James Cridland's itemroll

Hmm... remember this?

2009-10-23T23:58:00Z

Today's tabloids express mock outrage at the appearance of N*ck Gr*ff*n on the BBC Question Time programme. But they have short memories.

Here's today's Star:

Hang on, though. Isn't that the same newspaper that did this?

and this?

The Express, meanwhile, is also clutching its pearl necklace, claiming that the party is going to get taxpayer-funded broadcasts at the next election. Not a big lead on Griffin, because there's apparently another twist in the Diana saga (and as ever the stock image of her wearing a seatbelt, which would have saved her life in the crash, nutjob neenaw whoop-whoop conspiracy or no conspiracy)

But it's got those because it's gained votes. I wonder why? I wonder which newspapers are read by BNP supporters? Maybe ones that say stuff like this

or this?

or even this?

And not forgetting the all-time classic:

Not some. Not five hundred. Not even a thousand. Not half. Not three-quarters. No. ALL. IN BIG RED FUCKING LETTERS SO YOU'RE MADE CLEARLY AWARE THAT IT'S ALL.

Hey, and please let's not forget this:

I almost didn't include this!

Which is almost the same as this!

But no. The Express doesn't like the BNP. They just happen to share entirely the same views on immigration, but Griffin is bad, because... well. I haven't quite worked out why he's bad. Maybe he doesn't hate Muslims enough for their tastes?

The Mail have also had a bash, but as ever they're more concerned with attacking their nemesis the BBC than they are about hand-wringing over Griffin:

Having said which, I still think

it's worth making the point

that the Mail doesn't always steer so far away

from using content

which the BNP and 'bigot' N*ck Gr*ff*n

might completely agree with

and it's not long

before you might start thinking to yourself

are they really protesting a bit too much? And what's the difference, really, between the BNP bigots and the supposedly mainstream newspaper which claims to distance itself from them so much?

And you have to start thinking: do these newspapers which select certain types of images of ethnic minorities and use them again and again

really have such different views or agendas from the likes of the BNP?

It's all very well people blaming Labour, or the BBC, or whoever, for the 'rise' of the BNP. But if there has been a significant increase in BNP support - and it hasn't translated into votes yet, despite a severe recession and growing unemployment - perhaps that might have more to do with the legitimisation and absorption of their extreme views by newspapers creating scare story after scare story concerning race and immigration, often baseless stories created simply to scare? It's one thing going to a BNP meeting but it's quite another to hear exactly the same thing over the breakfast table from a publication which purports to report the facts.

But no. It's all the BBC's fault. Let's blame them.

The maddest channel on Sky Digital – fact

2009-11-05T20:30:15Z

Shared by James Cridland
What a shame I don't have Sky any more. But heavens, this channel's madder than a mad hatstand of mad.

There has never been a more compelling reason to drop everything and go out and get yourself a satellite dish than the freshly-discovered existence of Supreme Master TV.

Available free of charge on Sky (channel 835), this clip suggests that it’s some kind of pseuso-religious network with a vague vegan agenda. Oh, and a newsreader who has none of the qualities normally associated with the job.

This clip comes from their Noteworthy News broadcast – it’s much like most other news programmes really, whst with its reams of subtitles, unbridled praise for Uganda, a joke in Indonesian and correspondence from UK viewer which is met with the glorious sentence, “May celestial light and love shine on you and your co-citizens of Great England.”

May celestial light and love shine on Robert Popper who put this clip up on his blog. Supreme Master TV has just been added to the favourites on our Sky Digital box. Now, we’re off to the video archive on their website for a look at “All Life Connected: Dutch Telepathic Animal Communicator Ronald van de Peppel (In Dutch)”…

Pandora Will Fail. Terrestrial Radio Will Prevail.

2009-11-03T21:16:28Z

Pandora will fail. Investors who have pumped $56.3 million into the company in hopes of reinventing radio will discover that listeners are actually pretty pleased with radio as it is.

Pandora will not be the only pure Internet radio station to fail, but its failure will be all the more spectacular for its overreaching and confidence that musicians can create better radio than radio programmers.

