The Hindu : Business : On-line radio stations

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, May 30, 2005

Business

Business

On-line radio stations

They let your audio content be uploaded and broadcast

THIS EDITION of NetSpeak explores a new phenomenon, the open source radio, a recent burst on the Net that broadcasts/streams on-line, listener-submitted content.

One of the great innovations nurtured by the Net is the open source software movement that enables netizens with varying skills to contribute to the software development process. The success of this concept in the software arena has led many imaginative minds to try it out in other endeavours as well. In the past, we have seen open source books, open source novels, open source dictionary and the like. The latest product segment trying to embrace this concept is the on-line radio.

You can listen to a radio station depending on your geographical vicinity. By webcasting its programmes, a radio station can expand its reach far and wide. A radio station that transmits its programs through the Net is called on-line radio. There are several on-line radio stations that any one with a speaker and the necessary software can access.

Check out the link: http://tvradionetwork.com that helps you locate various on-line stations.

Like other traditional media, radio stations present programmes produced in-house. This means you are limited to listening whatever these stations broadcast.

In this digital age, recording a programme is not difficult and the widespread popularity of podcasts attests to this. Now, if a station accepts audio content created by its listeners, it can enrich the station's programme mix without incurring any additional cost. Also, it provides ordinary people with an opportunity to express their views/talents. The open source radio KYOURadio (http://kyouradio.com), which commenced its operations a few weeks ago, is based on this model.

KYOUradio's goal is to help you produce radio programmes and be heard. It lets you upload your audio content and have it broadcast by its radio station, provided the content is broadcast worthy. The programmes can be heard on-line if you have a reasonably good Net link. One shortcoming noticed by this author is that the service seems to support only Internet Explorer as he failed to access the service with Firefox.

E-mail encryption

As soon as an e-mail message is sent from your machine you lose control over it. Anyone with proper access rights to your mail server can read the mail. One solution to make your mail secure is to encrypt the message so that only the intended recipient can open it. The free software Keygloo addresses this e-mail security concern by helping you encrypt the content.

To use Keygloo, you need to sign-up with the service, then download and install it. While installing, select the option `Install Keygloo and get a Keygloo number'. During installation, the service provides you a Keygloo number which is associated with an encryption key pair. The key-pair consists of a public key and a private key. The public key component will be stored on the Keygloo server and the private key component will be on your local storage. Using your public key, anyone can lock or encrypt the document while sending it across to you. The file encrypted or locked thus can only be opened with your private key. Provide a password to protect your private key and note down your Keygloo number that will be generated towards the end of the installation process.

Once Keygloo is installed on your machine, apart from sending encrypted e-mail attachments, you can use it for protecting the folders/files on your local storage. The point to note here is that if you want to send an encrypted file to your friend/client, she should have Keygloo installed on her machine too and you should encrypt the file using the Keygloo number of your friend. A file encrypted in this manner can only be decrypted using the recipient's private key.

Personalised Google page

While opening Google, if you can automatically view content from other services such as Gmail and news sites, it can save you quite a bit of time.

Now, you can weave a customised Google home page with content from Gmail inbox and specified news sites, using "Personalise Google" (http://www.google.com/ig), the latest service from Google Labs (http://labs.google.com/).

J. MURALI

Email the author at: jmurali@gmail.com

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