For a while now, I’ve been supporting the British Wireless for the Blind Fund; so it was a nice surprise to be invited to the launch of a new ‘product’ of theirs yesterday in Maidstone.

The point of the British Wireless for the Blind Fund is that it provides radio sets to registered visually-impaired people in the UK. They’re supplied free of charge to those with a means-tested benefit; or are available to purchase by people who don’t qualify for a free set. As someone who’s been involved with radio for over twenty years, it’s always a pleasure to hear from people who are blind, and for whom radio gives them their best contact.

This set is rather fine. It contains radio stations (local and international); podcasts; audio books, talking newspapers and even audio catalogues from bright retailers like M&S and Argos. (I had no idea such things existed). And the clever bit – you can control it completely using the ‘OK’ button and listening to the prompts (though there are a few more to speed the process up a little). The video above with John Mills, the Technology Manager of the Fund, shows the unit in operation – and you’ll note that it’s simpler than anything you’ll have seen before.

This obviously replaces spoken-word cassettes (which are still used for distribution of talking newspapers), as well as opening up a much larger amount of audio for listeners. In case you wondered, the pre-programmed list of stations can be set on the listeners’ behalf (and changed just by picking up the phone and asking nicely). It can also be set to receive audio messages from others – perhaps if you’re part of a group.

For the more technical: currently, the radio station list is programmed by the Dutch company behind the unit. It would help, immeasurably, if broadcasters produced XML files with details of the radio stations: particularly, XML files with information on how to pronounce the names of the radio stations. (”WINS 1010″ could be pronounced “double-yew eye enn ess one oh one oh” otherwise, which would be entirely wrong – the correct pronunciation is “Winns ten-ten”.) Hopefully the IMDA can assist. And, secondly, this unit would be also good if it recognised when stations were also available on local broadcast platforms rather than the internet, and thus switch to conserve bandwidth for the user and the broadcaster accordingly. The technology behind that, naturally, is already being worked on separately).

It’s a very impressive unit: for a very deserving part of the population. If you’d like one, it’s available for purchase, but if you like the idea of making this available, free of charge, to those it would really benefit, it would be great if you, like me, could donate to the British Wireless for the Blind fund. You can do so via PayPal – and your money’s worth more if you are a UK taxpayer.

.

Here’s a transcript of the video, because it’s a good idea; and I’ve just added subtitles to the video as well (for similar reasons).

Interviewer: I’m with John Mills, who’s the Technology Manager for the British Wireless for the Blind Fund. What is this piece of technology?

John: This is British Wireless for the Blind Fund’s latest rendition of radio: It’s called a Sonata. It’s actually an internet radio. It’s capable of accessing any radio station anywhere on the planet but it’s very unique because it will also access other forms of audio such as audio books, audio catalogues local and national talking newspapers, that kind of thing.

Interviewer: And it’s specifically built for people with poor vision, isn’t it?

John: This was originally designed in Holland for people who were homeridden stuck at home and weren’t able to get to church, and it progressed from there. It’s now being completely redone for people who are visually impaired to make it as easy as possible to access the programming or the news about their local area that they need.

Interviewer: It’s wired up to the internet now, so shall we try tuning in to Radio 2 on it and see if we can get the delightful tones of Chris Evans?

John: #laughter Well, let’s see if we can get there!

John: It’s as simple as this – we switch on… and it connects to the server in Holland. You will then hear a voice

Radio: “Welcome to the Wireless Fund Internet Audio Service. Press the OK button when you hear the subject of your choice”

John: Now it reads out a list

Radio: “Radio Stations and Podcasts”

John: …which we go into

Radio: “You have chosen: Radio Stations and Podcasts.”
“You can choose from the following.”
“Radio Stations”
#click

John: Now we’ll hear an electronic voice…

“This list contains 9 items.”
“BBC Radio Kent.”
“CNN Radio (News)”
“FOX News Talk (News)”
“BBC Radio 1″
“BBC Radio 2″
#click

John: And it’s now going to buffer for some seconds… …and that’s done.

#music plays

…and it really is that simple.

Interviewer: That’s really nice: John, thank you very much.

John: You’re more than welcome: hope you’ve enjoyed it!

Permalink | No comment
Post tags: blind, bwbf, radio, sonata
These are my personal views | Full disclosure

You’ve probably noticed a lack of discussion about beer in this blog.

I had a chance discussion with Francis Currie over dinner a few weeks ago. I was talking to him about business cards, saying that mine (which have beer on the back) will probably need to be reprinted for the Muslim countries I’m visiting; and then that I should probably think about not blogging about beer any more, because that confuses my ‘brand’ – that is, confuses my ‘radio futurologist’ brand if occasionally I pop along and discuss beer.

He agreed with me that it would confuse my personal ‘brand’. But he then said an interesting thing. ‘We can have more than one personal brand.’

