A while back - well, actually, a year back - I bought a domain-name, mystatus.im, to go with a little project I was working on at the time. The project was to automatically sync your instant-messaging ’status’ from Facebook to Twitter, Pownce, Jabber, etc etc. It was quite a good idea, and while some have got a little of the way there, I don’t believe that a decent “my status” sync has really been done yet.

There was some shonky code on there for a while which did the Facebook->Twitter bit, but I retired that a short while ago, since the Twittersync app on Facebook does just a good a job the other way around.

mystatus.im runs out on 25th May. I’ve had expiring domain-names swiped by get-rich-quick merchants (mediauk.co.uk cost me a considerable sum to get back, though there’s a back-story here, since mediauk.co.uk had been out of my reach since 2001), so if there is anyone out there who can see a use for mystatus.im, please do get in touch. (I’m not planning on making a load of cash, and am more interested in a good coder doing a good piece of code).

.im is in the Isle of Man, by the way - a great TLD for instant-messaging type stuff, I think.

Also up for renewal is the instantly-usable UKDIGITALRADIOMEDIAONAIRTODAYSPY.COM (no, really) which I bought as a gag a year ago after it was published in The Radio Magazine. You don’t want that one? Oh.

Photo: Simen Svale Skogsrud. Used under licence.

I’m privileged to have been elected as a Trustee of The Radio Academy.

Thank you for your support. I’m looking forward to playing my part.

I’ve met Gillian Reynolds a few times. She’s the radio critic at The Daily Telegraph. She’s excellent at writing that she loves everything on her radio and is very rarely critical: exactly the sort of critic that radio needs, to my mind. She’s also wonderful in real life: a kind of self-deprecating grandmotherly figure, blissfully in love with the medium she writes about.

Writing today in the Daily Telegraph, she mentions three recent broadcasts that she’s enjoyed. Othello on Radio 3, the near sellout production with Ewan McGregor as Iago (”those idiots who wonder what Radio 3 is for had their answer”); Radio 4’s The Archive Hour (”imagine not having this kind of radio, where programmes start thought processes, make connections”); and another programme on Radio 4, British Jews and the Dream of Zion (”a fine example of how radio welcomes you into the conversation, widens the bounds of what you believed before, makes room for new thoughts, and still affords place for considered opinion”).

Her most interesting point, talking around Othello but valid for virtually anything on the radio:

There is no necessary distinction between quality and popularity. What mass audiences like is not necessarily rubbish. By the same token, some things only small audiences like are worth their place in any schedule because a) a small radio audience is still something like 100,000 listeners, while b) it is insulting to assume Shakespeare is only for posh people, and c) things that start with small audiences can be the place for new ideas and talents to grow.

It’s a clearly valedictory piece for the well-funded public service broadcaster; but in the age of ultra-relevance on the internet (hello, Google Ads), I wonder how we can encourage advertisers that mass audiences are not everything.

After all, if the advertisers don’t want this kind of radio, commercial radio is mostly stuck to playing ten great songs in a row; and commercial radio speech output would, in Gillian Reynolds’s words, be limited to “incendiary phone-ins, or bland promotions of this week’s celebrities”. Arise, LBC, talkSPORT, et al.

If “more-music” radio is better as a one-to-one service from services like last.fm and Pandora (which, when they get their algorithms right, surely will be), to safeguard radio’s future in our lives we need to invest in better and more engaging speech output; but we also need to invest in the commercial climate to make speech radio thrive.

Wonder how we do that?

Photo: Tom Watson. Used under licence

Sean Ross posts in Infinite Dial, a radio website well worth visiting, about a new radio station, being broadcast on FM and also on erockster.com:

Here’s erockster.com as heard on KAJR at 7:40 local time this morning, mostly unhosted but with various artist drops:
Yeah Yeah Yeahs, “Maps”
Beach Boys, “California Girls”
Tegan & Sara, “Burn Your Life”
Michael Jackson, “Billie Jean”
Bright Eyes, “Old Soul Song”
…
If, three years ago, you were one of those people who liked to point out that Bob- and Jack-FM were not your iPod on shuffle, this may well be.

If we continue to think of radio stations as purely music (”unhosted but with artist drops”), we’re going to hell in a handcart. Because last.fm, Pandora, et al, does a much better job of playing me new music that I’ve otherwise not heard of but I like than the likes of the nonstop music channels like Core, The Arrow, Virgin Groove, Century Digital, etc.

