While I was an undergraduate student at Washington University in St. Louis, I was a college radio DJ. I had an absolutely wonderful time working for KWUR 90.3 FM, the school's 10-Watt messenger of music, subculture, and fun. When I graduated and moved to the San Francisco bay area, I found myself missing the excitement and challenge of doing my own radio show.
In February of 2001, I created an Internet-based radio station. It was not too difficult to get a basic Internet radio station setup assembled. I did a few test broadcasts and made sure everything was working as expected. I quickly realized that my radio station would be of little value if I was the only DJ on the air. I did not have the time to broadcast a full 24-hour schedule of programming every day of the week.
It was then that I decided to take the next logical step, and create a distributed radio system where anyone in the world could use my servers to broadcast their radio show to the world. I credit my former show partner Scott Bellgrau for spurring much of my initial brainstorming and creative thought on what could be done with such a system.
The technical steps required to make this vision a reality would occupy the majority of my time for the next several months. By April 2001 I had a basic working system. It did have many flaws but the proof of concept was successfully produced. Since then I have made significant improvements to the system's reliability and feature. OPENdj.com was officially launched on April 11, 2001.
In October 2001 I unleashed the OPENdj.org beast unto the world, opening the entire OPENdj system codebase for anyone to download and use. Now anyone with a little technical expertise could set up and operate their own distributed radio system, just like OPENdj.com.
There are many directions to pursue, there are many features yet to be implemented. This is, by far, the most fun I have ever had doing software design and development. I hope you enjoy your OPENdj experience, whether you are a DJ, a listener, or an OPENdj-system operator!
- jonathan.