Oh yes!

So, welcome to a brand new beer blog – Beertweet. It has all the beer postings I’ve made here over the past year, and will henceforth contain more beer postings. If you’re into your beer, too, then I’d be rather happy to have a few co-writers. No money in it for you. Yet.

(I’ll still cross-post occasionally to there from here.)

That website again: Beertweet.

And, here’s an almost exclusive for you – something to do with a new Guinness television ad. Excellent!

Permalink | 2 comments
Post tags: beer
These are my personal views | Full disclosure

In preparation for my round the world trip, you’ll spot a new piece of micro-information on my front page: my current location. I’m taking this information from Google Latitude.

Google has a hidden API for this service – here – and I’m using this with a poorly-written piece of PHP, which you’ll find here.

Lots of people asked on Twitter how I did it… so this is how.

Hurray.

Permalink | 4 comments
Post tags: api, geolocation, latitude, location, php
These are my personal views | Full disclosure

I hadn’t appreciated, until I watched the above video from Joan Warner (the CEO of Commercial Radio Australia) how the launch of DAB+ was achieved earlier this year in Australia.

Watch it. The amount of coverage of this story was incredible – all over the television, and impossible to ignore.

When was the last time you saw this amount of coverage for the radio – and unprompted discussions of the features (pausing, rewinding) by news hosts? Quite awe-inspiring.

(I’m grateful to Joan for letting me steal her DVD and post it here)

Permalink | 4 comments
Post tags: australia, coverage, DAB, digital, marketing, news, radio
These are my personal views | Full disclosure

The latest RAJAR figures are interesting, and doubtless there are lots of blog posts getting excited about Heart or Capital.

I’m interested about the smaller stations – because they are the most popular radio stations in the UK; at least, if you look at the amount of listening in their area.

Manx Radio (in the Isle of Man) is now the UK’s most popular radio station – in terms of total listeners. Island FM (in Guernsey) is the UK’s most popular radio station – in terms of total listening share. Radio has a fantastic place in these types of communities – probably helped by the lack of alternative relevant media.

And lest we think this only goes for locally-programmed radio stations, the list also shows another local radio station with a high amount of listeners in its own area – which might surprise…

Permalink | 3 comments
Post tags: communities, figures, radio, RAJAR
These are my personal views | Full disclosure

Mark Ramsey suggests in a recent blog post that:

One of the capabilities baked into the digital environment is the ability to efficiently target by matching consumers to the messages that are most relevant for them. [But] the vast majority of radio companies are surrendering this [...] because they are not requiring registration to their websites and/or streams.

Mark says, as a ‘reality check’, that 100% of Pandora’s listeners are registered, and asks: “how many of yours are?”

Well. The real reality check is that Pandora offers a user something better than the offer of slightly more relevant advertisements, of course. There’s a damn good reason to register to Pandora, because it needs to remember your information in order to work. Pandora asks for email/password, plus birth year, US ZIP code and gender, incidentally.

Mark’s claim that 100% of Pandora users are registered might as well also claim that 100% of Hotmail’s users are registered – it’s not comparable. And just like you don’t need to register to listen to radio on any other platform, I’d hope you’re not thinking about hiding your radio station behind a registration wall on the web. It’s madness to hide the prime product from people who might be trialling it for the very first time.

However, Mark probably has a point hidden in his madness. You see – websites shouldn’t bully people to register. Instead, websites should encourage listeners to sign in with a ton of great reasons (preferably premium reasons).

So how are we doing with this encouragement to register? Here’s two large UK broadcasters telling us why I should sign up to their website:

(Station 1): If you haven’t signed up for our newsletter yet then you’re missing out on bundles of exclusive comps and offers. We’ve already announced some exclusive Elton John news and are giving away a Blu-Ray disc player.

(Station 2): You’ll have an exclusive opportunity to purchase tickets to our events before they go on general sale. You’ll receive our newsletter, containing all the latest station news and exclusive event information, cool competitions and credit-crunch beating special offers! Plus all the dull form-filling will be done for you when you enter a competition.

Wow. Hardly excitement-inducing; mind, the BBC doesn’t even seem to bother to want to sign anyone up at all (though, being fair, I know it has interesting things planned in this area).

In fact, there are only a few stations doing registration well.

Absolute Radio have a raft of good reasons to sign up (and, after all, their site offers a ton of interesting content opportunities). However, their registration process is fairly invasive; it asks a lot of rather detailed questions, including how many children I have at home, what business I work in, and what my job title is. I’m signing up to a radio station website, not a bank.

My favourite – though I’m hardly in the target demo – is KISS, which has a good, content-rich page with lots of reasons to register; much of their premium content looks like it’s hidden behind a registration wall, though certainly not the radio station itself. The ‘upgrade’ concept is nice; the writing is nicely on-target, and unlike Absolute it’s not asking for the name of my first-born, or my girth measurement.