I’m not a typical listener: nor a typical music fan. Listen to my music choice (that’s my music collection in one big playlist), while looking at my most-played tracks of the last 3 months, and you’ll see that my most played track in that three months is The Divine Comedy’s “Absent Friends”, which I’ve played just four times. A typical commercial radio station will play their top tracks eight times a day - once every three hours. Assuming I listen to music for a total of two hours a day (in commutes and desk-bound working), commercial radio would have had me listen to that track 60 times in three months.

Indeed, over the last week, my 210 different artists, and a total of 323 tracks means that, in just 18 hours, I’ve listened to more tracks than many commercial radio stations play per week. I’m singling out commercial radio here, by the way, not because of a misplaced loyalty to my employer, but that commercial radio’s music choice is, by and large, far more tightly musically formatted - and that, for whatever reason, only commercial radio runs nonstop music services.

Clear Channel’s new radio station, or The Arrow, or Virgin Xtreme, or any number of other “music jukebox” channels, just play a mix of music which is suboptimal, for me, to that available from a computer program or a website - or, even, from a tightly tuned iTunes.

Surely the future of radio isn’t just non-stop music jukebox channels? Can’t one-to-one technology do that job better? Or is the job of a programme director really just the job of a music scheduler these days?

(And does the above shine any light on the widening gap between commercial radio services and those from the BBC? Is the Radio 1 breakfast show, or Terry Wogan, or Chris Evans, or Scott Mills ‘all about the music’?)

Photo: flickr user niznoz. Used under licence.

“Do you use that as your main work computer?” asked a slightly quizzical Erik Huggers, looking at my little Asus Eee PC.

When I’m over in the BBC’s Media Village, I have discovered something called the FM&T HQ Hot-Desk Area, which consists of four desks with keyboard, monitor, a network cable, and a few extra plug points (actually, no extra plug points, but let’s not spoil it). This means that I can bring a laptop over, log in to Reith, the internal BBC network, and get on with some work.

Except I rarely carry my BBC-issue “ultra-light” HP around. I’ll not bore you with the specifics, other than to mention that the BBC appears to have virtually no business wifi, that I have to carry the power adaptor around which is almost as heavy as the laptop, that the desktop is crippled to not connect to open wifi connections with anything like ease, that it appears to have little power management, and, finally, it uses… Windows. Which I’m surprising myself by beginning to actively hate as an OS.

So instead, I carry my little Asus Eee PC around with me. Which, you’ll recall, has virtually no storage space whatsoever - mine’s the 4G model, which, after an install of Ubuntu Hardy Heron, has about half that spare. Not only that, but it can’t connect to Reith at all (not being a BBC machine), so the documents on my fileshare are unavailable. No wonder Erik gave me a quizzical look. How could I do any work on the thing?

Well, part of it is that I’ve discovered quite a few “dirty” internet connections (ADSL lines connected directly out, via wifi, to the internet), and partly it’s because I run my life in the cloud, with most of what I need either on a 4G USB stick that I carry around with me, or on my own Amazon S3 storage through JungleDisk. (Indeed, so far, this entry is the abortive beginning of that post).

I’m a big fan of my little Asus Eee. I found Xandros, the Linux distro that the unit shipped with, quite confusing: I’ve only really been using Linux for a year or so now, and I’ve only just got to grips with Ubuntu, so I popped Ubuntu 8.04 onto the device, and got the thing working quite well. So well, indeed, that I’ve written a wiki page on how to do it (which many others, gratifyingly, have added to).

The one thing I did notice was that Ubuntu used a lot more battery power than Xandros. The Eee’s battery power isn’t particularly magical, so to have even less battery power was disappointing. I guessed it might be something with processor scaling, that magical bit of running a computer where your machine thinks “ah, I’m having it easy now, I’ll stop running the processor quite so fast”.

I was right; Ubuntu as it’s initially configured on the Asus doesn’t enable processor scaling at all. Yet the little Intel processor inside my Asus Eee does cope with it quite happily: it’s just that the OS doesn’t allow it.

So, after a few hours’ research, I’m happy to mention that I’m now running a better, processor-scaled, version of Ubuntu Hardy Heron on the Asus Eee. Naturally, this information is now on the wiki, and it’s a quick, less-than-ten-step process. The machine’s running less hot, and the battery should last significantly longer. And, interestingly, the top speed has changed from 650MHz to 900MHz - that’s quite a potential speed increase.

