to many user funded websites, all monies collected were accounted for publicly by Golton so listeners could see where their money was spent. Donations were typically made online using Paypal either as scheduled monthly donations or one-time donations. Listeners also donated computer equipment, artwork, fixtures, furniture, food, coffee, soaps and various other items. In 2003, WWR was accepted under an official non-profit arts umbrella but opted not to participate because of potential on-air content control issues and because their finances were already healthy without additional grant funding.
WWR had no paid employees. All development time and facilities were donated by listeners, artists, Golton and Kloss. 100% of house concert proceeds were given to the performing artists. WWR did not have official fundraising pledge drives. Instead, the monthly funds needed to operate the station were posted on the website. Listeners frequently donated until the monthly financial requirement reads $0.00 on the website.
The website associated with the live stream quickly incorporated a live chat, information and links to the music being played, as well as information on the whereabouts of listeners based on their IP address. Kloss wrote the software in an outdated version of MS-DOS QuickBasic
that dynamically controlled the playlist based on changing criteria.
At first the musical fare consisted of Kloss' personal collection of major-label artists. After learning about potential royalty payment issues with the RIAA and webcasting, Whole Wheat Radio soon switched to webcasting only independent musicians not associated with the RIAA. Kloss and Golton were surprised to discover a wealth of musicians whose CDs rarely receive airplay, and quickly became strong advocates for the discovery of professional and semi-professional, seldom-heard independent artists.
By December 2002, Kloss and Golton realized that the project had outgrown the moniker of a small town in Alaska. The name of the webcast was changed to Whole Wheat Radio in order to symbolize a non-structured form of live radio that mimics the courseness and nutritional value of whole, unprocessed wheat flour.
Kloss was intrigued by the interactive possibilities presented by combining a radio station with a website. In Whole Wheat Radio's first year, he added many features including listener requests that play automatically, text-to-voice semi-intelligent "EJs" (Electronic Dee-Jays), the Say-It button, which allowed listeners to type messages into the chat and have an EJ say their words over the air, online games that involved collecting a valueless commodity called "wheatberries", personalized listener profiles, the ability to easily post links and photos in the chat and a group drawing room among other things. Listeners enthusiastically participated in these interactive features, often suggesting new ones for Kloss to program.
As WWR became more well known in the singer-songwriter community, musicians began contacting Golton about the possibility of performing in Talkeetna. Because there was a lack of reliable year-round venues in the small village, Golton and Kloss began discussing the possibility of constructing a small venue specifically to host concerts given by these independent musicians. Even though the village itself did not have enough residents to make regular concerts financially viable, being able to webcast these events live to a worldwide internet audience who might potentially purchase CDs gave the plan feasibility.
The summer of 2004 saw the construction of a new building next to the original 12 by cabin for holding house concert
s and webcast gear. The new 24 by 'Wheat Hole' (a listener-suggested play on the phrase 'Whole Wheat') was constructed in large part by Talkeetna musician, Larry Zarella. On July 30, with only partially covered exterior walls, Jack Williams performed at the first WWR house concert. The interior of the building has never been completely finished - there are still no stairs from the lower floor to the balcony where the WWR equipment is housed. During house concerts a folding ladder is raised and lowered by audience members in order for Kloss to go between floors.
's standard wiki software on the WWR site. In the following months, he customized the entire wiki and webcast operation using standard MediaWiki hooks. The significance of this innovative use of wiki software is found throughout highly customized listener created pages which include special WWR variables
. By hooking into the wiki output buffer immediately before display, WWR is able to replace any variable preceded with $wwr_ with information directly from the mySQL databases. These databases typically contain information about what is currently happening with the on-air stream. So, for example, users can post the name of the currently playing song on any wiki page simply by placing the variable $wwr_currentlyplaying on any standard wiki page.
By means of this customized wiki software hook, listeners are also able to post wiki markup language anywhere in the live chat and have it rendered as a fully functional wiki page. This allows users to teach each other wiki markup in a live classroom environment. There are frequent live demonstrations of how to use the wiki as well as the customized WWR wiki variables in the chat.
The applications for this sort of customized wiki programming are far reaching. With Kloss' PHP code and standard Mediawiki software, programmers can allow wiki users to access any kind of static or dynamic data contained on the webserver, either in flat files or mySQL databases, and post that data in any format on any wiki page.
As of early 2006, WWR was the only wiki-based webcast on the internet, as well as the only wiki with user controllable output buffer variable substitution integrated directly into mySQL databases.
s. Events and groups which have used the space include the Talkeetna Playground, dance classes, Red Cross CPR/first aid classes, art shows, home crafters, craft classes, musicians practicing and public and private service group meetings. Local involvement continues to be strongly encouraged and has resulted in new voices being heard on-the-air.
