I am very honored to have my old radioshow and podcast, also named mediageek, archived at the Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications in the Internet Archive. While listening back to some old episodes, nearly all recorded live from a community radio studio, occasionally makes me cringe, there are also interviews I’m proud of, that I think serve as important records of independent media and communications during the first decade of the 21st century.
Please allow me to select a handful of note:
- Making Podcasting Easier for the Masses and the FCC Busts Free Radio San Diego (July 22, 2005 – DLARC link) features an interview with Evan Henshaw-Plath, who at the time was working on podcast platform Odeo, which turned out to be the precursor to Twitter.
- The Inspiration for US Micropower Radio, and the Mediageek Radioshow — Mbanna Kantako from the Archives (March, 2004 – DLARC link) features a talk given by the unlicensed micropower radio trailblazer, who inspired many of the activists who took to the airwaves in the 1990s as acts of civil disobedience, protesting the fact that the FCC did not license low-power FM. Arguably this contributed to the motivation for the FCC to create the modern LPFM service in 2000.
- Brattleboro Community Radio – From Unlicensed to LPFM (June 8, 2007 – DLARC link) documents an example of one station that started unlicensed, to serve a public service gap in the community of Brattleboro, and then transitioned to a fully licensed LPFM once the opportunity was opened.
- San Francisco Liberation Radio (May, 2004 – DLARC link) – In fact, I often talked with microbroadcasters operating with out a license, in part because the FCC’s original LPFM order was curtailed by Congress, keeping low-power stations out of most major metroplexes until 2013. This is just one example.
I have another 21 months of shows in my own archives that haven’t been available online consistently for two decades. That’s because they’re from the pre-podcast era, with many episodes hosted on now-defunct Real Audio or other streaming servers. I was less consistent with posting them online, because I didn’t get a podcast feed up and running until 2004. Which, I must claim, was still very early, given that the first one went online less than a half-year prior, July 9, 2003.
Mediageek’s inclusion in the DLARC happened largely by happenstance. Curator Kay Savetz reached out to us at Radio Survivor, asking for permission to archive our podcast and radio show, which has been going since 2015. In turn, we asked Kay to be a guest on our show. As we were wrapping up that recording, mediageek came up, and they asked if I’d be interested in having it archived, too.
Next, I’m making plans to backfill those 2003 – 2003 archives on my radio show website, so that they’ll be available on its RSS feed, and easily ingested to the DLARC, if they’re still interested.
By, the way, if you have any interest in radio history at all, you owe it to yourself to dig into DLARC, which hosts periodicals, newsletters, manuals, as well as podcasts and audio, and other ephemera, all related to amateur radio and communications. Kay takes a pretty broad view of the subject, which makes for some fascinating reading and listening.
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