Success in Vegas and NPR in coffee shops
Posted on Sunday, April 18th, 2010 at 8:00am. #
Time for another set of Sunday morning reading, coming to you this week from Montréal in sunny Canada. It would be fun to claim that I’m here because of the ash stopping me travelling home; but I’d (thankfully) already planned to visit a friend here over the weekend.
I’ve spent the week in Las Vegas, manning the NAB Show stand – along with Chairperson Nick Piggott – for RadioDNS. We had a ton of interesting people coming to see us, and I hope we’ll get a lot more support from the US as a result (joining such organisations as the NAB, ClearChannel and iBiquity). Rather wonderfully, at the end of the show, we were awarded the Radio World ‘Cool Stuff’ Award – above – which was rather good to get.
Meanwhile, back in the UK, Matt Deegan helpfully gives Ford Ennals and the rest of the team at Digital Radio UK a few tips. He speaks a lot of sense; and it’s worth a good read.
When was the last time you tested your website with proper punters? NPR – ever the station to learn from – apparently hangs about in coffee shops, according to RAIN, and offers to pay people a couple of bucks just to watch them using the NPR website. (Which is rather a nice idea, since they’re using their own computers and therefore are much more comfortable with using them; and the NPR team can also spot any incompatibilities “out there in the wild”, rather than using a usability agency’s setup). Sounds low-cost and pretty cool.
Radio lost a bit of a competitor this week: last.fm announced, towards the end of an otherwise fairly unconnected post, that they’re stopping on-demand playback of songs. I’ve used last.fm since 2004, and I reckon I’ve listened to about four or five songs on-demand, though – it was hardly a Spotify replacement for me. I wonder how much effect it’ll have on last.fm’s site traffic? My guess: none.
David Hepworth talks about radio and television’s love-affair with newspaper reviews. When I did the evening show on a radio station, I never once mentioned anything that was on the telly that night, lest people tune away, and since I was there to offer a choice of something different. David makes a good point that we probably concentrate too much on newspaper reviews. Mind, it fills a good ten minutes.
Away from radio, but perhaps not too far away, Twitter has launched quite a neat thing: a site to explain how Twitter works for media companies. Not only is Twitter the darling of some media already, it clearly wants to make it more useful in future. A neat idea: I wonder how we can use something similar to this for radio station sites or sites like Media UK?
Speaking about Media UK, one of the things we did around six years ago (maybe rather more) is to move the discussion area to real names only. This helped – significantly – the type of miserable cowardly messages that some people posted under a secret username. Turns out that Gawker has been doing something different: simply hiding comments from untrusted people on their blogs. While they’re a click away (“see more comments”), it works quite well as a quality enhancer for their website. Neat idea.
Now that the hateful Digital Economy Act has been made law, we’re already seeing the effects. Neville Hobson posts a depressing piece about how you should tighten up the security of your wifi access points because of the new law; which will result in many less open wifi connections in the UK. Shame.
Have a good week. I plan to fly back into the UK on Tuesday night (blow, wind, blow!), and start a new, rather exciting, job on Wednesday. I’ll tell you more about that when I can.