If we are expecting people to sign up and register, perhaps we should bully less and encourage more. But you can only encourage people if you’ve some damn good reasons. And much though I like vague news about Elton John, or the opportunity to spend my money faster, that’s not good enough reasons for me to spend ten minutes registering on your site.

.

(Small bit of honesty: I coded the silly demographic questions as part of my original work on the sign-in code now used by Absolute Radio; although I made them optional pieces of information, and pushed the marketing team back from asking even more silly questions. Perhaps I should have pushed back harder.)

Permalink | 2 comments
Post tags: email, marketing, radio, registrations, spam
These are my personal views | Full disclosure

I was taken aside by an important person in the radio industry about three months ago. “Now, James,” he said, “you really must stop wanting everyone to listening to radio over the internet.” He started telling me about portability, and cost of receivers, internet connections, etc, before I stopped him. I believe no such thing.

Others claim I’ve a rabidly anti-internet radio position – preferring DAB to internet.

I’ve repeatedly said that I actually don’t care how people listen. I’m more concerned with whether they listen at all. And to ensure people listen, you need to make radio available on multiple platforms.

Recently I mentioned RAJAR research that internet radio listening is just 2.2%, and called that figure “tiny”. This rankled with someone, who gave arguments about RAJAR not including, in their main survey, on-demand services, personalised radio and podcasts; and a question of whether non-subscribers and international radio are measured. It’s a well-worn argument, so it’s a worthwhile exercise to work out what the ‘real’ figures might be.

On-demand at the BBC accounts for 26% of online radio listening (according to Mark Friend in a speech at the Radio Festival); and if you were to optimistically assume that every other radio service also runs on-demand listening to the same degree (they don’t), that might give you an extra 0.6% of total radio listening.

RAJAR’s separate research on platforms shows that 3.9 million people claim to have (ever) listened to personalised radio like last.fm and Spotify. That’s only 23% of the 16.9 million people who’ve (ever) listened to internet radio as a whole; and assuming people listen to last.fm or Spotify the same length as traditional radio – probably not very realistic – that might be another 0.5% of listening.

RAJAR also measure podcasts in this research. The typical podcast listener, they say, listens to just over an hour a week; and there are 7.8 million podcast listeners. That’s 8 million hours, then, to podcasts, compared to over 1 billion hours of radio listening a week – or, if you like it better that way, 0.7% of total radio listening.

RAJAR does measure non-subscribers or internet-only radio stations. It’s there, under ‘other listening’, in the main RAJAR figures. “Other” accounts for 2.7% of total radio listening – which could be FM listening to pirates or community stations, just as much as it could be internet listening. Taking a 50% share of this for internet radio would be optimistic, though would add 1.4% to total internet radio listening.

So, even if you did agree that RAJAR “misses” much internet radio listening, it’s interesting to note that adding these perceived “misses” gives you a wildly optimistic 5.4% of total radio listening over the internet; still considerably lower than DAB (13.1%), and not much higher than listening over the TV (3.3%). I’d still maintain that 5.4% is tiny.

Now.

There’s another way to check our figures, of course; and that’s to use actual published figures for internet radio listening, rather than rely on RAJAR’s research.

RAJAR claims that ‘all BBC’ has 561,706,000 total listening hours of live radio per week; and if RAJAR is correct, listening to live internet radio is 2.2% of total hours. That should be 12,357,532 weekly online hours.

The BBC’s site says that in August 2009, people listened to live BBC radio for 18,470,176 total hours online. That figure’s monthly; a weekly equivalent (by simply dividing by 31 and multiplying by 7) is 4,170,684 total hours. Which isn’t 2.2% of all listening. It’s actually 0.7%.

Which begs two questions…

1. Is the BBC significantly underperforming the industry as a whole online? It accounts for 54% of all radio listening, so does that mean that commercial radio has 6% of all their radio listening online? (Perhaps this is true – Absolute appears to have 10%, according to their recently published online figures).

2. Are the internet radio industry significantly over-estimating exactly how many people are listening through the internet?

I don’t know the answer; and given my track record in increasing quality and reach of internet radio stations, I’m quite interested in what the deal is here.

Permalink | 3 comments
Post tags: internet, online, radio, RAJAR, research
These are my personal views | Full disclosure

[The original posting of this was hijacked by a well-known industry harasser. I'm reposting it here so you can read it without the bile.]

Back in 2002 the Capital Radio Group took the step of releasing their online audience figures for streaming radio.

A quick Google search doesn’t reveal the actual figure, but it was a very long figure, in the billions possibly. On looking into the figures more closely, it turned out that it was quoted in terms of total seconds of audio streamed. Across all Capital Radio Group stations. Including archive audio as well as live audio.