Internet radio
Internet radio is an audio service transmitted via the Internet...
and Mediawiki
MediaWiki
MediaWiki is a popular free web-based wiki software application. Developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, it is used to run all of its projects, including Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikinews. Numerous other wikis around the world also use it to power their websites...
wiki based in Talkeetna
Talkeetna, Alaska
Talkeetna is a census-designated place in Matanuska-Susitna Borough, Alaska, United States. It is part of the Anchorage, Alaska Metropolitan Statistical Area. At the 2000 census the population was 772.-Geography:...
, Alaska, centered around independent music
Indie (music)
In music, independent music, often shortened to indie music or "indie" is a term used to describe independence from major commercial record labels or their subsidiaries, and an autonomous, Do-It-Yourself approach to recording and publishing....
aired 24 hours a day, that was financially and operationally maintained by an all-volunteer community as a grassroots alternative to mainstream media. WWR's listener-driven webcast
Webcast
A webcast is a media presentation distributed over the Internet using streaming media technology to distribute a single content source to many simultaneous listeners/viewers. A webcast may either be distributed live or on demand...
and real-time interactive community distinguished it from other streaming
Streaming media
Streaming media is multimedia that is constantly received by and presented to an end-user while being delivered by a streaming provider.The term "presented" is used in this article in a general sense that includes audio or video playback. The name refers to the delivery method of the medium rather...
webcasts, social music networks
Social network
A social network is a social structure made up of individuals called "nodes", which are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship, common interest, financial exchange, dislike, sexual relationships, or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige.Social...
, and peer to peer music file sharing websites. Whole Wheat Radio was an online community radio station
Community radio
Community radio is a type of radio service, that offers a third model of radio broadcasting beyond commercial broadcasting and public broadcasting. Community stations can serve geographic communities and communities of interest...
.
Musical offerings ranged from independent singer/songwriters, to blues
Blues
Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...
, to classical, to bluegrass
Bluegrass music
Bluegrass music is a form of American roots music, and a sub-genre of country music. It has mixed roots in Scottish, English, Welsh and Irish traditional music...
and newgrass
Progressive bluegrass
Progressive bluegrass is one of two major subgenres of bluegrass music. It is also known as newgrass, a term attributed to New Grass Revival member Ebo Walker. Musicians and bands John Hartford, New Grass Revival, J.D. Crowe and the New South, The Dillards, Boone Creek, Country Gazette, and the...
, to folk
Folk music
Folk music is an English term encompassing both traditional folk music and contemporary folk music. The term originated in the 19th century. Traditional folk music has been defined in several ways: as music transmitted by mouth, as music of the lower classes, and as music with unknown composers....
. Unscheduled live on-air banter, scheduled interviews, house concert
House concert
A house concert or home concert is a musical concert or performance art that is presented in someone's home or apartment, or a nearby small private space such as a barn, apartment rec room, lawn, or back yard....
s and spontaneous conversations were often broadcast live from Talkeetna. Though Jim Kloss hosted WWR from his home in Talkeetna, listeners controlled the music and other on-air content heard throughout the day through the website's request pages. Generally 15 to 50 listeners were tuned in at any given time with occasional spikes of up 90 concurrent listeners.
Whole Wheat Radio webcast three streams. One was for "low-speed" listeners (24 kbit/s) with dial-up connections. The next was for "medium-speed" listeners (56 kbit/s) with DSL, cable or other fast connections. The third stream was for "high-speed" listeners (128 kbit/s) with reliably fast connections. All streams utilized mp3PRO
Mp3PRO
mp3PRO is an audio compression algorithm that combines the MP3 audio format with spectral band replication compression methods. It claims to achieve transparency at lower bitrates than MP3, resulting in a file nearly half the size of standard MP3...
audio technology for listeners whose players support it. (An mp3PRO 56 kbit/s stream is comparable in audio quality to a 128 kbit/s stream while requiring only one-half the bandwidth.)
To listen to the Whole Wheat Radio webcast, request songs and/or contribute to the wiki a listener needed only a computer, an internet connection, a software music player and a browser. Listening and participating were not operating system specific or proprietary. Popular music players such as Winamp
Winamp
Winamp is a media player for Windows-based PCs and Android devices, written by Nullsoft, now a subsidiary of AOL. It is proprietary freeware/shareware, multi-format, extensible with plug-ins and skins, and is noted for its graphical sound visualization, playlist, and media library features.Winamp...
