Photo: Steve Rhodes, of Bank of America staff trying to stop him taking a photograph in a public place (the pavement). Take on March 19th. Used under licence.

PhotoShopped
Ack. Very splendid blog showing really quite awful photoshop work. Much amusement.

XMPP Pubsub Radio Playlist Bot
Interesting - an XMPP "now playing" bot for a radio station. Not quite convinced it works like this, but XMPP is certainly worth looking at for a distributed way of doing that type of information. Much better than regularly pinging a server. via kael

How to Look and Feel Like a Complete Idiot
Amusing comment from Curtis Poe (a BBC chap). Via Alan Connor.

A Copenhagen beer map
I personally recommend B and J in this map - both great places to eat and drink some unusual beer. And what a good idea.

How do you get your radio these days?
Word Magazine: "We're thinking of doing a piece in the magazine about the state of radio. How are you getting your radio? And what are you listening to?" - interesting comments!

Math links for fun and charity « Let?s play math!
Use of one of my photos: this time a recent one from the London Transport museum. Nice to see it used in a totally different situation.

TechCrunch UK » News Round
What a brilliant new service Mike's started. Excellent, I hope he continues.

This is a tidied and edited list of my del.icio.us postings from February 29th to March 20th. You can subscribe to this list, live, via rss.

Uploaded on 13 February 2008, this is a viewing platform in the war museum in Salford Quays. Photo by Mike Willshaw. Used under licence.

All this online sharing has to stop
It's ruining the motor mechanic industry. (No, really)

Flickr CC search
A quick page whipped up to help me find nice pictures for this blog - it searches all Flickr CC images together (which the Flickr UI won’t let me do).

Aussies Head to SXSW
A website using one of my photos, albeit only credited in the ALT tag (which isn’t cricket, by the way).

Oceanworld Manly
Another spotting of one of my photographs, complete with a link to my own website. How splendid.

Living on Earth: Swedish Body Heat
Sounds exciting, but actually it’s a radio feature about trains, aired on WBUR and other stations. They used one of my photographs to illustrate it on the web. Cool.

When statistics speak volumes
Good piece by Paul Smith on the press releases radio stations send out on figures day. Paul still owes me a fiver, by the way.

MMS For O2 iPhone
Just the thing I was looking for. Brilliant - now I can receive MMS on the iPhone. (Bizarre that it doesn’t support it…)

Twitter on the iPhone: Hahlo
While I’m on an iPhone theme, I use this for Twitter (it’s much prettier than it looks on this page). For this, and for the MMS thing, I’ve donated.

Keeping the conversation going
Nic Price activates a magic Wordpress plugin. So have I. Good idea.

Do We Have The Backup?
‘how it can be legitimate for a government to build roads but not to lay fibre is a mystery to me, and one that deserves to be questioned.’ Good point.

Big name #4
Hello, ladies. Contacting me has never been easier. Etc.

What HD-2s Don’t Stream And Should?
A rant about streaming. But included in this is interesting: WRXK’s HD2 channel (a new one only for HD radios) is entirely themed around their breakfast presenter. Neat idea. (Course, I was behind the ‘Virgin Radio Party Classics’ channel on Sky, voiced by Suggs.)

Interactivity: A lost opportunity for your station?
Some “isn’t the US behind the rest of us” type thoughts from Mark Ramsey; but some useful and interesting figures he quotes.

This is a tidied and edited list of my del.icio.us postings from January 26th to February 14th. You can subscribe to this list, live, via rss.

Photo: Xerones @ Flickr, cc licenced

Watching the stories about the floods in Yorkshire, it’s been interesting to switch between Sky News and BBC News 24.

BBC News 24 is talking to journalists, rescue workers, firemen, policemen, etc. The questions from the studio are the standard “What’s the latest where you are?”.

Sky News - Anna Botting, who is live on-air - is talking directly to people who are trapped. People stuck upstairs, workmen who are ‘really quite cold now’ in their warehouses, people stuck in their cars. The journalist’s questions are sympathetic, interesting, warm.

Which do you think is the most interesting?

Clue: it’s not what the BBC is doing.

CC licenced photo of bees on a mobile phone from Carol Esther

I wrote a while back about a particular story about lazy journalism where an obviously fake story simply wasn’t checked before printing or broadcasting.

And now, another - the case of the mobile phone towers that ‘kill bees’. First reported by The Independent on Sunday, the story was copied right round the world.

Shame it’s not true. Indeed, the scientist who’s quoted in the original article says (my bold)…

“Ever since The Independent wrote their article, for which they never called or wrote to us, none of us have been able to do any of our work because all our time has been spent in phone calls and e-mails trying to set things straight. This is a horror story for every researcher to have your study reduced to this. Now we are trying to force things back to normal.”