The figures were completely useless. It was impossible to compare them with Virgin Radio’s figures, where I worked at the time, and impossible to compare them with the BBC, who were beginning to also publish their own figures; let alone the obvious comparison with RAJAR. I attended a few ABCe meetings to try and rescue this incompatibility, before the ABCe realised that Virgin Radio were no longer members of the organisation, and politely asked us for some money, which we didn’t have.

Since then, it’s been difficult to compare online audience figures. There are differing methodologies, and the plethora of differing streaming technologies don’t help either; and while third-party streaming measurement companies do exist (and are becoming increasingly sophisticated), radio’s reliance on RAJAR as its primary trading currency – which already includes online listening – means that stations generally wouldn’t pay third-parties for expensive monitoring.

All that has changed – and changed this morning.

The BBC has published online statistics (for radio only, oddly) for quite some time now, using its own iStats tool, and other pieces of software, to calculate these figures. Working with colleagues across the corporation, I was keen to share the methodology behind these figures with commercial partners: firstly, because the BBC had clearly done a lot of thinking in this area, and secondly, to enable sensible referencing between numbers for other broadcasters. In short, I was really keen to ensure that we didn’t have a new broadcaster quoting total aggregate seconds at me.

It might have finally come to fruition after I’d left, but I’m delighted to note that the ever innovative Absolute Radio have today published their own stats; and the methodology they’ve used to produce them. They’re not completely comparable; but they’re in the right ballpark; and are using the same language as the BBC to enable easy reference. Adam Bowie, the station’s strategy man, has blogged about that this morning. Kudos and pats on the back are also due to the BBC’s Alan Phillips and Alex Giletti, who I know worked this through – and all those on the BBC’s MMB (that’s the Multiplatform Measurement Board, I think) who agreed the principle after reading a scrappy paper that I wrote in Alan’s absence.

Internet radio listening in the UK is compartively tiny. But if we can use the same language, and work out our numbers in the same way, it will help internet radio, and multiplatform radio of all guises, gain the traction it deserves.

And, lest we miss the obvious, it’s another example of agree on technology, compete on content.

Permalink | 4 comments
Post tags: audience, internet, online, radio
These are my personal views | Full disclosure

I’ve moved the original post, which discussed internet radio measurement, here, so you can avoid the unpleasantness of Steve’s responses (and my robust replies).

One para from the original post, which I’ve edited in the repost, is relevant to this:
Internet radio listening in the UK is tiny – RAJAR reports it’s 2.2%, compared to 13.1% for DAB or over 75% for analogue radio – so we’re talking small numbers here still. But if we can use the same language, and work out our numbers in the same way, it will help internet radio, and multiplatform radio of all guises, gain the traction it deserves.

And now, apologies, but Steve Green is about to start ranting about this small paragraph.

Permalink | 124 comments
Post tags: dab sounds worse than fm, digitalradiotech, green, harassment, homophobe, racist, steve, steve green
These are my personal views | Full disclosure

Ubuntu 9.10 ‘Karmic Koala’ comes out in just seven days. As it ships (at least, as the beta ships), it comes with Firefox 3.5 – which, for the Ubuntu Netbook Remix (the ‘UNR’ version), isn’t quite optimised for a small screen, such as on my Acer Aspire One. Here’s how I make the screen space rather bigger.

1. Right-click the three preset bookmarks on the Bookmark Toolbar and delete them. (Firefox checks your Live Bookmarks, which two of these presets are, every hour for updates. That’s additional bandwidth use you probably don’t want, particularly if you’re on a metered connection.)
2. Under the ‘View’ menu, select ‘Toolbars’, and deselect ‘bookmarks’.
3. Install Tiny Menu. This replaces your menu bar with just one entry. We’ll configure it better in a tick.
4. Also, install autoHideStatusbar. This is an ‘experimental’ add-on, but has worked well for me.
5. You might also want to uninstall the ‘webfav’ add-on, while you’re here: there’s a good reason why coming in just a minute.
6. Restart Firefox.
7. Oooh, look, the menu bar has been replaced with something saying ‘Menu’. Click ‘Menu’, ‘View’, ‘Toolbars’ then ‘Customise’.
8. Click ‘use small icons’ in the customise window that appears. Keep the customise window open, but pull it to one side: then drag the buttons on the main navigation toolbar up to be next to ‘Menu’ in the menu bar, as in the screenshot. Do this one by one, starting on the left.
9. Now – if you didn’t uninstall ‘webfav’ in point 5, you’ll still have a silly heart logo here. The problem is that this is made badly, and will make your menu bar taller than it needs to be. I also, frankly, found it pointless. We can hide it by leaving it in the Navigation Toolbar for now.
10. Finally, click ‘done’ in the customise window, followed by ‘Menu’ ‘View’ ‘Toolbars’ and deselect the ‘Navigation Toolbar’.
11. (later) Oh, and there’s one more thing to change… ‘Menu’ ‘Edit’ ‘Preferences’… go to the ‘tabs’ pane… and uncheck ‘Always show the tab bar’. If you’ve only one tab open, it’ll not even bother with the tab bar.