Pandora is different from other Internet radio stations. It creates unique playlists for each member based on a complex algorithm:

Together our team of fifty musician-analysts has been listening to music, one song at a time, studying and collecting literally hundreds of musical details on every song. It takes 20-30 minutes per song to capture all of the little details that give each recording its magical sound - melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, lyrics ... and more - close to 400 attributes!

Rob Walker of The New York Times recently wrote about the company noting:

Pandora's approach more or less ignores the crowd. It is indifferent to the possibility that any given piece of music in its system might become a hit. The idea is to figure out what you like, not what a market might like.

More interesting, the idea is that the taste of your cool friends, your peers, the traditional music critics, big-label talent scouts and the latest influential music blog are all equally irrelevant. That's all cultural information, not musical information. And theoretically at least, Pandora's approach distances music-liking from the cultural information that generally attaches to it.

The majority of the company’s employees are the musicians and musicologists who deconstruct songs according to beats per minute, chordal patterning, the importance of lyrics, and dozens of other criteria.

Pandora is often cited as an example of where radio is headed. Let’s hope not.

A song’s appeal cannot be reduced to a set of scored criteria. It cannot be reduced to objective criteria, particularly by musicologists and musicians. And what evidence is there that the criteria used are valid? Musicians and listeners have very different ideas about songs, particularly songs that they like.

We once showed an open minded artist the results of a music test that included his songs. He was initially flabbergasted. He couldn’t understand why people liked some of what he considered his weaker songs, while they disliked some of his finer work. And the biggest hits were not necessarily the songs that got the biggest reaction performed live.

Putting together a radio station playlist is an art. The very best radio stations are programmed by men and women who have an innate sense of what the station’s listeners want to hear. Music testing helps in the process, but only to a point. Ultimately it is the programmer’s interpretation of the results that determines the sound of the station.

Musicologists with algorithms will never out program a PD with the right ears.

Now Pandora has announced a goal of making its service available on pretty much any connected device from cars to Blu-Ray players. It may be able to weasel itself onto the appliances, but bad radio is bad radio even if it comes through a kitchen device.

Pandora is toast.

Help us nail spammers

2009-10-13T18:25:00Z

Today we've added another tool to our spam fighting toolbox that will give users the ability to flag bad accounts on Twitter.

Folks can now help us conquer spam by calling our attention to a profile they find questionable. Click the “Report as spam” button under the Actions section of a profile’s sidebar and our Trust and Safety team will check it out to see what needs to be done. No automated action will be taken as a result of reporting a user as spam (in other words, it can't be used to incite an angry mob against an account you don't like.) And once you report a profile it will automatically be blocked from following or replying to you. You nailed it!

Our spam fighting tools will continue to evolve as new behaviors emerge, and as always, we'll keep trust and safety at the top of our list.

The Most Innovative Radio Station In The World

2009-10-21T19:56:49Z

I'm proud to work with Absolute Radio in the UK. Since taking over Virgin Radio in the UK just one year ago, the team at Absolute Radio, led by COO Clive Dickens, has launched an incredible array of digital initiatives which put to shame the efforts of most integrated, consolidated radio operators around the world.

Allow me to list just some of the things they are doing. And think about them in the context of providing unique, non-commodity experiences in exchange for signing up for a master Absolute VIP membership. This squarely puts Absolute in the database game with a whole host of revenue (and relationship) opportunities that may or may not have anything to do with "ratings."

