Part of my team at BBC Audio & Music is a small R&D department. I say small - it’s made up of two people; Chris Bowley and Tristan Ferne.

Tristan, as head of that department, is a clever, bright man who never stops thinking. Recently he posted some really interesting thoughts around The Archers; and this afternoon, he’s put a new website live… Radio Pop, our first public prototype.

Sign up to Radio Pop and we will store your listening to BBC Radio. You can then see graphs, charts and lists of your listening, get recommendations from your friends, share your tastes and browse around to see what other people are hearing right now.

Radio Pop is an experimental prototype - we’re doing this to learn things about radio and social software. We don’t yet know how long it will remain live and we make no guarantees as to its reliability or performance but we will do our best to make it better over time and welcome your feedback.

Of note - it uses OpenID (if you want); and is a Rails app.

Read more on the BBC Radio Labs blog; and the blogs of Tristan Ferne and Chris Bowley.

Note: Radio Pop only supports the following browsers: Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Safari 3, Internet Explorer 7, Opera 9 and (almost) Google Chrome. We can’t guarantee performance, functionality or aesthetics in any other browsers. Its. A. Prototype. (grin)

Virgin Radio’s new name, Absolute Radio, might be seen by some people as a little, um, obvious. Absolute Radio was the name of the company that bid for Virgin Radio in the first place. So, after all the hoopla and suspense over the last few months, is Absolute the right name?

Let’s rewind a little. At the time of writing (8.00pm), there’s no announcement on the Virgin Radio website. There’s nothing on the onegoldensquare staff blog. They’re treating their VIPs as just that - VIPs. So, possibly uniquely in radio… the listeners got to find out before anyone else outside the station did. Above is how I found out. (Well, okay, after a telephone call or two, and a broken embargo on Marketing Week, the rotters). [Later: the announcement is now live on Virgin Radio's site].

So, why do I think the new name is actually really rather special?

It’s got a number of interesting points. Absolute Classic Rock, the classic rock station on DAB and Sky that the company also runs (I can reveal - I think exclusively - that’ll be its new name), is a statement of intent. It plays absolute classic rock. It works on an obvious level.

But what makes the Absolute brand a special one? Surely you can name any old radio station anything you like these days? So why is Absolute a good brand for a multi-platform radio station?

The answer, my friend, is written in the EPG. The electronic programme guide. Radio’s future isn’t 105.8FM. And it’s certainly not 1215AM. The future’s digital. And digital gives us no numbers… just names. My new Pure Evoke Flow, just like almost every DAB Digital Radio built these days, sorts its stations in alphabetical order. In London, the first set of stations on your dial are the BBC stations. From October, no longer - Absolute Radio will be number one. In fact, given that only two stations are “higher” in the alphabet in the UK, and both aren’t on any new platforms, Absolute Radio is guaranteed to be number one on anyone’s radio. Or any internet listing. Or any website.

They’re still committed to DAB - I can possibly also exclusively reveal that they’re concentrating on promoting the in-car element of DAB, giving away around a thousand Pure Highway in-car DAB receivers between now and Christmas. It’s surprising how few people realise that DAB is available in the car as well as in home; this will go a long way towards shattering that misconception. Hopefully, the rest of the radio industry will sing off the same hymn-sheet, just like BBC Radio 5 live has been doing for a while.

And Absolute Radio are also committed to cross-promoting their additional services (available on DAB in London). Oddly, they plan to simulcast the Christian O’Connell breakfast show, and the new drive show with Geoff Lloyd, on all three - and, at the broadcast junctions, heavily promote the choice of listening on each station.

Absolute is unlike other Virgin refugees, who’ve gone with unpronounceable and unspellable names when they jumped away from the Virgin brand. Absolute is easy to spell, easy to remember, and absolutely easy to include in crap puns. And that’s particularly useful for website addresses. Compare, if you will, with GWR plc’s mindnumbing decision to go, five years ago, with “koko.com” as their local radio station website addresses - a worse website address for radio it would have been hard to find, given every mention of it had to be accompanied by how to spell the damn thing.