I’ve spotted stories being copied and embellished before, and (as a non-journalist who’s never worked in journalism) I do find it quite amazing that people lift stories from others without any checking at all.

So, the biggest French political news this year: France has a new president.

A quick flick through at 10.15pm tonight…

Sky News had live coverage of Sarkozy’s speech.
Euronews had live coverage of Sarkozy’s speech.
CNN had live coverage of Sarkozy’s speech.
Al Jazeera had live coverage of Sarkozy’s speech.
BBC Parliament was taking TF1 with live coverage of Sarkozy’s speech (while BBC News 24 simulcasts BBC One’s national news)

…and France 24, the international news service from France, had a pre-recorded sports report, a promo telling us it concentrates on news from France, followed by… a package from New Delhi in India.

And the prize for most non-existent live coverage of the French election goes, surprisingly, to its own news channel.

Well, and Fox News. But then, you’d expect that.

It’s not every day that you end up as a minor tech news story, but that happened this week to me. I thought it would be interesting to do some analysis on it.

First, a bit of background. Before Christmas, we (that is, Virgin Radio, the company I work for) quietly made our radio player work correctly with the Nintendo Wii. The only mention - because I didn’t think it was worthy of a story at the time - was on my blog. We didn’t PR it, nor did we even put it on the website.

Then, thanks to a colleague who bought a PS3, we got the Virgin Radio player working on the Sony PS3. On Friday 30 March, in fact - because, once more, it was blogged here. Again, we didn’t put anything about it on the website; but I did wonder whether we might make a story out of it, so I mailed our PR team over the weekend.

Most of the things we’re proud of (the launch of the Virgin Radio Interact section for example) are technically ambitious, loved by our audience, and totally ignored by the press - I guess because they’re too complicated, too confusing, and not sexy enough. This, however, was different.

A call from John Plunkett from The Guardian resulted in the first coverage of the story. Once that story appeared, on 10 April, I had a few other calls from trade publications and one games website - and our press release went to anyone who asked our PR team.

What’s been interesting is how the story spread. It didn’t take long for BBC News to find the story, headlining it with “console tie-up”, making it appear as if we have spoken to Sony and/or Nintendo. (We haven’t, for the record).

Radio Today used our press release as the basis for their story; as did (I guess) Digital Spy - both of them similarly used the future tense - ‘Virgin Radio is to become the first…’, rather than saying we’d already launched with the service.

But news on the internet appears to run through a chinese whispers system. One news source will copy other news sources in order to add to their news. So, it is interesting following the story around. As an example, I didn’t speak to Radio Today at all (Roy always gets the story right, so I don’t need to); however, I’m quoted as speaking to Radio Today by many websites who use the story, like next-gen.biz, gamesindustry.biz, monstersandcritics.com, ps3news.ca, PC Advisor, tech.blorge.com and absolutegadget.com. Also crediting Radio Today are Portable Planet, whos story then gets used by Nintendojo.

Using a combination of our press release and our website as a source are iTWire and el33tonline, whos story then makes it to igniq.com. Also apparent users of our press release include MCVUK, who then get quoted as a source for PSPSPS and Pocket-Lint.

Clearly looking at Digital Spy’s “will be launching” text were PS3center.net and Hexus who were under the impression this was something we were planning to launch in the future.

AHN quotes the BBC news report; as does Aurum3, totalgaming.co.uk and Afterdawn.com who uses a Virgin brand (not Virgin Radio brand) logo, and claims it will be an update for the console.

Eurogamer quotes the subscription mad.co.uk report (one of the trade press that called me for comment), as do GWN.com.

Interesting how my job changes, too.
I get quoted as ‘Virgin spokesman’ by Palgn.com.au, and just “James Cridland, Virgin” by techshout.com (I’m not, y’know.). In a piece I can’t currently find in the archives, I’m even quoted as being “Virgin’s PR spokesman”.

Seemingly original content (at least, nicely rewritten stuff) from Wii-UK, a nice piece from The Inquirer, Cubed3, Play.tm, TUV Product Service.

So, what do we learn from this?

The main message of this appears, to me, to be summed up here - Paidcontent.org and Future’s tech.co.uk were the only ones to explicitly credit The Guardian’s story, who were first to break it. Being first seemingly doesn’t guarantee a ton of back-links. Perhaps the registration barrier is at fault; if you can find the same story on Radio Today without any registration, instead of on The Guardian with registration, then perhaps that’s an interesting reason to avoid mandatory registration.

As an aside…
Of our total traffic to the radio player since the announcement, 3.3% of that was ‘unknown’ platform (even beating all visits from Mac users). For the same period before the announcement, similar traffic was less than 0.04%. In the PR world, I guess that looks like a hundred-fold increase.

Thanks to you if you wrote and passed on the story; I’ve not included everyone who published it because, well, it’ll get really boring.