You’ll note that you have a much larger screen to play with as a result (up to six or seven extra lines of text); that everything works as expected, and that you still have a completely unhobbled version of Firefox to play with.

As a matter of interest: everything works on Ubuntu 9.10 on the Acer Aspire One straight from installation; even the little wifi light comes on. Oooh.

Permalink | 4 comments
Post tags: firefox, how to, netbook, notebook, screen-estate, screenspace, ubuntu
These are my personal views | Full disclosure

Tonight, as a judge and trustee, I’m off to The Radio Academy’s Promotion & Marketing Awards. It’s at a place I’ve never been before in Great Portland Street, and I’m hoping to bump into a lot of old friends and have a good evening. While the Sony Radio Academy Awards are good, it’s always good to see some of the rest of the craft in radio in more specialised awards, and I’m looking forward to discovering some neat ideas.

However, this isn’t actually a blog posting about the P&M Awards. It’s a blog posting about a blog posting about the P&M Awards, a kind of recursive blog-will-eat-itself posting, much like the BBC’s inevitable Editor’s Blog posting about the BBC news coverage of the BBC Trust decision about whether the BBC Question Time discussion with the BNP’s Nick Griffin should go ahead. (Oooh, topical. Excellent. Come, Google spider, come.)

The blog posting I’m typing about is Steve Martin’s interview with Trevor Dann; and it’s very interesting for two reasons.

It’s out before the event.
It would have been easy for Steve to take an audio recorder to the P&Ms, and interview Trevor; publishing it the next day. However, it would have been lost in the noise of the award winners, and would have obviously included chats about the winners and nobody else. By publishing before the event, it builds excitement and buzz about the event, and will draw traffic because it clearly contains clues as to who has won and who hasn’t. Maybe. It’s probably no surprise, then, that radio news websites have picked up on it.

It has a transcript
This is the main brilliance of this post.
1. Google can’t index your audio. It can’t. Trevor’s mention of Radio City’s “Make My Day” feature would not have appeared on Google if Steve had only posted the audio. Yet, Google can index text. And does. And has.
2. I can read faster than real-time. So, I was able to flick through this interview without, bless him, listening to Trevor’s voice, discovering what he was talking about, in a much more efficient way than simply listening to the audio.
3. It’s surprisingly cheap to do. Transcribing a ten-minute interview in this way looks as if it might have cost around £20, judging from a quick Google search. If you want to put a little more work in, it could be even cheaper. This is not outside your price range; and it’s something that can easily be outsourced to India or similar areas.

What surprises me, therefore, is why more radio stations don’t transcribe their interviews. While I enjoyed the Chris Evans interview yesterday at Absolute Radio, or the programme called The Interview on the BBC World Service, why not transcribe these, too, to add to their Google-ability? And why do we treat our audience’s time so poorly, expecting them to sit through twenty minutes of audio instead of ten minutes of speed-reading? Is that good user-experience?

As ever, your thoughts are welcome. Incidentally, you’ll now see feedback from Twitter, Digg, and a few other places in my comments, courtesy of a new plugin I’ve discovered. Hopefully this’ll enable you to discover new people to follow on Twitter, too.

Permalink | 7 comments
Post tags: radio, radio-academy, transcription
These are my personal views | Full disclosure

Another magical thing from One Golden Square Labs has just surfaced: Compare my radio.

It’s yet another comparison site. But this time, it’s not for car insurance, or, indeed, for small mammals from the mongoose family. It’s for music radio.

Last.fm tells me that I am a fan of The Beatles, The Eels, and the Divine Comedy. Compare My Radio tells me that The Beatles are most played on Absolute Classic Rock; that NME Radio has a particular penchant for The Eels; and that the Divine Comedy’s natural home is BBC 6 Music. I would never have thought of listening to NME Radio, it should be said, for the type of music I’m into. Good work, CompareMyRadio.

What’s more interesting is the website’s comparison of some of the radio stations. No surprise that Heart in London, and Heart in the East Midlands, share 96% of their playlist. More interesting that Absolute Radio and Rock Radio share 66% of theirs; and I find it, as a non-music programmer, quite interesting that XFM and NME Radio in London are poles apart: sharing only 27% of their playlists. And it’s all done with a rather lovely user interface – including the delightfulness of sparklines. Yay for sparklines! ;)

This is a brave move by Absolute Radio, the company behind this new website. It’s carefully not branded by Absolute; indeed, as my figures show, it’s not recommending the main Absolute Radio service to me at all. Doubtless it’ll ruffle feathers – while it’s using open data, I’ll bet some stations won’t be particularly pleased about their playlists being dissected in this way (though they’d be mad to complain, it should be said).