They’ve done this properly. They own www.absolute.co.uk as well as all the variants. They’ve already thought about additional opportunities. And they’re not shy of the fact… on the ‘questions and answers’ page of the website, they write: “Why are you changing the name?” The old one wasn’t ours, it was lent to us. That means we could not do all the other things we wanted to do, in spinning off the radio station into other areas which we feel you wanted. A beautifully clear way of explaining what I had to in a much quicker way.

Life will be rocky with a brand new name. The station’s web traffic will significantly suffer (and with it, their revenue). Their RAJAR listening figures, based as they are on the antiquated system of writing in a paper diary what you listen to, will undoubtedly dip alarmingly before recovering. Worse, it’s possible that Virgin Enterprises will perform the morally bankrupt exercise of relicensing the name to one of the company’s competitors - though I doubt Virgin Enterprises would be so damn stupid or ignorant.

Absolute’s launch treasure-chest of many millions of pounds does mean they stand a good chance to produce a brand new radio brand: something the station has promised will be “the largest multi-platform marketing campaign in commercial radio history”. And a success for Absolute will be a success for the medium as a whole. So I wish them all the luck.

And to those in the digital media team - your friend is the search and replace function.

Some rather nice beer I drank in Prague on holiday earlier on in August

On radio’s proven web strategies

Merlin Mann [Twitter]
Merlin Mann makes a good point: “NPR drives traffic to their home page by never announcing any URL except their own: a proven web strategy also known as "being a huge dick."”

Selling Brands, Nick Hewat [one golden square]
An essential piece of reading for anyone involved in radio. Ignore the selling brands bit. This should be taught at university.

On audio formats online

Interview with Richard Hulse of Radio New Zealand, on the decision to offer Ogg Vorbis [Groklaw]
Radio New Zealand now offering Ogg Vorbis (wrongly, in my view, since nobody bothers with it really).

The Prestige Factor by Ben Matthew [One Golden Square]
Virgin Radio's AAC+ stream gets listened to by "a peak of 32 concurrent listeners". Yikes.

On other websites

This is it. This is us. [Gigulate]
“The Gigulator is our guide through the world of music, ingesting all the juiciest Music News, Gig Listings, Blogs and general information at a rate you wouldn’t believe, crunching it up like crazy and spitting it out in a nice clean digested bolus, a bit like an owl.” Nice. Gigulate is a project from some of my old team; and looking good.

Metropolitan Police Service - Crime mapping test site
Wow, this is quite neat. Apparently my area is "average", though whether that's averagely good or bad is hard to know.

Books that I’ve bought

Pattern Recognition: William Gibson [amazon.co.uk]
Conversation with new friend called Del earlier this week, over pint of Pitfield Brewery "Eco Warrior", where he soundly recommends this book. So convincingly, iPhone was used for half a minute and book was bought. It arrived today, to be added to the pile of 'books I haven't yet read but ought to'.

Other things of interest

Apple hit with class-action lawsuit over iPhone 3G flakiness [arstechnica]
"Alabama resident Jessica Alena Smith [alleges] that the new iPhone's 3G performance and reliability has been subpar, despite the claims made by Apple's aggressive marketing campaign." Hilarious, and mad.

Online POKER marketing could spell the NAKED end of VIAGRA journalism as we LOHAN know it [The Guardian]
Charlie Brooker at his best: "Search engine optimisation is the journalistic equivalent of a classified ad that starts with the word "SEX!" in large lettering, and "Now that we've got your attention . . ." printed below it in smaller type."

John Naughton: The Google Killer engine has arrived … er, no it hasn't [The Observer]
Brilliant piece about Cuil (and the Commons Select Committee on culture, media and sport); John on the ball as ever

jamescridland's Bookmarks on Delicious
Crikey. Delicious has changed a bit, hasn't it? Coo. Good redesign: it's kept the simple feel of the original, while brought it up to date. Good stuff

This is a tidied and edited list of my del.icio.us postings from August 1st to August 31st. You can subscribe to this list, live, via rss.

A few days ago, someone used my internet connection for fifteen minutes. He, or she, downloaded 1.9 meg of data, and uploaded just under half a meg. In fact, he’s regularly doing that - normally between 5pm and 6pm, but occasionally at 8.45am. And that’s fine by me - because I let him.

No, I don’t run a totally open wifi connection. I live in an urban area; I want to ensure that my own network is not open to the world; I want to be able to limit the bandwidth I give away for free; and I want something in return.