www.comparemyradio.com is a cross-station search engine that combs through the "now playing" metadata on all UK stations and returns information on what the most popular songs are and what the most played artists on each station are. It allows you to enter an artist or song, see how often it is played on various UK stations, so that you can pick a station that best suits your taste. The engine is "egalitarian" in that it includes both Absolute Radio stations and their competitors, and certainly has a user benefit -- but the really clever bit is that Absolute is capturing all of that search and click-through behavior, instead of their competitors getting it. Learn more from James Cridland's blog post.
www.songofthedecade.com is a user-generated content site that allows visitors to vote for their favorite song from the past decade and contribute notes about the music. It's a unique joint venture with Spotify and Shortlist and the especially clever bit is that it captures email addresses in an entirely contextual and appropriate manner to drive Absolute VIP membership.
www.dabbl.co.uk is a completely user-controlled radio experience that broadcasts online and on DAB. Again, it drives Absolute VIP membership by requiring sign-ups to vote for songs, with the added hook that all the songs are special live concert versions from the Absolute archives. Unique content, unique experience. Essentially, they have built their own version of the "Listener Driven Radio" or "Jelli" packages that are being syndicated, with the added benefit of unique content that simply cannot be matched.
www.onegoldensquare.com/labs. They have developed their own internal development group called One Golden Square Labs. They likely have as many Web and Mobile developers for their one radio station as any American group employs. As with Google Labs, they allow users to see what they are up to, allowing users to act and feel like "insiders" while they experiment with the various new toys OGS is developing.
Of course, they have a free iPhone app called the iAmp for live streaming, but they also offer a paid app (for about 99 cents) called LiveAmp which offers a richer gateway to live festivals, gigs and concerts by aggregating live videos of bands, interviews, photos of various festivals and even twitter feeds that mention musical acts. A calendar of upcoming shows is also integrated. Listeners can also stream the Absolute stations, but this app really aims to be the "home page" for the UK concertgoer. The iAmp Android app is also up and running with support for Nokia & Blackberry on the way.
They have developed their own dynamic Podcast channel on the iTunes music store. This helps facilitate even more downloads and they are making podcasting a profitable business, while many American companies are still struggling to figure it all out. Absolute has over 750,000 downloads per month of their unique, non-music content, and it is growing at a fast clip. The new iTunes channel will likely accelerate downloads even more.
They have 'open' playlist meetings for listeners and advertisers, humanizing the company with behind-the-scenes views of the stations. Tom Webster wrote about this over the summer, and it is an idea Absolute have truly taken to heart.

It's worth mentioning that virtually almost all of these efforts are profitable, or at least paid for. Most podcasts go out with a spot attached. Every site is ad supported. Partnerships abound.

These are just the efforts that have already gone public. A variety of other new approaches to relationship building and digital assets are in the pipeline.

Is Absolute Radio the most innovative radio station in the world? They are certainly the most innovative I've come across. Have other nominees for such a title? What are your nominees for the most innovative radio station in the world? Let us know in the comments!

What’s-a-meta-you? Hey!

2009-10-21T21:07:15Z

Earlier today a selection of “mild-mannered geeks“, myself included, had a discussion on Twitter following the removal of data for the Bauer-owned Kiss 100 radio station from One Golden Square Labs’ Compare My Radio project.

At the time of writing the website still states that Kiss “has either removed their now playing information, or is outputting incorrect data.” Taking a closer look at the output of the bot that powers Compare My Radio it is clear to see something went awry from around 10:00 this morning. Around this time the sound of a fun, young London began to bang out the hits including ‘Lorem’ by Ipsum, ‘Nunc’ by up-and-coming artist Tincidunt and the hot “flavas” of Eget with their new track ‘est’. Anyone with even the briefest amount of knowledge on 1550’s typsetting should be able to spot a familiar pattern to these artist/title combinations.

Far be it for me to speculate what’s going on here, but there is a possibility the team at Bauer may have casually fed some slightly erroneous data to the Compare My Radio bots. Why would a service provider take these kind of steps? Surely the nature of the technology landscape these days is that of an open and honest culture to create, share, mix and mash up and re-create? This is true, but it can be seen that there is still plenty of value in meta data.

The most obvious value in a radio station’s now playing data is that a third party could provide commercial links to download the tracks played from providers like Apple’s iTunes Music Store or 7Digital with no return of accumulated commission revenue to the originating broadcaster. It could be argued that the originating station should therefore provide a simple and enticing user experience via their own website to ensure that a user never need venture elsewhere to spend their money. But if the listener is unfamiliar with the service or its website, or a third party website dedicated to download music heard on radio stations has sufficient SEO magic up its sleeve the user may never stumble across the original broadcasters beautifully crafted now playing page and the revenue is lost.

But for that single argument it would be easy to dream up half a dozen new and exciting uses for aggregated now playing data from a selection of radio stations. In its current form I don’t personally disagree with what Compare My Radio is doing. Its a clever use of the data and provide a useful and innovative tool.