What else of the Asus Eee? Well, the screen on my 710 is a little too small; the just-released 900 fixes that, but at a massive price premium. The keyboard appears to have the numbers in the wrong place, which gets a bit of getting used to (though the size is just fine). However, the machine’s really rather well-built: solid and reassuring-feeling, rather than cheap and tacky. I was lucky enough to buy the black version instead of the “looks cute but shows the dirt” white version so it looks halfway decent; and it has many more connections than, say, the Apple MacBook Air.

And unlike one of my colleagues, who uses his MacBook Air to take notes using nothing more than TextEditor (ha!), I’ve quite a sensible note-taking system, thanks to the wonderful world of Tiddlywiki: a perfectly usable and brilliant offline note-taking system. Just power up Firefox, open the local Tiddlywiki on my system, and there are all my notes, all interlinked, with full backup files and (if I set it up) online backup. It’s really quite excellent.

Anyway, after showing him, Erik’s impressed at the Asus. So should you be. At about £220, it’s really not the worst machine you could ever buy.

[updated with final notes]

A good conference today at the bottom of CentrePoint - the CBI Conference Centre. Here are my notes of the day. They might be a bit random, and may contain views that are not those of my employer.

Jenny Abramsky from the BBC talked about DAB, ensuring that people are clear of the pro-DAB position of the BBC. Then really stressed that the only thing people really want on radio… is content. Ignore the techie stuff. Get the content right. Hurray for her. And finally had a good long dig at “her good friend” Peter Bazalgette for suggesting that Radio 1 and Radio 2 should be privatised.

Fru Hazlitt: GCap are larger than last.fm (in terms of uniques) and shortly to overtake Yahoo. 2.1 million users online compared to 15 million listeners onair. And monetised far higher in terms of CPT. Audience online growing 71% year on year, and money doing that too. She believes that internet isn’t necessarily the right thing for listening to radio, but it’s certainly a way to extend the brand. Talks about her recent acquisition of welovelocal.com as a way of getting much closer to the audience; and that radio should have tons of local content. “If you’re a kid, what are you going to want? iPod touch? Or a DAB receiver?” Good point. Also claims that GCap are iTunes’s second biggest affiliate partner in Europe. And she said bollocks. Twice. Yay.

Philippe Generali (CEO, RCS Worldwide) does an overview of radio revenue. US revenue: everything down except non-spot revenue, and all is down. UK too, and France (-5.8%). So, what to do?
Starts talking about websites. Apparently content should be relevant. And fresh. And apparently you can slap ads on it. Fuck me. I’d never have thought of that. Websites, eh?
Talks about Skyrock, the third most-visited website in France (because it has created its own, French-language, social networking site, in a world where French-language is ignored by people like Facebook and Bebo). Says we should all have a social network as a result. My jury’s out.
Starts doing a sales pitch for Nokia Visual Radio (which it is now the software provider for). Does so with really, really, faked screenshots. Been there, done that, got the postcard: I wonder if it’s really popular for anyone? (Virgin Radio switched it off the minute I left, quite rightly).
Starts doing a sales pitch for iSelector, which I’ve never quite understood as a concept, given that it is a competitor for your on-air station without the bits that makes the station unique, but what do I know. Gives Nick Piggott a mention for MiXFM and My Classic FM who use this in the UK.
Does a big sales pitch for Media Monitors, an RCS company. Quite nice - it uses Arbitron PPM data to show people tuning in and out of a station, minute by minute. Plays dreadful clip of a public radio station which singlehandedly loses the station over 70% of all their audience. I’ve blogged about the use of PPMs before, but good to see it on the screen. Philippe earns a small reprieve in my otherwise most scornful scorn for showing us this.
Shows a graph showing that Abba’s Dancing Queen is the most hated song on the radio. Much amusement, given that Fru had just announced that her favourite song was, indeed, Abba’s Dancing Queen. I suspect RCS has just lost a contract!

Coffee

After the coffee break, the room is significantly less full. It’s quite cold here in the presentation hall. And the free wifi that was here last time when I was here (at a ‘widgets’ conference), there was copious free wifi, so clearly they’ve switched it off deliberately for us. Nice. Well done, CBI Conference Centre. (Later I discover it needs a key, and it’s so weak it doesn’t work in the auditorium).

Peter Davies from Ofcom did a presentation which didn’t say too much that was new. Talked about Smooth FM in London not being allowed to get rid of their jazz programming. Squirmed delightfully when Paul Robinson pointed out that they’ve shunted their jazz to overnights, so what does it matter?

Rights and radio in the digital age, the first panel session, has Andrew Harrison from the RadioCentre, Martin Stiksel from last.fm, Fran Nevrkla from PPL, and Cliff Fluet from Lewis Silkin.