, iTunes
ITunes
iTunes is a media player computer program, used for playing, downloading, and organizing digital music and video files on desktop computers. It can also manage contents on iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad....
, and Windows Media Player
Windows Media Player
Windows Media Player is a media player and media library application developed by Microsoft that is used for playing audio, video and viewing images on personal computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system, as well as on Pocket PC and Windows Mobile-based devices...
could all be utilized as well as the Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
, Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
and Macintosh
Macintosh
The Macintosh , or Mac, is a series of several lines of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. The first Macintosh was introduced by Apple's then-chairman Steve Jobs on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a...
operating systems.
WWR's technological innovations facilitated the growth of a small virtual community that was driven by the audience and not station management. Known as Wheatheads, regular listeners interacted in an entirely wiki-based "live collaboration room"; request, rate and tag music; send original music; write to artists and create wiki pages.
An example of technology reaching the world from a small rural town in Alaska, WWR's low-profile adult format succeeded without typical web advertising or competitive musical hype. Typically, WWR reached more SHOUTcast
SHOUTcast
SHOUTcast is cross-platform proprietary software for streaming media over the Internet. The software, developed by Nullsoft , allows digital audio content, primarily in MP3 or HE-AAC format, to be broadcast to and from media player software, enabling the creation of Internet radio "stations"...
listeners on a daily basis than any other webcast originating in Alaska.http://yp.shoutcast.com/directory/?s=alaska
The webcast ceased broadcasting on October 20th, 2010.
Music
Whole Wheat Radio featured the music of several thousand independent artists not associated with the RIAARecording Industry Association of America
The Recording Industry Association of America is a trade organization that represents the recording industry distributors in the United States...
. Major artists who are household names generally have contractual obligations which do not allow them to submit their music for airplay on stations which do not pay RIAA royalties. Therefore, WWR did not air their music. The phrase "indie music" often refers just to the genre of independent rock in the wider world, but Whole Wheat Radio's emphasis was on independent acoustic musicians, including singer-songwriters, folk, jazz, blues, and classical, who have retained the right to submit their music for airplay without receiving RIAA royalties. The library also included indie rock and pop, but on a limited scale.
Music from CDs sent to WWR were ripped to MP3 files and entered into a music library mySQL database. Tracks were ranked by listeners using a 1- to 5-star rating system. Each song was also tagged and categorized by genre, keyword, subject matter, arrangements, keys, musical instruments featured, etc. There were more than 20,000 tracks in the Whole Wheat Radio music library. Unpopular tracks were automatically removed from the library based on listener's rankings.
All tracks in the music library were listener-requestable through the Whole Wheat Radio wiki. Songs could be requested individually, or in music sets or blocks based on the requester's criteria. For example - one could request a 20-minute block of female singer-songwriter music added to the library within the last six months, with an average 4-star rating, with the tag "Mood-Pretty."
The requested songs were queued for airplay from the main computer in Talkeeta. Dynamic pages on the website showed information about the artist, listener rankings, artist website, etc., simultaneous to playing of the track. Links to the artist's website and CD Baby
CD Baby
CD Baby is an online music store specializing in the sale of CDs and digital music downloads from independent musicians to consumers. The company is also a digital aggregator of independent music recordings, distributing content to several online digital music retailers.CD Baby has achieved recent...
(where proceeds from CDs sales are paid directly to the artist) were displayed.
Musicians submitted their music by sending a CD to Whole Wheat Radio. If a CD fit the overall WWR music genre requirements, the entire CD was put into the music library. This distinguishes WWR from most radio stations or webcasts where a program director
Program director
In service industries, such as education, a program director or programme director researches, plans, develops and implements one or more of the firm's professional services...
is responsible for choosing which tracks get airplay. All tracks on an artist's album were available for listeners to request.
Each day an artist was spotlighted on WWR. One of his/her songs played each hour, a prominent link to his/her WWR page was displayed and the artist was often discussed on-air.
Because Whole Wheat Radio was a listener-interactive experience, listeners often participated in the building of Whole Wheat Radio by contacting independent artists and requesting CDs to be included in the library on behalf of Whole Wheat Radio.
Live broadcasts
Live Interviews: Other live broadcasts included Golton interviewing musicians who were visiting Talkeetna on-air. The interviews usually included live performances, and were recorded for rebroadcast.
House Concerts: In addition to its normal musical webcast, WWR webcast live house concert
House concert
A house concert or home concert is a musical concert or performance art that is presented in someone's home or apartment, or a nearby small private space such as a barn, apartment rec room, lawn, or back yard....
s held at Whole Wheat Radio facilities in Talkeetna.
