The Gang was goofing around in our pre-show emails signing off with “Breaker Breaker 19 Good Buddy” using 1970’s CB (citizen’s band) Radio talk.
Poking around ahead of the show led us to reading this article about the CB radio ‘bubble’ we experienced and the reason this form of communication exploded on to the scene: “Following the 1973 oil crisis, the U.S. government imposed a nationwide 55 mph speed limit, and fuel shortages and rationing were widespread. CB radio was often used to locate service stations with a supply of gasoline, to notify other drivers of speed traps, and to organize blockades and convoys in a 1974 strike protesting the new speed limit and other trucking regulations.”
The Burt Reynolds movie Smokey and the Bandit was one (and what some term unfortunate) result of the huge CB radio boom in the 1970’s and really shows how it permeated our culture at the time in many ways like Twitter is today with CNN and Oprah jumping in and using it as Twitter grows like crazy…even though quitting Twitter is perhaps the new trend.
It got us to thinking about how much human communication and connection has changed since then and even how Twitter might be construed as ‘the CB radio of the internet age’. No question we have many ways to connect with one another and we talk about some of those in this show, how to achieve higher quality communications, consider what happens if we need to virtualize our communications even more today since most people are not preparing their families, companies or work processes in the event of a crisis (e.g., swine flu, terrorist attack, etc.). As always, we wander off on tangents that seem logical at the time!
Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins (our buddy Phil Wilson is off today).
The Podcast
Podcast: Download (Duration: 39:46 — 23.1MB)
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“Discussed During the Show” Notes:
+ NetBriefings, OnePlace, Yugma, Minnedemo
+ GLUE Conference (and contacting Graeme (email) about the two free passes he has)
+ Leo Laporte using a new Friendfeed groups feature to have chat accompany the TwitLive netcasts
+ Biz Borsch, 20 year old daughter of Steve, in community management with Social Media Eyes (launching soon)
+ Graeme uses TweetGrid for monitoring specific Twitter mentions of a keyword
+ Innovation Accelerator, Kim Garretson, and a new offering he’s ‘accelerating’, Involver
+ A good story that encapsulates the 1970’s CB Radio boom in an entertaining way.