680 News...help me with my short attention span!
I'm one of those listeners who has fully bought into the 680 News "if you're reading it, it's history...if you're hearing it, it's news" philosophy; I'm a huge fan, particularly of the traffic alerts every ten minutes "on the ones."
My problem...I have a terribly short attention span and I tend to get distracted really easily, particularly when the traffic report comes on. Invariably I tune out of what's on the radio, coming to only when my "periferal hearing" catches the fact that I just missed the traffic update for the route I'm on. Then it's another nine minutes of news headlines (which I've already heard) and, in most cases, tuning out again by the time the traffic report comes on. This process can repeat itself several times and, as it did yesterday, can leave me livid and at a standstill on the DVP.
But I'm not just complaining; I have a solution, and one that I think would be fairly easy to implement. What if 680 recorded each traffic update, posting the recording to a special *680-type number that drivers like me could call in for a traffic update? If I tune out of the traffic report like I normally do, I could simply dial the number and hear a recording of the last update, fully alert and concentrating. Or I could simply dial up the number when I'm first getting in the car.
I'm pretty sure this would be a quick system to implement, and even one that could pay for itself. The recorded reports could be "brought to you" by paid advertisers, and listeners could pay $0.25 or so for the recording (if it were a quarter vs. another nine minutes of rage, I'd pay!).
So, if anyone from 680 is reading this, please help me with my short attention span!
posted by CORCORAN @ 9:14 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
A quick SMS version would be nice too... lemme know if you find something like that. =)
They (680) already do this … except I believe they charge 50¢ per call. I get the impression you get the whole report .. never used it. when in the UK, I used the system there all the time … their cellphone service lets you enter the highway number and voila, you got a report. Only problem with the story is that in the UK you don’t have any/many options if caught in a traffic jam …. So, that service in combination with the on board gps unit, you knew where you were stopped and why.
They also have a neat service which looks like a gps unit but shows highway map and colour codes the congestion pattern. As far as I know, they have had all these services for at least 5 years.
Oooops...looks like my short attention span applied to my research into this functionality too. 680 does in fact have an SMS service already, although to my credit...the really don't promote it at all on the radio. So there.
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