Spontaneous Live Broadcasts: Frequent spontaneous live broadcasts included coverage of events such as flooding in Talkeetna in 2006, neighbors dropping in, open mics while cooking steaks on a campfire in the yard, and Friday night merriment.
Live broadcasts were often recorded for rebroadcast and some were later available for download.
Simulcasts
Throughout its history, WWR has been sporadically simulcast on other internet and terrestrially based webcasts and radio stations including Robin Valley Community Radio, AM 1690 in Omaha, Nebraska.Technology and innovations
From the Talkeetna studio, where the music library was housed on Windows computers, using WinampWinamp
Winamp is a media player for Windows-based PCs and Android devices, written by Nullsoft, now a subsidiary of AOL. It is proprietary freeware/shareware, multi-format, extensible with plug-ins and skins, and is noted for its graphical sound visualization, playlist, and media library features.Winamp...
, music and live broadcasts were streamed in MP3 format to a SHOUTcast
SHOUTcast
SHOUTcast is cross-platform proprietary software for streaming media over the Internet. The software, developed by Nullsoft , allows digital audio content, primarily in MP3 or HE-AAC format, to be broadcast to and from media player software, enabling the creation of Internet radio "stations"...
server in California to which listeners actually connected to the audio stream. The main website was hosted in New York on a LAMP
LAMP (software bundle)
LAMP is an acronym for a solution stack of free, open source software, referring to the first letters of Linux , Apache HTTP Server, MySQL and PHP , principal components to build a viable general purpose web server.The GNU project is advocating people to use the term "GLAMP" since what is known as...
server and communicated on a constant basis with both the SHOUTcast server and a non-public server in Talkeetna in order to react in real-time with users.
All technical software aspects were based on open source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
or standard technology. Most of the coding was done with PHP
PHP
PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...
and MySQL
MySQL
MySQL officially, but also commonly "My Sequel") is a relational database management system that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. It is named after developer Michael Widenius' daughter, My...
databases. For listeners and website users WWR was platform independent — listeners tuned in using almost any audio player, and accessed the website with any browser.
Kloss was WWR's core code developer although since migrating to a wiki format, users played an increasingly large part in both screen layout, design, and testing. Code development was done without formal requirements or testing procedures. As an aspect of community involvement, users were code testers. During active development the site was frequently unstable which enhances the 'community bonding' experience.
Previous to March 2006, the website with its real-time chat and request/tracking interface ran on proprietary PHP/MySQL code written by Kloss. In March 2006, after seeing how successfully Wikipedia created an active community of contributors, he began testing and migrating to MediaWiki
MediaWiki
MediaWiki is a popular free web-based wiki software application. Developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, it is used to run all of its projects, including Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikinews. Numerous other wikis around the world also use it to power their websites...
. By writing several customized hooks into the wiki code, Whole Wheat Radio was able to give users access to customized real-time variables containing information about what is currently playing for placement on any wiki page. WWR was the first website/webcast to integrate a live chat, which understands wiki markup, and real-time music requesting into a wiki.
With the wiki format, development of the website opened to the WWR community which then voluntarily maintained much of the website.
WWR was the first webcast to allow listeners to insert text-to-speech into the audio stream by typing messages into a browser chat interface. Also, using text-to-speech technology the system, known as "EJs", is programmed to read stored or off-site information on the air such as horoscopes and philosophical tidbits.
In 2004, WWR was the first webcast set up with a phone-in line on which listeners leave voice messages (Phonegrams) that almost immediately play in the stream.
Podcasts/Audio Magazines
(A listing of house concerts and podcasts currently available)WWR was the first webcast to podcast
Podcast
A podcast is a series of digital media files that are released episodically and often downloaded through web syndication...
as well as include other people's podcasts in the WWR audio stream. The first WWR podcast http://www.wholewheatradio.org/wiki/index.php/Audio_magazine was created on October 3, 2004 http://www.wholewheatradio.org/wiki/index.php/Blog:2004/10/03_-_Whole_Wheat_Radio_Audio_Blog_Podcast. On October 12, 2004 Doc Searls http://doc.weblogs.com/2004/10/12 mentioned Kloss's blog entry "The Bridge Between Webcasting And Full-Fledged Radio"http://www.wholewheatradio.org/wiki/index.php/Blog:2004/10/08_-_Podcasting_-_The_Bridge_Between_Webcasting_And_Full-Fledged_Radio and called WWR "...one of the legendary internet webio stations". For several months, daily "rants", which listeners only heard live for the previous two years, were recorded and within minutes automatically posted as podcasts. WWR produced the first podcasts of live house concerts. Hundreds of hours of audio which were available as podcasts are archived for on-demand listening on the WWR website.http://www.wholewheatradio.org/wiki/index.php/Category:Audio_magazine-All
Shortly after making the first podcasts of the "rants" available, taking podcasts and RSS feeds a step further, Whole Wheat Radio became the first to use podcast "channels." On October 12, 2004 http://www.wholewheatradio.org/wiki/index.php/Blog:2004/10/10_-_Podcast_%22Channels%22 Kloss created several subscription channels (e.g.: Rants Channel, Comedy Channel, Podcaster Tips Channel, Music Channel and All Channels) to enable listeners to be able to control what content they received in their podcast aggregator. Listeners were then able to have more control of their feed. By subscribing to a particular channel rather than having listeners download everything that Whole Wheat Radio put into podcast form, wasting listener's bandwidth and Whole Wheat Radio's bandwidth, they could subscribe solely to a feed of interest e.g. Comedy only or House Concerts only.