Martin points out that licensing is v difficult, since he needs to get licenses in 240 countries. Paul points out they haven’t yet, so surely they’re infringing copyright? Martin points out that it’s not quite as easy as that, since they can’t even get some licenses.

Andrew says that commercial radio wants to act responsibly instead. He says that the deal with music rights-holders needs to be “reborn” - to take account of all platforms and on-demand content. Good call.

Fran loves broadcasters, and thinks that “ISPs” are being very bad, not allowing PPL to earn money from them, while still being sold for very high figures. (He has confused last.fm with an ISP - he’s just called them an ISP again.) 90% of the 47,000 performers he represents, he says, exist on less than £18,000 a year from music. Apparently we’re supposed to feel bad for them. He then moves into a polemic about “we should not give music away for free”, which I agree with. He gives a sideswipe to last.fm, saying that PPL should get money from the start, not just when your business gets sold for £300m. He wants to get to know each other better. Aw. However, he’s just said that there’s not goodwill in this industry. (Not sure what industry he’s talking about).

Cliff says that the record industry has to move away from sales to money on a per-play basis, or a licensing basis. Fran nods head. Cliff wants radio to add a ‘buy this song’ link everywhere.

Digital Radio - on the money? was quite a good session:

Matt Wells, The Guardian: he’s been in the sun, he’s bright red, with panda eyes from his sunglasses That’ll peel later this week. He says he doesn’t believe the second DAB mux will be launched. Points out that commercial radio appears to push for FM being killed in order for DAB to succeed. Interesting viewpoint. Thinks that DAB only really offers “5live in better quality” which “isn’t very impressive”. Claims 4digital will require 1200 new transmitters (ah, Guardian accuracy, it’s actually around 170). Says they’ll not earn money out of it, and/or Channel4 is only there to earn money out of it. Points out that PlanetRock and OneWord were not loved by their owners (and I suspect he’s right), but claims PlanetRock will survive. Claim that The Guardian are getting 1.5m podcast downloads a month.

Nathalie Schwarz, 4 Digital Group: talks about tv going digital and how it’s working. Wants a similarly clear roadmap for radio. However, says the second mux will launch. However, doesn’t rule out launching on Digital One. Oooh. Talks about what would be their first station, E4 Radio. (E4 produced a 65% uplift in Freeview boxes, apparently). Brilliantly shuts Matt up by asking whether MediaGuardian is in profit yet - or, indeed, The Guardian itself. (It’s not). Talks about commercial radio bulking and discounting AMers, let alone DAB stations.

Paul Brown, DRDB: is fed up of the radio industry ’staring up our own fundements’. I do like Paul. Points out listener figures, and set sales, are high. Says commercial radio isn’t very good at selling ads on digital radio, interestingly. Very bullish about radio in the future. Says that radio has been hampered by ‘indecisiveness’ because of being owned by shareholders. Says that commercial radio doesn’t crosspromote enough. Mentions that PlanetRock had more Sony Radio Academy Award nominations than any other national station (not entirely sure that’s right, but it did get quite a few).

Mark Friend, BBC: talks about hybrid sets: DAB+IP. Wants to think more carefully about the content and the interface to make it more relevant. He’s a bright, clever, handsome, intelligent man. And my boss, by the way. Cough. Says future required cooperation around technology and marketing.

Ventura Barba, Yahoo Music: wooooah, great radio name! Starts talking about the internet. Probably a little confused about what everyone else has been talking about. Starts talking about copyright and illegal sites. Hey, wrong panel, you’re 45 minutes too late. Can’t help but think he’s been badly booked, he’s had nothing else to really contribute. At the end he mentions that Yahoo earns money. Good for you.

A break for lunch - yum, salmon pasta, then breakout sessions. I went to the one about technology.

Nick Piggott (GCap) talked about the NanoDAB - a magic Bluetooth DAB receiver which talks to your mobile phone. Then showed quite an insipring video of what it might be capable of, full of an iPhone-like device which adds a whole heap of information to radio listening. It’s a brilliant video, so I hope he posts it somewhere. His summary: create “new radio”, get it on the right platforms and devices, and only DAB can economically reach the mass market. Later, Nick talked about tagging: being a way of timeshifting interactivity. He says (and I’m working on this too) that it’s a simple but crucial part of enabling a richer radio; and says it’s far more than buying music. He says that personalisable radio will hopefully result in better revenues for commercial radio.

