If you’ve ever wondered what I do, this is it.

Monday
Saw a presentation of a great piece of research, done for the BBC and others by The Leading Question. Interesting figures include (I’ve checked, I can blog these):
77% of music fans discover new music on the radio. The average music library on an iPod or computer is 1,247. 51% of that is from their own CDs. 27% from ‘free downloads’. Among filesharers, Limewire still MUCH more popular (67%) than torrents (14%). 44% of iPod owners live within the M25. Plenty more interesting stats to come, I suspect.
Meeting count: 3

Tuesday
Included a meeting around putting radio into the iPlayer. People started shouting at each other. Nobody minded. Passion, it’s good.
Also included, variously, a pitch from a company about a new product; a meeting about potential improvements to a BBC system; a meeting with Ian from BBC Backstage, which was very good; and a pitch from a US company which wasn’t.
Meeting count: 7

Wednesday
Catching up with some of my direct reports. Useful meetings, must do them more often (and pass on good feedback rather better). Travelled to Heathrow, got on a plane to Dublin. Really good conference about the future of newspapers, where I was chided for not wearing a tie. Professor Roy Greenslade is officially the most interesting man in the known universe, if you want to know about newspapers. Lots of editors of newspapers on the panel with me. Slightly startled the panel by saying I’d read 243 news items by 146 different journalists - or, rather, bloggers - that day, and hadn’t read a newspaper. Those stats were stunningly made up, but potentially very possible given my Google Reader habit. (I had in fact read two, because they were free.) Enjoyed the conference very much. Particularly enjoyed the Guinness drinking and excellent company afterwards. Quite seriously considering hopping on a plane back to Dublin tomorrow for more of aforesaid company. Can’t. But quite tempted.
Meeting count: 4

Thursday
Staying at a posh hotel in Dublin (courtesy of the conference organisers), which was irritatingly attentive and anxious to please. Just fuck off, leave me alone, stop ringing me every two minutes asking if everything’s okay. Thanks. Woke up after a, ahem, small amount of sleep, to get to Dublin airport for 7am. Thank heavens I flew on BMI (courtesy of the conference organisers), which was cheap and meant I had club lounge access (courtesy of other conference organisers and my silver card). Much coffee drunk. Back in the UK, one meeting around new streaming infrastructure; the monthly departmental get-together (three great presentations by my team, one blog read out by me, that was it really); then moderately not very good conference in the evening around widgets, during which I had to pipe up from the audience of course. My take? Widgets aren’t the exciting bit. APIs are. APIs? Mmm. Widgets? Meh. Retold a story about Virgin Radio’s magical “adding the person’s ID number at the end of their linking code” to reward people for linking from external sites. Bumped into some nice people from Sky afterwards.
Meeting count: 3

Friday
Inexplicable internal BBC accounting wrangling portfolio discussion meeting, then radio-into-iPlayer meeting in the afternoon. Seeing lots of really nice UI for it. Lots of little niggles to help sort. Looking really good though. Quite exciting.
Meeting count: 4

All in all, a meeting-light week (Tuesday was more normal). Very tired now, mind. Looking forward to bed.

Photo: Jesús Gorriti. Used under licence.

“I think we have been slow to embrace blogs as a way of discussing our strategy and direction. This often leads to the debate happening elsewhere, based often on only half the information, and without our being able fully to join in the debate. We’ve not done ourselves any favours, and we want to use this blog to re-engage with our friends and critics.”

That’s not my words - instead, those of Ashley Highfield, who is Divisional Director for BBC Future Media and Technology (and my boss’s half-boss). I think that’s his first public blog posting, too, and he’s welcoming-in the BBC Internet Blog, a kind-of complement to the BBC Editors’ Blog from BBC News and BBC Sport; and something similar (but hopefully much more responsible and grown-up) to Virgin Radio’s techblog which I launched a few years ago.

It’s great to see this blog there - particularly great to see the owl on the right-hand side of the page (which any tech geek of-a-certain-age will recognise, but I’ll not spoil it for you if you’re too young). I’m one of the people who’s been asked to blog on there, but I’m currently moderately unclear whether my blogs will go past a committee of twenty people who’ll rewrite it and send it back for revisions, so we’ll see how it works. But I’ve a login and a password for the BBC blog system, and someone has taken a photo of me and made it into a little avatar, so it’s all very exciting. I look forward to posting something highly libellous and getting the site shut down.

I’m hoping that I can get away with moderately re-heating some of the postings I make here, but bothering to back up my wild assertions with facts and stuff (though if you read Biased BBC apparently that would be most unlike the Corporation).

Anyway, I notice that they’re linking to my blog already: apparently my high praise for the BBC Electric Proms site was deemed nice enough to link to, so that’s a nice thing.

Let me know what you’d like me to blog about, if anything, in the comments. My comments (unlike the BBC’s blog) are pre-moderated if you’re new, post-moderated if I trust you.

Signs pointing to the BBC, from Redvers on Flickr. Used under licence.

Within the BBC, you can run your own blog on the intranet. This appears within the BBC firewall, so we can speak more freely, and, conversely, nobody can read it unless they’re at work, and if they’re at work, they should be doing something more interesting than reading guff from their colleagues. As a concept, I’m slightly dubious. I can’t plug those blogs into Google Reader, and I’ve not found an easy way to find them, so I don’t read them. Sorry, colleagues.

However, a discussion on something called talk.gateway (think “a discussion forum linked from the intranet to help people while away their dismal lunchbreaks eating their mangiare soup” for those people stuck in W12) today included a list of BBC staff with public blogs. I appeared there, despite this blog descending into nothing more than a del.icio.us link list recently, and there were some I didn’t know about (and conversely, I knew of some that they didn’t know about).

Anyway, for those of you - and I know there are some - who want all BBC staff public blogs, then you, too, can read them - here. If you’d prefer an RSS feed, you’ll find one here. This list contains some ex-BBC people of note too; and the naming convention shows who they are, and where they’re based - so mine says “James Cridland/AMi” since I’m based within Audio and Music Interactive (even though I actually work for Future Media & Technology). I hope you find it useful. If I’ve missed you, and you work in the BBC, then a) keep your blog up to date, and b) let me know where it lives - via email if you like.

And as I type, two boring things:
1. I discover that my RSS feed here is broken. I’ll fix that tomorrow. Fixed. Feedburner wierdness: have regressed to feeds.feedburner.com instead of rss.james.cridland.net
2. My del.icio.us links. Are these actually useful within this blog? Should I just link to my del.icio.us page, and stop adding them to my blog itself? Please let me know - by comments here - whether you want me to keep adding my del.icio.us links to my blog postings. I’m thinking about stopping them; do you want me to keep posting?