What may have got the backs up of some broadcasters is the way OGS Labs implemented the technology without first consulting those being indexed about their inclusion in the project. What if the service did change overnight to offer commercial links alongside the tracks? Without any form of agreement in place this could be a risky venture to freely hand over all your data to. I’m not suggesting OGS Labs would ever go down this route, but without any agreement in place it is always worth considering the possibilities.

If a simply defined transport was agreed between the interested parties, bound by terms on how the data is to be used, these innovative projects could and should continue to thrive. I very firmly believe that no matter how hugely talented the in-house development team of any broadcaster be, someone out there could be able to mash up your data in to another application twice as amazing that you would never consider. This is a good thing. But it needs a layer of trust, not unlike the API keys implemented by the likes of Twitter and Flickr to safeguard from abuse the access to the content they host. Outside of this protection I don’t see it unreasonable for services to suitably obfuscate their data to reduce the risks of those who don’t want to play nice exploiting that information.

The now playing / last 10 tracks page on a radio station’s website is always going to be a useful resource contributing to a great user experience. No matter how hard a broadcaster tries to obfuscate its data on the website, someone somewhere will have the determination to mine that data. If you were really crazy you could even sit, pen and paper in hand, crafting your own now playing list to republish outside the “evil clutches” of the originator. But the key to obfuscation isn’t to attempt to make it impossible to exploit, it is to make the costs associated with obtaining the data in a usable format far more expensive than those gained from utilising that data.

With simple terms of agreement in place, I believe it absolutely right for open meta data to flow freely between interested parties. It’s ensuring the trust between those parties before throwing valuable information out there as a free-for-all.

If nothing else today’s discussion shows how important it is that across the industry we talk about these relevant challenges. Despite the number of times the importance of meta data has been presented at conferences and in papers, never before have I seen such a vibrant exchange centered around the openness and exchange of meta data. Hopefully there’s lots more to come.

Photo credit: stebulus @ Flickr. As with all my blog posts, the views expressed here are my own and not those of my employer.

New Study: Internet Radio Plays 800,000+ Stiffs

2009-10-22T09:23:59Z

Shared by James Cridland
This is an interesting post, and gives the lie to some 'exciting internet radio' stories I've seen recently.

A “study” making the new-media rounds illustrates the extent to which Internet radio boosters will go to cast commercial radio in a negative light. The study also inadvertently illustrates why pure Internet radio is failing and will continue to fail to attract any measurable audience.

A monitoring service, streamSerf, claims to have compared the number of artists played on terrestrial and Internet radio stations last month and found that Internet stations played 804,572 more artists than terrestrial stations (defined as commercial plus non-commercial stations).

There are several methodological issues that concern us about this study. We’ll get to those in a moment, but let’s run with the results for a moment. Here’s how audio4cast characterized the results:

It's not shocking to learn that Internet radio is more diverse. There are more choices for the listener, and more determination by the stations themselves to provide alternative music to the basic cookie-cutter formats and playlists provided on broadcast radio. It is stunning to learn that Internet radio's list of unique artists is greater than broadcast radio's by 3600%.

Basic cookie-cutter formats and playlists?

Let’s reflect on that phrase. Remember satellite radio? Beyond AM, beyond FM? We were told that commercial radio had become predictable and stale. Satellite radio with nearly 100 channels of music would reinvent radio, offering more diversity, finding new artists.

The one and only time that Arbitron measured satellite radio, it found that virtually no one listens to the majority of the channels. There are many channels where there are more people in the studio than people listening. The only channels that attract significant numbers of listeners are those that resemble commercial radio stations. There is a listener-driven reason for playlists. There is a listener-driven reason similarly formatted stations sound similar.

There is no reason to expect successful Internet radio to be any different. The vast majority of Internet radio listeners tune to stations that play the same music played by commercial radio stations. We can see this from the study’s own results. Look at the list of the top 10 terrestrial and top 10 Internet artists (click to enlarge).

It is clear that the two lists are very similar. However, that’s not how the results were interpreted:

Also interesting is the list of artists that get the most plays on broadcast stations versus Internet radio stations. While some of the top ten artists are the same on either list, others are very different.

Very different?