So, I run a FON hotspot - as do another one million people across the world. Essentially, it lets me run what looks like two wifi networks - one, WPA-secured, for me; and one, open and isolated network for others. I can limit it (it’s only 512k), I can add additional users (so guests get free wifi when they’re here), and I can even nominate a free website (I nominate BBC News).

What do I get back? Free wifi access in nearly a million hotspots across the world. I’m giving it away, so I get to use other peoples’ wifi too. (Fon make their money by charging for access to non-members; I could forgo the chance of free wifi in return for earning a %age from their sales).

This is good for two reasons.

First, while access to free wifi has historically been nice but a little pointless - I don’t carry around a wifi-capable laptop, after all - with the advent of devices like the iPhone, all of a sudden free wifi is rather useful; particularly when abroad to avoid the eye-watering bills for roaming data.

And second, while free wifi connections are easy to come by in places like Prague (and Reykjavik), I’ve found cities like London and Vienna have rather less free wifi available. Particularly Vienna. So, needing to send a bit of personal email, I did the “iPhone wifi” walk - you know the one, with the wifi networks page open and just wandering to find an open network. Hey presto, a FON wifi point appeared, and I was able to send a mail for free, rather than for the equivalent of a few euro on roaming data.

FON is an interesting concept: sharing our technology in an interesting way. It’s similar to the ‘agree on technology, compete on content’ philosophy I’m very keen on. And if you’ve not got a FON spot, they’re dirt cheap and might come in very useful indeed.

(And, as a thing to be aware of, the FON wifi hotspot is a very strong wifi signal indeed, which means my private connection is available for a wide area right round my house - which means I can work in the back yard if it ever decides to be sunny again this year.)

Photo: Clive Darr. Used under licence.

Always good to take a peek at a brand new radio website, even better when it’s not a direct and unauthorised ripoff of another one.

So, after a considerable amount of months beavering away in Django, it’s great to see a brand new and much less unpleasant Capital Radio website has appeared.

First impressions are favourable: a big (very big) animated carousel on the front, which appears to be de rigeur in many content rich websites these days. Right now, the carousel is promoting something on the radio (as number one); a competition (as number two); and a feature on the site, the London Guide (as number three). I like the arrow motif at the top, which shows what’s coming next; and the ‘related links’ on the right hand side (though it wasn’t immediately obvious that they were related to the big picture).

The advertising is tastefully done. There are three big ads on the front page - one, the MPU, cleverly treated with the same graphical treatment as the other images on the site (a kind of coloured underlining) which is a nice design touch. I’m surprised by the amount of advertising on the front page; but the effect isn’t as unpleasant as you’d think, mainly because the pages are long: the front page itself is four screens long.

In common with most radio websites, ‘listen live’ is the biggest and most prominent link, in a consistent place just below the logo. It’s accompanied by something similar to the livetext that accompanies DAB broadcasts. I first saw the site during a programme, Capital Dance Anthems, that I suspect isn’t played off the playout system; since I got a rather confusing message that they were currently playing Oasis, and they’d just played… Oasis.

In a nice touch, the ‘on-air’ page lists the last four songs; but there’s little information about the current presenter. Clicking the names of the songs leads you not to a music section, but to a direct link to iTunes. The big splash on the front page about Johnny’s breakfast show leads you to a four paragraph story about his programme - it’s only on scrolling down the page, past the pointless social media bookmarks, that you realise there’s more about the programme. And not much more, it ought to be said. Mind, it’s more than the other programmes, which have one page each. For a radio station website, there’s precious little content about the radio station here. It’s always unfair to judge a website’s content on their first few days, but it will be interesting how quickly more content will appear for the radio presenters, and how much character the template is capable of giving.

Mind you - there’s a ton of news (mostly from ITN, but nicely presented); and then, there’s the London Guide. And, all of a sudden, GCap’s purchase of welovelocal.com makes sense. This is a ton of local, relevant, and impressive data. While a search for “pizza” near my house gives me the local Pizza Express but not the two italian restaurants and the takeaway that the area also offers, the “live events” search has pointed me to a venue I was previously unaware of, only three minutes’ walk away. There’s a ton of data, cleverly delivered mostly through a Google Maps mashup. And there’s some fun language used, too - things can be “five minutes away”, “one minute away”, or “a hop, skip and jump away”.