David Muniz (Gaydar) explained his brand’s evolution - a radio station launched off the back of a website in Feb 2002 on Sky, then May 2003 on DAB in London, and 2004 on DAB in the South Coast (read Brighton, I think). Says that he’d love to be national on DAB, but it’s impossible because of bandwidth costs. Has a lot of slides, rather more than he was seemingly expecting. In terms of how people tune into the station - 60% via internet, 30% DAB, and 10% Sky.

Colin Crawford (Pure) shows an interesting “first connected DAB radio” which isn’t publicly announced yet. This is probably it then. It’s a nice black device, looking not unlike a Pure One, with software buttons on a big screen, and also runs on Linux. LINUX! Wow, that’s quite cool. He says this will enable quick upgrades for new features. He’s running a dedicated portal for this (ah, so he runs our listeners, then). Next, he shows a full-screen, full-colour touchscreen display, coming to market in 2009. Really nice looking. Slideshow support, by the looks of things. Has internet radio on it, as well as DAB. And it does media streaming from your own PC server or your “NAS box”, whatever the hell one of those is. Full colour album covers, etc. This is really nice. Wow, I’m quite flabbergasted about this; I never thought Pure was so forward-looking.

John Ousby (BBC) shows some visualisation we’re working on for IPTV. It’s very good. I won’t spoil it. Also says that 3G coverage is pretty awful and is very difficult to stream reliably with - or, for that matter, DAB Digital Radio coverage, or wifi coverage.

Analysis

Claire Enders came on with some great and interesting figures, culled from a ton of different sources, but first was very excited that she’s just gained British citizenship. Aw. Bless.

She poured some scorn on some of the figures we’ve heard so far; notably some of Fru’s claims about how music is sold as a result of listening to it on the radio (apparently she’s quoting US figures not UK ones).

iPod ownership in the UK is the second largest in the world per capita. That’s interesting.

She predicts a fairly subdued neartime commercial future for radio. Explains her figures don’t include any allowance for hypercyclicality. I had hypercyclicality once, but I got some pills for it and it cleared up within a few days.

Shows percentage share of UK advertising by medium - substantial jump for the internet, but goodness, national newspapers, and business magazines, are in shit: huge great falls. Recently, in the last three years, huge falls in direct mail and regional newspapers too (and similar, though less pronounced, in the radio).

Almost £1billion has been spent on commercial radio acquisitions in the last year, did you know that? Gosh, that’s a lot.

The last session
Well, I’m suffering a little from conference fatigue; as you might guess from the above writeup. The last session is around commercial opportunities which (for now, at least) I can ignore. So, this is my last update. It’s been a mix of positive and sobering discussion, this conference. Quite well done, with lots of arguments, which is nice. It’s almost like a “Radio at the Edge” conference which is rather more biz friendly.

At home, I’ve three computers that I use regularly: my Asus Eee PC, a really rather heavy HP laptop, and an even heavier and larger (and much more ancient) Sony Vaio. All run Ubuntu, though the HP has Windows XP on it for the times when I have to boot up in that flavour.

But, if the hard-drive broke on any of these machines, I’d lose absolutely nothing.

All my photos, and increasingly videos, are held at Flickr (I buy a DVD once a year of all the photos I have there, just for safety’s sake). All my documents are with the increasingly-good Google Docs. My code is held on my website, though backed-up daily. All my email, back to 2004, is held on my Google Apps for Your Domain. My list of passwords? I don’t have one, using my own password generator.

Of course, I do have some files held locally. The other machine in my house is a fairly old Mac Mini, which sits under the telly. I use it to play DVDs and sync my iPhone, but it also contains my music collection. Indeed, after an Amazon.co.uk “sell your stuff” spree, I have about five CDs left in the house. But, once more, if the hard-drive broke on this machine, I’d lose absolutely nothing.

I back up the 30G of data I hold within iTunes automatically every night, thanks to a piece of software called JungleDisk. This simply watches for changes within my iTunes folder, and uploads those changes to Amazon’s servers somewhere. I pay £1.89 a month for the storage (and like JungleDisk so much, I also spent a one-off £10.10 for the software). So, while undoubtedly it would be a hassle and a lengthy download if this disk broke, I’d again not lose anything; and JungleDisk also ensures that my music collection is available to me wherever I am in the world.

With the advent of services like Amazon S3, Flickr, Gmail and Google Docs, it strikes me that we don’t really need computers to have great big hard drives any more - certainly not on a laptop. Asus appear to be the first computer manufacturer to really understand this.

By leaving all my data on the cloud, am I ahead of the curve, I wonder? Or simply too trusting of Google/Flickr et al?