The truth is that there is only one artist on the Internet list that stands out. Amin Van Buuren is ranked 6th on the Internet, but 7,811 on terrestrial. The other top ranked Internet artists include Madonna, Metalica, Lady Gaga, The Rolling Stones, and similar mainstream artists.

So having shaken off the shackles of basic cookie-cutter formats and playlists, successful Internet radio stations end up...playing the same artists heard on commercial radio stations.

But these are just the top 10 artists. What about the other 829,961 artists Internet stations play? According to the company, terrestrial radio played only 25,399 artists. Since thousands of radio stations have been testing their music now for nearly three decades, it is a safe bet that we have identified virtually every song that listeners want to hear.

If you have tested your music for any length of time, looking for new and different songs to play, you know that there are a lot more stiffs than hits.

We have found the same thing in every format, from Classical to Hip-Hop. Across the entire spectrum, there are only so many songs worth playing (if your goal is to have a measurable audience). That means there are only so many “marketable” artists that listeners want to hear.

We at Harker Research have been testing music for thirty years now. We find it hard to believe that there are 25,399 artists worth playing on the radio. We can only assume that the inclusion of educational and non-commercial stations ran up the numbers.

The study claims that Internet radio plays 3,600% (actually 3,168%) more artists, and pundits see it as a big plus for Internet radio. What it actually means is that Internet radio stations are playing over 800,000 artists that people don’t want to hear.

Before the Internet, artists that didn’t deserve to be heard beyond their family and closest friends toiled away in garages and empty coffeehouses. Years of practice would separate the good from the bad. The artists that got better found success. The majority went back to their day jobs.

Now anybody at any level of accomplishment can be heard on some quirky Internet radio station someplace. We suspect that the actual number of artists played on Internet stations is considerably higher than the 800K+ that the study found.

Paul Mockenhaupt, founder of the company, declared: It's the new, fresh, undiscovered, local, home grown music that's filling the internet airwaves! One report’s author adding: Internet radio gives voice to the long tail of music, providing entry for many musicians that have never had a platform before. That, he (Mockenhaupt) says, is the "magic" of Internet radio.

The magic of Internet radio is that it operates in a fantasy world. The notion that radio can operate in a “long tail” world is a fantasy as long as radio (whether it be terrestrial, in outer space, or on the Internet) depends on listenership as a measure of success.

But what about those numbers? How can a monitoring service be so precise? The reports are rather vague on the methodology of the study, streamSerf has no mention of the study on their web site, and we got no response to the questions we put to the company.

The web site boasts that it monitors thousands of radio stations:

Our patent-pending technology allows us to listen to thousands and thousands of radio stations at the same time... Satellite, Internet and Terrestrial stations. As a matter of fact, we are currently listening to over 30 MILLION HOURS of radio per year in 65 countries across the planet. If there's a song being played on the radio, there's a good chance we hear it.

It certainly sounds impressive, but let’s do a little math based on some pretty basic assumptions. We suspect that the company is monitoring station streams, not their signals. There are 14,355 licensed radio stations in the US, many of them not streaming. There’s a little less than another hundred on Sirius XM. Those are the easy numbers. How many Internet radio stations are there? Of those, how many are exclusively Internet? There are thousands, if not tens of thousands.

Thirty million hours of monitoring sounds like a lot, but that has to be spread across many radio stations. There are 8,760 hours in a year, so that means the company on average is monitoring 3,425 stations each hour of the year.

Considering that there are nearly 10,000 US FM stations alone, the company can’t be monitoring terrestrial radio stations continuously. It may be monitoring stations for a few hours at a time, or monitoring a handful of stations continuously. In either case, it means the company is taking a sampling. How the sample is chosen can have a major impact on the outcome.

More problematic is how one monitors tens of thousands of Internet stations along with the terrestrial and satellite stations. As with terrestrial stations, the only practical way is to either monitor a random cross-section of Internet stations continuously, or monitor every station known for just a few minutes.

Based on what we see, it appears that the 25,399 versus 829,971 artist comparison is more likely based on an educated guess and wishful thinking than one based on a month long continuous monitoring of all terrestrial and Internet stations.