It would, of course, be better if the service was able to recommend me a radio station by looking at my last.fm profile or my iTunes library data, rather than individual artists. And, given that many programmes on BBC Radio run very different music policies, it might be nice to split this data to programme level (though that’s made rather more difficult to do because radio stations have to date been pretty poor at sharing programme data in an open way).

Notwithstanding that, this is a really interesting piece of work into the output of the UK’s major radio stations – stations that between them are listened-to by over 50% of the population. One Golden Square Labs should, once more, be congratulated.

Of course, I’m reminded of the work that the BBC did in this area over a year ago (during the ‘Mashed!’ hack weekend). Testing the recommendation service, I punched in my last.fm profile, and the information that came back was that I might rather enjoy the Russell Brand show on BBC Radio 2. If only I could have enjoyed the purile rubbish that came between the songs…

(Full disclosure: most of Golden Square Labs worked for me at one stage, and are friends of mine; and I saw Compare My Radio before general release, and told them to put a ‘listen to’ button in there. They have. Hurray.)

Permalink | 11 comments
Post tags: absolute, absoluteradio, comparemyradio, one-golden-square-labs, radio
These are my personal views | Full disclosure

Making things shorter than they really are might be rather good fun (just look at what Newsnight did to little Hazel Blears above), but it’s also rather useful for text-limited things like Twitter.

Using bit.ly or tinyurl or j.mp or other thinks like that are all just fine, but you’re putting your links at risk; since you don’t control where those links go. tr.im announced earlier this year that they were going to close down; Digg changed their short links to go to different places depending whether you were signed in to Digg or not; and doubtless we’re all waiting for another provider of a shortlink service to fall over and die as well, or replace all your links with spam.

I’ve been using my own shortlink service, at muk.fm, for a while now; and have just added a Tweetie2 compatible API to it – and open-sourced the code.

You’ll find my code by using my link-shortener to get there: it’s at http://muk.fm/4l9.

Feedback is welcome, of course; but feel free to use it as you see fit.

Permalink | No comment
Post tags: bit.ly, code, j.mp, links, php, short, shorten, tr.im
These are my personal views | Full disclosure

What do Virgin Radio and GCap Media have in common? They both ran their websites on their own, custom-built, content management system (and continue to do so in their new corporate guises).

Virgin Radio’s content management system, called simply the “CDS” (and you thought calling things after initials was just a BBC thing), started development in 2002. It’s entirely home-grown, written in PHP mostly by Duncan Amey, the clever software engineer there. It’s developed and designed to ensure that database calls are kept to a minimum on the live site; and the CDS writes mostly flat pages to the webserver. It was developed to work together with the playout system and various other tools within the radio station. Some of it managed to parse flat output from other systems.

GCap’s content management system is called “Gusto”. Started in around 2005, I’d guess, it’s written in Django, a high-level Python framework – and, again, much of it is homegrown, though they contributed heavily back to the Django project, partially due to Simon Willison’s hard work. Once more, it’s specifically written for the needs of a radio station, as I understand it (though I’ve not seen it working behind the scenes).

(added): Gusto was actually started in mid 2007. Prior to Gusto awas IKE (Ike Knows Everything), which was a GWR Group CMS, doing websites, DLS and SMS as well.

Oh, and the BBC has its own, too – IPS (which they’re phasing out), and a host of others.

So, if you’re starting from scratch, writing a complex radio station website – should you do as they did, and write your own website content management system?

It might surprise you to learn that there’s one major-market radio station which is not using its own complicated code – or buying a CMS in from companies like MediaSpan. Instead, they’ve used free tools available on the web to completely reengineer how they do their website – moving away from their own tools, and the headache of keeping them going, to using open-source tools that hundreds of people are writing.

And, thinking about it: why would you want to run a membership, “VIP”, service, when you’ve got Facebook Connect there? Why subject your users with the hassle of signing into yet another service – and your web designers and developers with the hassle of writing the system behind it – when you could do the job just as effectively in Facebook, Twitter, or a variety of systems that your listeners will probably already be signed up to?

At this year’s Radio At The Edge – tickets available now – you can find out who that radio station is – and why using open tools to create your website (and, come to that, open content to add to it) is getting more and more important.

After all: why concentrate on the tech, when you can concentrate on the content?

Permalink | 11 comments
Post tags: content, django, php, radio, websites
These are my personal views | Full disclosure

By way of an update: I have had lots of invitations (many thanks, all); and my current itinerary looks like…

Nov 12-20: New York, Washington DC
Nov 20-26: Ottowa, Montreal, Toronto
Nov 26-Dec3: Vancouver, Seattle
Dec 4 for a week or so: San Francisco

…then in the new year, I’m doing
Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Melbourne, Sydney, and Mumbai.