As the term "podcast" became popular, Kloss insisted that the term itself would be relatively short-lived as more competitors were introduced for the iPod. He coined the phrase "audio magazine" sometime before April, 2005 http://www.wholewheatradio.org/wiki/index.php/Blog:2005/04/05_-_%28Audio_Magazine%29_Thought_For_The_Day believing it better described the content and subscription idea implied by podcasting.
Kloss eventually became disillusioned with the direction of mainstream podcasting. Rather than becoming a well-thought-out alternative to mainstream media, he believes it quickly succumbed to the same ratings pressures and hype inherent in corporate media outlets. He wrote several blog entries http://www.wholewheatradio.org/wiki/index.php/Category:Blog-Audio_Magazines concerning what he considers inaccurate podcasting download statistics and poor technical practices in the podcasting world.
Although WWR continued to produce public podcasts on occasion, Kloss indicated he plans to reintroduce audio magazines in 2007 as a free feed to approved subscribers. He believed this would reduce server loads significantly and increase the accuracy of listener statistics by ensuring that a greater number of magazine downloads are done by humans who intend to listen rather than by bots, aggregator sites and outdated podcast feeds.
Audio experimentation
WWR experimented with many technologies designed to incorporate grassroots audio into the stream itself. Examples include:- Multiple listeners being able to talk live on-air via PaltalkPaltalkPaltalk Messenger, or simply referred to as Paltalk, is an Internet chat service that allows users to communicate via instant messaging, voice and video chat. It offers thousands of chat rooms and the ability for users to create their own virtual chat room on any topic and category...
- Multiple listeners being able to talk live on-air via various IM voice services
- Live audio shows originating from other sources (i.e. live shows from Kulak's Woodshed) being broadcast on WWR
- Automated inclusion of listener FTP uploads of audio material into the webcast
- Automated inclusion of podcasts into the webcast
- Automated text-to-speech announcements when listeners have updated their blogs
- Listener telephone calls (Phonegrams) being a part of the normal webcast
- Automated text-to-speech announcements of listener horoscopes, weather forecasts and 'today in history' notes
Latterly, only Phonegrams and text-to-speech announcements were heard on a regular basis. Occasionally, new experimental audio sources obtained in real-time from the internet were included in the stream. Based on listener's overall reaction, airing of that particular audio source wes either continued or not.
Community
WWR listeners formed a loosely knit Web 2.0 community. With an average listener age between 43 and 45 http://www.wholewheatradio.org/wiki/index.php/Birthday, the WWR community included listeners from grade school age to retirees. With the featured musical styles that appeal to almost everybody, a slow paced non-ICQ chat with discussions that are left-leaning, WWR attracted a specific subset of the overall internet communityCommunity
The term community has two distinct meanings:*a group of interacting people, possibly living in close proximity, and often refers to a group that shares some common values, and is attributed with social cohesion within a shared geographical location, generally in social units larger than a household...
. Along with online discussions of daily activities, listeners shared an auditory bond. All the listeners heard and made requests from the same music library. This was in direct contrast to a static, solo, "on-demand" audio download experience which is not shared with a real-time dynamic community. For this reason, many listeners tended to listen all day or for long periods of time, creating a very "sticky" website with much long-term user loyalty.
With the introduction of a wiki-based website in 2006, an additional focus on volunteerism was created. Listeners taught each other how to use wiki markup language and how to make musical requests. They created image intensive userpages and talked semi-privately with one another on their discussion pages. Because independent music is little known in mainstream culture and because WWR did not adhere to mainstream radio guidelines, the community remained relatively small. Therefore, listeners had an opportunity to get to know each other in a personal way on a website they trusted.