It is making the rounds because despite its flimsiness, it provides one more opportunity for new media pundits to dump on commercial radio. The good news is that if the numbers are based on crude estimates, maybe terrestrial radio isn’t playing 25,399 artists. We hope not.

This is what happens when the Today Programme send the radio car

2009-10-15T06:48:00Z

For a start it's not so much a car as a van. The driver, who's also the engineer, turns up at your house about forty minutes before the appointed time and looks for a place to park. He then cranks up an enormous transmitter mast which is as high as the houses. Looking out of their windows the neighbours assume that it's a TV detector van and nervously check that their TV licence is up to date. About ten minutes before your item is due the chap comes and knocks on your door and conducts you into the tiny studio in the back of the van. The two of you sit there with headphones on and eventually your item starts. They say that cunning old foxes like Michael Heseltine always chose to be interviewed via the radio car. Not only did he get more time in bed but he also took advantage of the absence of presenter eye-contact to keep talking far longer than he would ordinarily be allowed.

How The Huffington Post uses real-time testing to write better headlines

2009-10-14T15:24:55Z

Shared by James Cridland
Bloody clever.

From direct mail to web design, A/B testing is considered a gold standard of user research: Show one version to half your audience and another version to the other half; compare results, and adjust accordingly. Some very cool examples include Google’s obsessive testing of subtle design tweaks and Dustin Curtis’ experiment with direct commands and clickthrough rates. (”You should follow me on Twitter” produced dramatically better results than the less moralizing, “Follow me on Twitter.”)

So here’s something devilishly brilliant: The Huffington Post applies A/B testing to some of its headlines. Readers are randomly shown one of two headlines for the same story. After five minutes, which is enough time for such a high-traffic site, the version with the most clicks becomes the wood that everyone sees.

Headlines have always played the most promotional role in news, charged with selling readers on the articles they adorn, so it only makes sense to apply the best tools of market research to their crafting. Think of it as a more rigorous version of magazines adjusting their covers based on newsstand sales.

Paul Berry, chief technology officer at The Huffington Post, spoke briefly about their real-time headline testing on a panel at the Online News Association conference in San Francisco earlier this month. When I talked to him afterwards, Berry said the system was created inhouse, but he wouldn’t disclose much else about how or how often it’s done. He did say Huffington Post editors have found that placing the author’s name above a headline almost always leads to more clicks than omitting it.

Though it’s unrelated to this A/B testing, The Huffington Post’s new social media editor, Josh Young, has also been soliciting better headlines from readers on Twitter. That’s not as awesomely scientific, but it’s a pretty good use of the crowd.

Studying and responding to users was the theme of Berry’s panel, which also included Steve Dorsey, who conducts qualitative research on reader behavior for the Detroit Free Press, and Eric Brown, homepage planning editor for Yahoo.

Brown said Yahoo closely tracks clickthroughs to measure which content does well with which audiences, as illustrated in his slide below. Yahoo may eventually use that data to serve, say, teenage girls a different version of the front page than they serve to middle-aged men. (Brown’s entire presentation from ONA is here.)

On the topic of audience segmentation, Berry told me that The Huffington Post is considering separate East Coast and West Coast editions. He used the example of morning-after Oscars coverage, when readers flock to slideshows and blog posts about the event. But the story is old news to East Coast readers by noon, when the West Coast is only first logging on, so it would make sense to serve New Yorkers fresher headlines while Californians get their Oscars fix. Identifying readers’ location from their IP address is easy, but coordinating different editions of the site would be a challenge.

Going Down

2009-09-30T14:31:38Z

Shared by James Cridland
Worthwhile pointing out, as we go into a world of networking...

Local advertisers' radio spend dips 6% vs national fall of 16% LONDON - Local advertising spend on radio fell less sharply than national advertising in Q2, although total radi...

Radio's Stimulus Package

2009-09-30T14:31:24Z

Shared by James Cridland
Nicely put. Not sure we have this problem in the UK - or do we?

Note: This is the complete text of a recent speech I gave at the NAB Radio Show in Philly. The topic was "A Stimulus Package for Radio." This speech has sparked a lot of inter...

Hacker

2009-09-30T14:31:02Z

Shared by James Cridland
I forsee that this photo might be good for a conference or other.