Technically, the URLs appear to be nice and clean; a vast increase from previous Article.asp?id=861883 type website addresses; the site appears to validate as valid HTML (yay); and the JavaScript libraries are minimised and consolidated for quick downloading. This is a quick site to use - again, a tremendous increase from previous incarnations.

The legacy stuff is less impressive. The webcam is the size of a small postage stamp, which for a young station is a little unfortunate; and, running something that’s not Windows, I’m unable to listen live to the radio station - the website refuses to show me the player, though does give me some useful advice to try to listen.

The music section (cleverly called “music and showbiz”) includes some bespoke content, like video interviews, which is a good thing to see (not that I could). I’m surprised that the station hasn’t moved to flash-based streaming - YouTube, et al, has rather forced the rest of the world to move away from proprietary solutions like Windows. But there’s a good amount of content here, mainly authored by the station (and using the benefits of the group, like photographs taken in Cardiff, where sister station Red Dragon lives). The link to the Hit 40 takes me surprisingly away from the main website, which I found a bit of a jarring effect; but it’s good content otherwise.

And it’s also clever to call the news section the “news and travel” section; while it’s difficult to find the travel stuff (it’s not in the main page once you move in, you need to find the link in the left-hand nav). Again, there’s some nice Google mappage going on here.

So - as a London website, it’s pretty good - a ton of news and music, a load of local info, and some really nicely put together content. As a radio station website, however, it’s content-poor. For now.

A Sardianian student called Francesca has asked if I’d help her with her thesis; and, as always, I’m happy to answer the questions as long as I can publish them. So, here are the questions and answers - note that, as ever, I’m replying in a personal capacity, and BBC policy may be different.

1- The everybody’s attention in the radio’s market, or at least in Italy, is focused on which technology can lead the medium.
12 - Which one is the best audio technology for future’s radio and why?

Radio is turning into a multiplatform medium: so there’s no “best technology” any more for radio. In the UK, there are four predominant technologies for radio (analogue, DAB, internet, satellite) and each of them have their own benefits.
But we need to move to a digital platform. Not because “the rest of media is going on to digital and we will be left behind” - that’s an argument for technology’s sake. No, because digital platforms allow broadcasters to make radio sets more clever: to add features that consumers want, as well as a wider choice.
DAB Digital Radio is closest to FM/AM in that it is free at the point of use, works well while mobile, uses low power consumption so is ideal for battery-operated equipment, and radio broadcasters own the infrastructure (sometimes through an operating company). This is why DAB is attractive to both consumers and broadcasters, and why DAB is far and away the most popular new platform for radio.

In terms of figures, 17.9% of UK radio listening is now done on a digital platform. Only 2% is done via the internet (a shock for many); 3.3% is done via digital television platforms; and 11% is done by DAB Digital Radio. (The rest is ‘unknown’).

What about the content? Should a different technology influence radio’s content? How?
2- If yes, how can DAB build new contents’ types or formats, for example?

If a different technology allows you to do different things (radio with pictures, or a “more info” button which lets you get more detailed information on the thing you’re listening to, etc) then this allows many changes to content. For example, a large amount of people read the ‘livetext’, the scrolling text that accompanies a radio broadcast on DAB, every single day - new content that can enhance a programme.

Additionally, if new platforms allow you space for more radio stations, you can experiment with more specialised stations, and different ways of making the content and for paying for it.

Examples from DAB Digital Radio have been additional visual content from commercial broadcasters and the BBC - pictures of traffic cameras in London on a local station there, or pictures and information about the current band being played on-air.

And all broadcasters have launched new services - catering for different music or different types of people. These are increasingly popular. Examples include the BBC Asian Network (offering music and programming especially for the asian community), BBC 6 music (a music station playing a wider choice of music including archive tracks from BBC sessions), Chill (a station playing relaxing cafe-del-mar type music), or Planet Rock (a classic rock station).

3 - How much does it cost to broadcast with DAB system for a radio?

