jake's blog
Komal in the Boston Globe
Today's Boston Globe has a nice feature on Komal Trivedi, Round 1 Talent Quest finalist.
BRIGHTON -- Fueled by a cup of hot chai, Komal Trivedi is blasting out bhangra beats from a claustrophobic basement radio studio at Boston College. The disc jockey likes her music loud, so loud that the bass booming from the two large speakers above her head sounds as if it could burst her eardrums at any moment.
delicious
diggRound 3 is live - let the voting begin!
The Round 3 entries in the Public Radio Talent Quest are now live!
You can get to them by clicking on a contestant's name over in the right hand column of every page, or from the home page of the site.
Our seven semi-finalists did a fantastic job with their interviews, as you'll hear for yourself.
And a big thanks to the public radio stations who contributed studio time and the talents of their own local hosts for the "interviewee" segment.
Now we are asking you to help vote and comment on them as we narrow the field to 5 people to move on to Round 4, which is the final elimination round.
[prtq] Weekend America on the semifinalists
Bill Radke (pictured here on the right, and a masterful host himself, to be sure) interviewed me for the segment.
One correction from the story: there were over 136,000 votes in Round One, not voters, which I believe numbered around 15,000.
[prtq] Round 2 here we come!
Ok everybody, time to get a move on to the next round of the Quest.
This is kind of the obstacle course phase of the Talent Quest (hence the "muddy buddy" photo), where we put our 10 finalists through their hosting paces and test some basic skills.
NOTE: The Round 2 challenges are for the 10 finalists and only their entries for this round will be accepted for voting and judging on the site.
There will be three main tasks each finalist will have to complete, resulting in a single combined audio entry posted to the site for popular voting and judging.
And Here They Are!
And here they are!
At long last! Ladies and Gentlemen, we present to you: the ten semi-finalists selected from one thousand, four hundred and fifty two entries to the Public Radio Talent Quest.
From left to right, row one then two in the pictures above (click the links to see their new profiles):
re-entry update
You may notice the total entry count edging upwards over the next day or two. After much wrangling and disentangling we were able to come up with a way to accept resubmission of entries that didn't get in last weekend due to the traffic overload.
We've contacted everyone whose submissions were already logged - we are not accepting any new entries - and have given them an opportunity to re-upload the audio they'd already created. My apologies for the delay and confusion in sorting this out. Onward and upward.
- Jake
Tag cloud of entries by state
Tag cloud for why you should be on public radio
Here are the 100 most frequently used words from 91,362 used by contestants to answer the question 'Why should you be on public radio?".
(the font size for each word represents its frequency, for example "radio" was used 1,406 times and "young" was used 50 times)
(generated by TagCrowd.com
Feel free to modify as long as you keep this notice.
The mad dash to the finish line
We all had our public and private guesses about how many entries we'd get for the Talent Quest, but none of us anticipated the flurry of activity over the weekend and through Monday. When I checked in Sunday morning we had about 800 entries, and by Monday at midnight we had 1368.
In tech terms, we served up nearly 112,000 page views on Monday and handled over 500 2 minute (2MB) contest submissions while over 10 thousand voters continued to listen, vote and comment on contest entries. We also served up 30GB of data running at a constant 5MB/second. That's 2 full contest entries being downloaded every second all day long, a pace which has hardly let up since. Our hosting provider Contegix performed admirably under the circumstances.
More about PRX
Hi Questers,
We've just finished a nifty animated introduction to PRX and I thought I'd post it here to give everyone a better sense of the organization behind the Talent Quest.
You can go here to get links and code for posting this on your own site or blog.
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