As you may have heard, WiMax is coming to Salt Lake City. (Full disclosure: I am employed by a competitor to Sprint ).

At any rate, there are many — including myself — who believe that while WiMAX is not a particularly turnkey solution for generalized Internet access, it does have very interesting possibilities. Obviously, one of the biggest of those is breaking down the last wall for Internet radio — the automobile.

So, I wanted to share this post with you from one of Florida’s radio gods, Brock Whaley who has been broadcasting since 1971. After 30 years in radio, he thought to himself, “Hmmm, WiMAX + laptop + car + Hawaii == radio heaven?”

You’ll like what he found: read his post for full details

If you have one in working order, you can donate it to us. We need several for broadcasting live events. It doesn’t have to be a particularly powerful machine or even particularly recent. Ideally, we’d find something that’s lightweight and easy to lug around but we’ll make do with whatever you come up with.

Contact me if you have something that might work. We’ll get it of your basement, and we’ll introduce it to nice people and bring it to fun shows. We’ll buy it a beer (OK, a couple beers) and the morning after we’ll even cook it breakfast.

You know you want to — email me and we’ll talk.

Volunteer to be a language translator for UtahFM!

Part of our mission is to serve the community. This means the *whole* community, even those that don’t speak English. If you’d like to spend a few hours helping to translate our website into Spanish, French, Chinese or whatever language you happen to speak, you’ll be helping us expand our reach around our community and around the world. You can work whenever you like and do a bit at a time and you can even collaborate with others who are working on the same language — helping to improve your language skills and theirs.

Interested? Email me and we’ll start talking.

Obviously, Murhpy heard that we added additional redundent Internet connectivity at the studio last night and decided that hardware failure would be the best response. *sigh*

So, if you happen to have a spare SuperMicro Xeon motherboard in your basement that you’re not using….

Apply to be a volutneer hacker with UtahFM. We can’t pay you, but you’ll get to work with cool people, learn a lot, and you can do pretty much whatever the hell you want while becoming a community radio hero. All our code is licensed via Creative Commons and all our our music licensing is done via code that you still need to write, so you’d better hurry up.

What does this means for the future of online radio? Not much in the short run, but if there’s one thing that music licensing companies DO seem to respect — it’s a corporate powerhouse like Clear Channel. Perhaps not co-incidentally, the issue of online music licensing is back in the Senate.

That’s the way you build meaningful and lasting communities. One listener at a time.

While we’ve had a fantastic launch, knowing that people are settling on UtahFM as a part of their media diet is what’s heartening. While I’m a graphing and data visualization nut, it doesn’t mean that I really care all that much about what the raw number of connected listeners is.

What really thrills me about the Internet and about new media specifically is that people are empowered to select just what they want to hear and they can hear it from anywhere. It still amazes me when I notice that somebody is listening to the stream from Hawaii, or from Japan. I suspect it’s the same feeling that Hertz or Marconi must have had when they fired up old spark-gap transmitters for the first time — the feeling that a very small transmission was about to make a very, very big difference.

Remember kids, don’t drink and derive.

UPDATE: I broke the graphs, too. Thanks Andy, for pointing this out. I suck. ;]

If you want one and you’re downtown, just drop by Urban Utah or XMission Internet and shout, “Hey, give me the loot!”

OK, don’t shout that exactly. You’ll scare people. But do come by and ask for a sticker.

Just be polite.

This says everything you need to know about community radio.

Slightly out of focus, a little thrown together, but in the end you hit your stride and find that transition between tracks, straddled between something that’s about to end and something that’s just beginning — the perfect fade.