That’s a difficult question. DAB multiplexes normally carry a wide variety of radio stations, which means that each station will share the cost; while the frequencies used by DAB means you need more transmitters to cover the same area in good quality (which then pushes the price back up again). It’ generally felt that the cost of transmission for each station should be roughly similar to FM, depending on many factors; though in practice it is rather more expensive to broadcast DAB than FM.

4 - Could or should DAB replace the analogue radio?

It could - it has in my house! My own personal belief is that any talk of switchoff should be informed by what listeners are doing, and that we should not kill analogue while it remains a popular way of listening and economical to broadcast. Some radio stations have already switched off their analogue broadcasts (albeit for other reasons).

5 - I have also noticed that BBC is in many social networks: it has profiles on Last.fm too that should be considered an enemy of the traditional radio. Is it a way to be online as much as possible or another strategy?Could you explain it?

last.fm and traditional radio aren’t enemies; traditional radio gives companionship and trusted guides to introduce you to new music and new ideas, which automated online services are incapable of doing. I use last.fm a lot, and I notice that my music compatibility with BBC 6 music is “super”, while with BBC 1Xtra is “poor”, so I now know exactly what station I should be listening to.

But all radio stations try to be in as many places as possible to reach as many listeners as they can - for commercial radio, it’s to increase their revenue, while for public service radio, it’s to achieve best value for the licence-fee payer.

6 - BBC looks like the leader in up-dating the radio system. What I mean is that you are doing a big work on the web radio offering a lot of applications and services which are still futuristic for a lot of FM radios. Why is BBC doing that?

The internet is capable of much more than just live broadcast. The BBC’s iPlayer gives me, as a licence-fee payer myself, a fantastic way of discovering the tremendous range of content that is available from its radio stations. And, through some of the things we’re doing, we’re trying to keep radio relevant for a younger generation, used to Facebook and YouTube.

7 - Interactivity is the nowadays’ trend; everybody justifies new technology with this issue. Since the origin the radio has been a medium which we can use also while we are doing other things. Could this excess of interactivity destroy this original characteristic? What I mean is that the listener has to concentrate so much to interpret more data, and a lot of times to generate data. Could interactivity lose audience in the long run?

I’m not sure. I think people expect to interact, and to shape their media choices. The days of a broadcaster just ‘broadcasting’ and not listening to their audience are, I hope, long gone.

Where interactivity gets in the way of the pleasure of just listening to the radio, I agree, it’s unwanted. I don’t see this being a large problem at the moment, though.

8 - How is the new web’ 3.0’changing the tradional radio?

The phone-in programme on radio was doing, in the 1970s, what Web 3.0 is doing now.

But radio stations with vibrant online communities enables a broadcaster to get closer to their audience in a way we’ve never been able to do in the past.

9 - How can you explain one of the latest BBC service as ‘Soun Index’?
10 - How can we consider an application as ‘Sound Index’? What is the benefits of this application for the audience?

Sound Index is a way of tracking the ‘buzz’ around new music by monitoring online conversations. It’s not specifically there for BBC Radio; but tools like this are used by many radio stations to ensure they’re spotting new music to play.

11 – Could you explain ‘Radio Labs’ project?

Yes, Radio Labs is where my team share some of their thinking about radio and other projects they’re responsible for. We’re experimenting with lots of things, and trying to share that learning and understanding with the rest of the industry. We firmly believe in “agree on technology, compete on content”, and by sharing our understanding around technology, we hope to keep radio relevant for many years to come.

So, this week I went to have a presentation from an agency, the kind of reverse of the presentation I used to have from agencies. This one was mostly an hour of bullshit bingo, albeit quite well presented, but there were two bits that shone for me.

One impressive bit was quite a nice definition, I thought, of web2.0…

Web 1.0 was all about connecting people to the internet.
Web 2.0 was all about connecting people with each other.

Nice. I thought. So, I was going to post a nice piece about this agency. I’d not heard that explanation before. Just before posting it, I did a quick Google search, to discover this…

LANINGHAM: (interviewer) You know, with Web 2.0, a common explanation out there is Web 1.0 was about connecting computers and making information available; and Web 2 is about connecting people and facilitating new kinds of collaboration. Is that how you see Web 2.0?
TIM BERNERS-LEE: (he who invented the internet) Totally not. Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.

So, on second thoughts, I won’t be posting that after all.

Google. Bullshit buster.