DianeAleta has added a photo to the pool:...

Comment about Zatte beer

2009-09-27T20:01:19Z

Shared by James Cridland
Huh?!

meeware1 has posted a comment: A fine tipple that trippel. Went well with a good vege meal on our last night at IBC....

WWD Weekend Reading List

2009-09-19T19:00:26Z

Here are some interesting posts from around the ‘Net to catch up with over the weekend:

What are you reading this weekend?

Read our latest analysis piece, "Career Opportunities in the NewNet." Only on GigaOM Pro.

Last.fm and MySpace Blocked in Turkey? « Technology It

2009-09-19T21:22:15Z

... internet users in Turkey spend more time online and consume more pages than users in other European countries. Are you based in Turkey and unable to access these sites? Let us know in the comments. [Image credit: James Cridland ] ...

BBC - Radio Labs: Designing for your least able user

2009-09-27T08:14:20Z

Shared by Fred
HUGELY important

This is our blog for BBC Radio Labs - a place where we show some of our prototypes for new sites and services. They are all at an early stage of development and some of them might not work quite right, some might look a bit sketchy and they may never be taken any further. They're what we call betas. We'll write about every new beta we release on this blog so please play with them and come back here to let us know what you think. We'll also be writing about other things we're working on, how we do our work and anything else we think you might be interested in.

In the shops now! Sex sells in Sweden, possibly

2009-09-25T15:00:11Z

The Swedish are well known/inappropriately stereotyped for their lack of sexual inhibitions. Still, it comes as a shock to the Brit abroad to see what they’re openly promoting in shop windows:

Very occasional Bitterwallet reader James Cridland spotted this earlier in the week while in Stockholm. Anybody care to translate and tell us what we’re looking at? Another, slightly filthier attempt by the Nordic countries to entice the Brits to visit?

Radio's Looming Crisis Is Not Digital

2009-09-24T17:39:21Z

This is a long post, but I hope you'll indulge me and read it through, because I hope you'll agree that the issue is too important to treat lightly.

I just sat through a panel comprising some of the top programming executives in radio at the NAB Radio Show in Philadelphia (in fact, it ended about an hour ago, which tells you how passionate I really am about this topic.) During this session, programming leaders from companies like Clear Channel, Emmis, Saga and Radio One talked about all of the ways they are using social media, streaming, mobile applications and other digital tools to grow radio and engage audience. If you came to the session wondering if today's radio corporations "get" digital, you got your answer--they do.

And yet, there was something tremendously disappointing about this panel--in particular, how the panelists responded to some of the audience's questions about growing and nurturing talent in an industry that is relying increasingly on syndication, voice-tracking, and other "right-sizing" measures. The response to one question struck a particularly sour note--how do we nurture our "farm system" when so many of the potential jobs for newcomers have been eliminated and automated?

The response from one panelist was that there continues to be a "farm system": small and medium markets. Talent can still work their way up the system in smaller markets--only, the progression is now from morning show in small market "a" to morning show in medium market "b" (and not from overnights in market "a" to drive time in market "a.") He then gave a sports analogy--when a rookie is drafted in baseball, they don't start out making millions in the big leagues, they "pay their dues" in single A, double A and so on. The big market jobs are there for talented people that "pay their dues in the minors" before they make the big leagues.

Full disclosure: I despise sports analogies in business. I find them not only simplistic, but generally irrelevant. In this case, trotting out this analogy revealed quite clearly that the biggest problem in broadcast radio is not their digital strategy, but their HR strategy. Work has changed dramatically in the past 10 years, and the workplace of today has little in common with the workplace of the previous decade. I sit on the Alumni Board of the business school from which I got my MBA, and from an admissions and retention perspective, the world of work has changed irrevocably. Where MBA programs used to get mid-level managers from big companies in droves, those big companies and those mid-level managerial positions have disappeared. The potential student body for our program has become the thousands of young entrepreneurs in our area that the Internet revolution has created, and our challenge is no longer to give an assistant manager the sheepskin they need to be a manager--it's to keep these thousands of entrepreneurs in business and improve the economic climate of our region.