If I’m coming anywhere near you in the first half of my trip, do shout, and we’ll fix some dates up; and for the second half, I hope to firm up this itinerary very shortly.

I’m rather excited. And rather nervous – particularly of the long far-eastern stint. I’ll keep you posted.

Permalink | One comment
Post tags:
These are my personal views | Full disclosure

What have Heart, NME Radio, Capital, Absolute Radio, Planet Rock, Gold, BBC Radio 1, Fun Kids, Traffic Radio, and many more stations in the UK have in common?

They’re already making images to go alongside radio. Not just text, but full, glossy images, ripe for monetising but more importantly retaining radio’s relevance on new, multimedia devices.

Earlier this year, BBC Radio 5 Live did some fascinating trials into “visualising radio”, as they call it. Fresh from trying it on pop music radio, the much harder job of visualising the Simon Mayo show went really rather well – with a ton of learnings in the process as to what worked editorially, and what didn’t. The BBC spent a ton of time working on this, so you don’t have to. So, it would be great if we could all find out how the trial went, wouldn’t it? The irrepressibly good-humoured Brett Spencer from the station will be discussing it at Radio At The Edge this year; along with others who’ve been looking into the possibilities of radio with pictures; and one manufacturer that’s delivered it, using an open technology produced by industry collaboration.

Radio At The Edge is on the 9th November in London. What do you think – is radio with pictures crap telly, or great radio?

Permalink | One comment
Post tags: radio, radio-at-the-edge, visualisation
These are my personal views | Full disclosure

Listen to the new radio stations on your DAB Digital Radio, or your HD Radio, and I bet you’ll hear two different types of radio station.

The first is another radio station that sounds just like the station you got on FM. It’s got a breakfast show, and a drivetime show, and news at the top of the hour, probably, and competitions and things.

The other is a radio station that sounds… different. In London, I can hear Traffic Radio – a never-ending loop of commuter misery thinly disguised as travel news; I can hear Chill, a relaxing radio station playing nothing but Morcheeba and Air, with little commercial content; I can hear dabbl, a user-generated radio station currently playing live music.

One of the most interesting things coming out of the US and Australia is the variety of different radio stations appearing – as experiments – on ’side-channels’, as the Americans like to call them. The ABC in Australia have recently broadcast temporary, short-lived stations around the moon landing and Woodstock; Austereo announced a station themed around Pink (the artist, not a gay station, not a breast cancer awareness station, not that any of those is less valid).

Radio in the UK can be slightly less innovative. I’m perplexed why BBC Radio 7 schedules its comedy to finish at 1.00pm on Saturday – just when the comedy has finished on its sister station BBC Radio 4. Surely the schedules should be complementary? “And, if you fancy some more comedy, you’ll find that Comedy Controller is just about to start over on BBC Radio 7″. No?

And even how we assemble programmes is seemingly stuck in the FM world. Why do we make music programmes that are three hours long, rather than pieces of content that are assembled into a music programme that is three hours long but can also be assembled into other, more personalised services?

When it comes to the rulebook for programming digital radio, isn’t this the best opportunity to rip it up and start again?

Radio At The Edge this year (9th November in London – book here) has a session all about this. What are your thoughts? If we know what works, why change it? Or does new platforms give us new ideas for the future?

Permalink | 3 comments
Post tags: programming, radio, rules
These are my personal views | Full disclosure

Attention. This is a rant alert.

If you’re going to send email out, make sure it’s relevant to what someone has asked for. I used Tesco Compare a while back for a car insurance quote – and today they sent me an email for mortgages. I’ve no interest in your mortgage offers, Tesco, and would never have said I was. Irrelevant advertising means that you’ll be marked by me as spam, and by my head as an irritant and a bad company.

If you’re going to send irrelevant email, then ensure that your unsubscribe link is either a simple one-click affair (like Media UK’s – click and it’s done); or at the very least, takes you to a settings page which already has your email address in it for your email settings (like Absolute Radio’s, I happen to know, since I coded it). You have sent me a personalised email: there is no excuse not to give a personalised unsubscribe link.

If you’re going to let people unsubscribe, asking for anything other than my email address is not only pointless, it’s also illegal under the Data Protection Act, which requires that you only store information that is relevant to the enquiry. To unsubscribe, Tesco are asking for my email address (again), my first name, my last name, and my date of birth. Anything other than the email address is completely irrelevant to the enquiry, and the (obligatory) request for this information is illegal.

And when having a contact-us form, firstly don’t ask for irrelevant and illegal information (you’ve guessed it, they want my birthdate once more), offering a message box that is only 255 characters long simply adds insult to injury. That’s less than two tweets! One can only assume that they don’t give a flying fig about conversing with their customers.

(Oh, and also, resizing a user’s browser window is nothing short of rude. You’ve guessed it – that contact-us form does exactly that.)