Whole Wheat Radio became an experiment in internet community. Under the watchful eye of Kloss http://wholewheatradio.org/wiki/index.php/User:Jimkloss the community grew and changed. Listeners supported the cost of the hardware and bandwidth, and were anything but passive.
Listening to a concert live from the Wheat Hole gavea user a sense of participation. There was a tip jar, artist-signed CDs for sale, and interactive chat with the audience and artists. For example, at one concert an artist drew a painting during the concert. Listener in the chat room got together and purchased the painting to adorn the Wheat Hole as a surprise for Golton and Kloss.
If the web stream went down several listeners would broadcast a stream of Whole Wheat Radio music using their own bandwidth to keep chat users entertained until the stream was repaired.
The sense of community went well beyond the internet and the web. The depth of information and experience of the community was amazing. Whether working on sixth grade math with a young listener, discussing plumbing code, or having a structural engineer take a look at a building problem while delivering a pizza via airplane, it happened on WWR. If one of the independent artists was performing in your part of the world you could expect to not only know about it, but to meet other Wheatheads at the performance. In the fall of 2005 one of the featured artists Danny Schmidt
Danny Schmidt
Danny Schmidt is an American singer-songwriter based in Austin, Texas where he was born and raised and now lives with fellow musician and singer-songwriter Carrie Elkin.-Biography:...
did a live house concert. In the summer of 2006 he once again showed up in Talkeetna, not for a house concert, but to help work on the new "Wheat Palace" and take a break from performing. The artists were also part of this global community.
WWR was also unique in the "cross-pollination" that exists between other well established internet communities such as the J-Walk Blog
J-Walk Blog
The J-Walk Blog was a weblog, or blog, created and maintained by John Walkenbach of Tucson, Arizona, United States. Mainly a daily-updated list of links to strange, interesting, or wacky things found on the internets, it had a loyal and vocal cadre of regular visitors and its comment section was a...
community, and the 3 Blind Mice http://www.catsaway.com/ community. Listeners shared their favorite sites, blogs, podcasts, and anything else they find interesting. If there was a good concert being webcast somewhere else it would be shared and listeners may have tuned into together to listen.
To quote a longtime listener Flying Trout "Whole Wheat Radio isn't a home-page, it is home!"
Wheatheads
Longtime listeners who spent a lot of time listening to WWR are affectionately referred to as "Wheatheads". Wheatheads got to know each other on the live collaboration page, watched each others musical requests and sometimes drew together in the drawing room.Wheatstalk
Wheatstalk was a summer solstice gathering of Wheatheads in Talkeetna to celebrate music and friendship. The first Wheatstalk was June 21, 2005 and featured the music of 3 Blind Mice. Due to moving and renovations 2006 saw no Wheatstalk, but a Wheatstalk was planned for 2007.House concerts
Whole Wheat Radio began presenting and live-webcasting house concertHouse concert
A house concert or home concert is a musical concert or performance art that is presented in someone's home or apartment, or a nearby small private space such as a barn, apartment rec room, lawn, or back yard....
s in July, 2004, after a 24 by cabin (dubbed the Wheat Hole) was built to make enough room for an in-house audience of 50. The construction was motivated by frequent contacts from traveling artists looking for a venue in Talkeetna. There are few opportunities to perform or hear singer-songwriter music in rural Alaska; Kloss and Golton wanted to find a financially feasible way to present some of these artists, and realized that building a simple, economical space would add the opportunity to webcast the concerts live on Whole Wheat Radio increasing the audience size by as many as 90 more online listeners.
Both the in-house and internet attendees pitched in during the concert to pay the artist with online donations or CD sales. Whole Wheat Radio gave 100% of the night's income to the performer.
House concerts were recorded with high audio quality and later posted as audio magazines
Podcast
A podcast is a series of digital media files that are released episodically and often downloaded through web syndication...
for download via RSS feed.
Performers have included Jack Williams, Johnsmith, Mark Erelli
Mark Erelli
Mark Erelli is an American folk singer/songwriter from Reading, Massachusetts. He currently resides in Massachusetts. Erelli is a 1996 graduate of Bates College, where he majored in Biology, and holds a Master's Degree in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Massachusetts...
, Peter Mulvey
Peter Mulvey
Peter Mulvey is an American folk singer-songwriter based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Since the early 1990s, he has developed a strong national following in the indie folk/rock scene through his relentless touring and critically acclaimed albums. Starting his musical career in Milwaukee while at...
, David Goodrich, Cliff Eberhardt
Cliff Eberhardt
Cliff Eberhardt is an American folk singer-songwriter. He is a founding member of the Fast Folk Music Cooperative in New York City. Eberhardt joined Red House Records in 1997 and has recorded five albums for the label, the most recent in 2009, 500 Miles: The Blue Rock Sessions...