Into this new world of work comes today's talented young creative professional. They have the tools to create their own future, and they are using them, not waiting around for their "shot." Attracting young talent has to be the primary focus for the radio industry today--there simply are not enough young people in the business for it to be sustainably competitive in the medium term. One of the panelists reiterated the importance of their digital strategy, and that young talent will think radio is "cool" when they are able to use all of the digital tools to make it so. This is the wrong end of the funnel. Today's web-savvy young creatives already know how to use the tools, and most of them are free. They already have that knowledge, and they are already using it. The solution is not to make a bunch of tools and hope young creatives are attracted to the business to use them--it's to hire the best young creatives now and tap into the knowledge they already have.

In one breath, a panelist in today's session proclaimed that "we need to have a strong digital strategy" to attract young talent, but then added "I don't know how we are going to pay them." THAT is the problem, in a nutshell, and all the Twittering in the world won't really address it.

Radio needs two basic types of professionals: creative talent (for on-air, programming and promotions) and business talent (the quants and marketing analysts that will blend science into the art). In the case of the latter, Radio has never done a good job of attracting the best talent. I've noted before in this space that when I finished my undergraduate degree, I had three choices: I could go to graduate school, I could take a high-paying job with one of the McKinsey/Andersen/PWC-esque companies recruiting on campus, or I could get Carlos and the Chicken's coffee for two years in the hopes of getting an overnight shift someday. Guess which one I didn't choose. Attracting the best minds in marketing, analysis and finance is not a matter of working people from Kaline to Moline and asking them to tough it out--it's attracting the best people NOW and creating attractive positions, favorable working conditions, and humane career paths that don't involve uprooting families every 18 months.

For creatives, things have changed dramatically. There was once a time when we could expect creative talent to gravitate to radio, tough it out for a decade or so, and finally crack the big time. Today, however, all the most creative people need is a Mac and a mic and they already have the same potential access to a digital audience that we do, without all of the restrictions of corporate broadcasting today. The brightest young talent today is more entrepreneurial, and has the means to syndicate themselves anytime they want--and do things their way. Maybe they will fail, maybe not--but they can do it on their terms, and that is increasingly important to today's potential young talent. If they are going to "pay their dues" for little money, they are more willing to do it on their own than ever before.

This is a long post, and it's long because I'm passionate about this and alarmed by broadcast radio's response to date. Is a digital strategy important? You betcha. But the secret to all the options that young web-savvy talent have before them is the fact that all of these tools are free, and they are already using them. The real strategic issue at the root of radio's problem is this:

We cannot continue to say, over and over, that content is king--and then continue to invest in tools. Tools don't make content, people do. The tools are free. Pay the people.

PURE explain why RadioDNS was great for the Sensia

2009-09-19T20:51:27Z

Following on from Thursday’s launch of the PURE Sensia, the first radio to incorporate RadioDNS technologies, we were able to talk to Colin Crawford, Head of Marketing at PURE, about why they chose to incorporate RadioVIS in the Sensia.

Colin said:

Sensia is unique in having a 5.7” 640 x 480 touch screen, and making full use of visuals from radio is a key part of making the product so engaging, particularly for a younger audience. We chose to incorporate RadioVIS because it provides massive flexibility and is relatively straightforward to implement for us and for radio stations, as demonstrated by the fact that we are already seeing RadioVIS slideshow in the UK from Capital, Heart, LBC, Fun Kids, Absolute Radio, Planet Rock, NME, Passion for the Planet and many others, and we are getting expressions of interest from broadcasters in many other countries.

Feedback from broadcasters has been equally positive, with some reporting deployment times for RadioVIS of less than 8 working hours.

A number of third party providers are producing RadioVIS services on behalf of broadcasters, using the ability of RadioDNS to forward requests to a third party to handle (after the broadcaster has given permission).

The project expects to see more broadcasters launch RadioDNS based applications, and more manufacturers supporting the technology in devices, in the coming months.

What information is "personally identifiable"?

2009-09-12T07:13:34Z

Shared by James Cridland
Wow. Cautionary tale. Very interesting.

Mr. X lives in ZIP code 02138 and was born July 31, 1945. These facts about him were included in an anonymized medical record released to the public. Sounds like Mr. X is pret...