I’m especially vexed about this, because generally Tesco get things beautifully right. But, this product has left me with a really bad taste in the mouth. It’ll be interesting to see whether Tesco bother to respond to this blog post (they are monitoring the web, right?) and to read their responses to my three separate complaints through their unpleasant website. I’d have sent one, but it’s difficult to do that in 255 characters.

F*ckwits, the lot of them. Grr. They get the official wag of the finger. WAG.

Permalink | 7 comments
Post tags: comparison, customer service, fail, forms, insurance, tesco, tesco compare, web design, website
These are my personal views | Full disclosure

As regular readers of this blog might (both) know, I have been loudly praising my rather nice little Acer Aspire One netbook.

However, just before I left the BBC, and in no way connected to the BBC staff discount at the Apple store, I bought myself an Apple MacBook Pro. I needed a computer powerful enough to do some of the jobs my netbook wasn’t capable of – like video encoding, for example – and one to do inspiring and exciting presentations on. And I really didn’t want to use Windows for that; I seem to equate seeing the Windows interface with being at work.

I’ve spent six weeks or so with this computer now; long enough for the Apple love-affair to rub off, and for reality to set in. So here is a moderately considered long-term review of this beastie.

I was concerned about the chiclet keyboard – nearly putting me off this unit completely – but it does appear to work well. The keyboard is my favourite aspect of the Acer Aspire One: I got on very well with that unit’s 89% keyboard – both its responsiveness and feel, but also its size: I actually find the MacBook Pro’s full-size keyboard is almost too large. One thing I don’t like is that the black keyboard does show finger-grease fairly quickly and obviously. I do, however, really like the keytop illumination, which makes the machine very usable in dark surroundings.

The USB positions are annoyingly close together. Plug in a 3G broadband dongle into the front USB socket, and you cannot plug in an iPhone into the adjacent USB socket, nor can you easily plug in an SD card into the SD slot. Putting these plugs together so closely is just stupidity, nothing more. Quite why SD cards don’t fit flush into the unit is odd. And don’t even get me started on the absence of a standard VGA output without a £20 adaptor. Grr. Having said that, the magnetic power adaptor plug is genius, however; as is the battery life, which is simply excellent. That, alone, makes this the computer I carry around.

This machine is damn heavy. Weighing 2.04kg, it’s over twice as heavy as the Acer Aspire One’s 950g, but feels considerably heavier still, particularly with the (also larger) power supply (the Acer’s is just 0.15kg, though I can’t work out how heavy the MacBook’s is). Because it’s larger, it’s not as easy to carry around, and while it does fit into my man-bag, it’s certainly not as sensible to schlep around with it as the netbook; and because it’s a more expensive piece of kit, it’s less sensible to just chuck in my bag unprotected (as I do with my sticker-laden Acer Aspire One).

Ubuntu’s 3G support really was as simple, for my Huawei USB modem, as plugging it in; it recognised it and set it up immediately. Unfortunately, Apple’s 3G software inside Snow Leopard isn’t quite as nice; while better than the horrid 3Connect software that the modem comes with, it is irritatingly buggy – thinking that it’s connected when it’s not, for example, or needing me to unplug, count to five and then plug the modem back in. It pops up dialog boxes complaining when it can’t connect, and the 3G modem seems considerably more ‘deaf’ than when inside the Acer Aspire. This is very poor when compared to Ubuntu, where the dongle simply sits there, silently connecting and reconnecting when required.

In terms of the software – iCal and Apple Mail are truly execrable pieces of software. When editing an event inside iCal, flipping to a different program to check the details manages to take iCal out of ‘edit’ mode, which is hugely annoying; the ‘today’ button isn’t sensibly near the calendar, but the other end of the app’s window; and the ‘Location’ bar consistently displays some kind of alert, and I have no idea what it’s alerting me to. Apple Mail is slower than Gmail – which isn’t big or clever – and less flexible than Gmail too.

It’s not all bad though – I’m using Fluid to use Google Mail and Google Calendar as separate apps, which works perfectly – particularly with Gears, meaning I’ve still got access offline. Fluid is really rather excellent, and a godsend for power-users (since I can tweak the webapps as much as I like). Keynote is excellent presentation software; QuickSilver is every bit as excellent as its equivalent, “Gnome Do”; and the BBC iPlayer’s desktop software (for which I forget the internal project name) works beautifully, even in HD.

For presentations, therefore, this is a great machine. Frankly, for schlepping around the capital (or even for doing work on Media UK at the office), I’m rather hankering after the netbook. I might buy it a bigger battery.

Photo: Lauri Rantala; used under licence

Permalink | 5 comments
Post tags: acer, apple, aspire, macbook, review
These are my personal views | Full disclosure

Here’s more information

Permalink | One comment
Post tags: radio, radio-academy, radio-at-the-edge
These are my personal views | Full disclosure