, Stephen Fearing
Stephen Fearing
Stephen Fearing is a Canadian folk singer-songwriter.Fearing was born in Vancouver, British Columbia and raised in Dublin, Ireland. He returned to Canada in 1981 and began pursuing a career in music. In addition to his solo career, Fearing was one of the founding members of Blackie and the Rodeo...
, 3 Blind Mice, Danny Schmidt, Robin Hopper, Ann Pence, , Radoslav Lorkovic, Diane Zeigler, Brooks Williams
Brooks Williams
Brooks Williams is an American acoustic guitarist and singer/songwriter. His style combines roots, jazz, blues, classical, and folk...
, Larry Zarella, and Kristina Olsen
Kristina Olsen
Kristina Olsen is a American contemporary folk singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist known for her sometimes humorous, heartfelt and sometimes ribald songs. Many of her recordings appear on Rounder Records...
.
Funding
(Lifetime WWR accounting statements)Initially, WWR was paid for as a hobby from Kloss's personal funds. As webcast and webhosting expenses increased, he decided it was no longer possible to maintain WWR without financial assistance from listeners. A small notice was put on the website indicating the amount of money needed to keep the station on-the-air for the current month. Listeners reacted by sending more funds than were needed and a public accounting page detailing where the funds were being spent was created. WWR also began referring listeners to CDBaby to purchase CDs in September 2003. WWR earnt $1 for every CDBaby referral that results in a CD sale. This income was also publicly accounted for.
As of October, 2008 a total of $42,357.69 in donations had been raised to fund operations. Over $22,000 in combined in-house and online sales and "tip jar" had been generated by 35+ house concerts, all of which (minus Paypal fees) was paid to the performers. 3,023 albums had been sold to listeners via CDBaby click-thrus.
Whole Wheat Radio's operating expenses were paid entirely by listener donations, proceeds from the CDBaby referral program and donations from listeners who sold WWR related merchandise in their personally managed businesses. In contrast to many user funded websites, all monies collected were accounted for publicly by Golton so listeners could see where their money was spent. Donations were typically made online using Paypal either as scheduled monthly donations or one-time donations. Listeners also donated computer equipment, artwork, fixtures, furniture, food, coffee, soaps and various other items. In 2003, WWR was accepted under an official non-profit arts umbrella but opted not to participate because of potential on-air content control issues and because their finances were already healthy without additional grant funding.
WWR had no paid employees. All development time and facilities were donated by listeners, artists, Golton and Kloss. 100% of house concert proceeds were given to the performing artists. WWR did not have official fundraising pledge drives. Instead, the monthly funds needed to operate the station were posted on the website. Listeners frequently donated until the monthly financial requirement reads $0.00 on the website.
2002 - The original 12x12 cabin
Whole Wheat Radio began as "Radio Free Talkeetna" in August 2002. Programmer Jim Kloss started the live interactive webcast immediately after high speed DSL access arrived in the small village of Talkeetna, Alaska. His partner, singer/songwriter Esther Golton, soon joined in the project with the two broadcasting live on the stream from her self-built 12 by cabin which was heated by wood, lacked running water, and utilized an outhouse. The tiny cabin did have the three essential elements for internet connectivity: electricity (via an extension cord), a telephone line, and a resident computer programmer.The website associated with the live stream quickly incorporated a live chat, information and links to the music being played, as well as information on the whereabouts of listeners based on their IP address. Kloss wrote the software in an outdated version of MS-DOS QuickBasic
QuickBASIC
Microsoft QuickBASIC is an Integrated Development Environment and compiler for the BASIC programming language that was developed by Microsoft. QuickBASIC runs mainly on DOS, though there was a short-lived version for Mac OS...
that dynamically controlled the playlist based on changing criteria.
At first the musical fare consisted of Kloss' personal collection of major-label artists. After learning about potential royalty payment issues with the RIAA and webcasting, Whole Wheat Radio soon switched to webcasting only independent musicians not associated with the RIAA. Kloss and Golton were surprised to discover a wealth of musicians whose CDs rarely receive airplay, and quickly became strong advocates for the discovery of professional and semi-professional, seldom-heard independent artists.
By December 2002, Kloss and Golton realized that the project had outgrown the moniker of a small town in Alaska. The name of the webcast was changed to Whole Wheat Radio in order to symbolize a non-structured form of live radio that mimics the courseness and nutritional value of whole, unprocessed wheat flour.
Kloss was intrigued by the interactive possibilities presented by combining a radio station with a website. In Whole Wheat Radio's first year, he added many features including listener requests that play automatically, text-to-voice semi-intelligent "EJs" (Electronic Dee-Jays), the Say-It button, which allowed listeners to type messages into the chat and have an EJ say their words over the air, online games that involved collecting a valueless commodity called "wheatberries", personalized listener profiles, the ability to easily post links and photos in the chat and a group drawing room among other things. Listeners enthusiastically participated in these interactive features, often suggesting new ones for Kloss to program.
2004 - Construction of the Wheat Hole
The summer of 2004 saw the construction of a new building next to the original 12 by cabin for holding house concert
House concert
A house concert or home concert is a musical concert or performance art that is presented in someone's home or apartment, or a nearby small private space such as a barn, apartment rec room, lawn, or back yard....
s and webcast gear. The new 24 by 'Wheat Hole' (a listener-suggested play on the phrase 'Whole Wheat') was constructed in large part by Talkeetna musician, Larry Zarella. On July 30, with only partially covered exterior walls, Jack Williams performed at the first WWR house concert. The interior of the building has never been completely finished - there are still no stairs from the lower floor to the balcony where the WWR equipment is housed. During house concerts a folding ladder is raised and lowered by audience members in order for Kloss to go between floors.
2006 - Conversion to wiki
On March 15, 2006 Kloss installed MediaWikiMediaWiki
MediaWiki is a popular free web-based wiki software application. Developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, it is used to run all of its projects, including Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikinews. Numerous other wikis around the world also use it to power their websites...
's standard wiki software on the WWR site. In the following months, he customized the entire wiki and webcast operation using standard MediaWiki hooks. The significance of this innovative use of wiki software is found throughout highly customized listener created pages which include special WWR variables
Variable (programming)
In computer programming, a variable is a symbolic name given to some known or unknown quantity or information, for the purpose of allowing the name to be used independently of the information it represents...
. By hooking into the wiki output buffer immediately before display, WWR is able to replace any variable preceded with $wwr_ with information directly from the mySQL databases. These databases typically contain information about what is currently happening with the on-air stream. So, for example, users can post the name of the currently playing song on any wiki page simply by placing the variable $wwr_currentlyplaying on any standard wiki page.
By means of this customized wiki software hook, listeners are also able to post wiki markup language anywhere in the live chat and have it rendered as a fully functional wiki page. This allows users to teach each other wiki markup in a live classroom environment. There are frequent live demonstrations of how to use the wiki as well as the customized WWR wiki variables in the chat.
The applications for this sort of customized wiki programming are far reaching. With Kloss' PHP code and standard Mediawiki software, programmers can allow wiki users to access any kind of static or dynamic data contained on the webserver, either in flat files or mySQL databases, and post that data in any format on any wiki page.
As of early 2006, WWR was the only wiki-based webcast on the internet, as well as the only wiki with user controllable output buffer variable substitution integrated directly into mySQL databases.
2006 - Purchase and renovation of the Wheat Palace
In 2006 Kloss and Golton purchased and began renovating the 10 acres (4 ha) former Talkeetna Old Tyme Saloon, 7 miles (11.3 km) from downtown Talkeetna. Historically, the Wheat Palace is on the same site used for several initial Talkeetna Bluegrass Festival events in the early 1980s. Listeners dubbed the large log cabin's 36 by public space the "Wheat Palace" in contrast to the original 12 by WWR cabin. Webcast operations and house concerts are expected to move to the new facility in late 2006. Future plans include continued webcasting, house concerts, annual Wheatstalk gatherings and technological seminars with nighttime concerts featuring independent musicians.2007 - Wheat Palace Grand Opening
In September 2007, the Wheat Palace was finally open after renovations. The Whole Wheat Radio studio is upstairs in the main room.2008 - Local involvement
Upon opening in September, 2007 the Wheat Palace was made available on a free/donation basis to local community/arts/music groups as well as continuing the tradition of hosting house concertHouse concert
A house concert or home concert is a musical concert or performance art that is presented in someone's home or apartment, or a nearby small private space such as a barn, apartment rec room, lawn, or back yard....
s. Events and groups which have used the space include the Talkeetna Playground, dance classes, Red Cross CPR/first aid classes, art shows, home crafters, craft classes, musicians practicing and public and private service group meetings. Local involvement continues to be strongly encouraged and has resulted in new voices being heard on-the-air.
2010 - Shutdown
On October 20, 2010, the Whole Wheat Radio official website was replaced by a message from Jim Kloss, Whole Wheat Radio founder, stating that he was stopping all audio streaming and shutting the website down.Awards
- SEOmoz Web 2.0 Award - 2007 honorable mention in the music category.