It’s been a busy few days.

Last night I was celebrating the first birthday of the rather clever recommendation and review service Qype, by taking part in a pub quiz. Our team, the ‘Sake six’, succeeded in achieving a creditable mid-table position with 32. An enjoyable evening, though there was much grumbling about “nine finger holes on a recorder”, and whether Penelope Cruz really looked like that. (She did, apparently).

Later in the evening, I was chatting to Simon Warren who is, I discover from his posh business-card-cum-portfolio, a rather splendid architectural photographer.

I don’t understand architecture much, but I do really appreciate a well-designed building when I see one. The renovated St Pancras filled me with joy when I first saw it, and I regularly spend longer looking at buildings rather than the things inside them, whether it’s a football stadium or an expansive meeting room. Simon’s photos capture the majesty of buildings well.

Which is why I enjoyed, particularly, my visit to BBC Scotland’s new building earlier in the week. The building from the outside looks like a large glass box; but inside it’s particularly splendid, with a cavernous and impressive atrium, and an ingenious way of incorporating large studios within an open environment by stacking them next to each other in a large set of stairs called The Street - full of little places to meet and chat. Walk all the way up ‘The Street’ and you end up, past the BBC News operation, in a bright and airy cafe - on the top of the building, with a large outside area overlooking the Clyde and expansive views.

Next door (but one) from BBC Scotland is my old employer STV Group (who still have an SMG logo on their building and on their website). They, too, are in a brand new building; and that, too, overlooks the Clyde. They managed to hide their cafe in the basement - half of it’s rather dark as a result. The best view, that of a rather splendid bridge that opened a few months after they moved in, is seemingly reserved for those in the boardroom.

While I’m certainly not a Belamesque BBC fanboy, visiting BBC Scotland made me proud to be part of the corporation. It’s a tremendously exciting building - vibrant and energising. And the difference between the architecture of the two buildings in Pacific Quay appear to underline a fundemental difference between the two companies, at least in the pre-Woodward era.

(I note that my predecessor in this job, Dan Hill, now appears to mainly blog about architecture - does the BBC do this to people, I wonder?)

Photo: John Ousby. Used under licence.

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.

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.

On one side, Toronto-based Virgin Radio 999, a website which says on the bottom “© 2008 Astral Media, All Rights Reserved” (the station’s entirely owned by Astral in a licensing deal, as far as I can tell). Click to enlarge.

On the other side, London-based Virgin Radio UK, a website which was designed entirely in-house by a team I once managed and says on the bottom “© 1993-2008 Virgin Radio Ltd” (the station’s not been owned by Virgin since 2000). Click to enlarge.

One of these entirely commercially-separate websites is clearly a direct copy of the other. So, which came first? (Clue: Virgin Radio 999 in Toronto went live today.)

I assume there was some money that changed hands between Golden Square and Astral Media… ? That must have happened, right?

NB: For comparison, try Virgin Hitz in Thailand, or Virgin Radio Dubai. I tried to speak to Virgin Management’s press office to confirm the ownership of Virgin Radio 99.9 (”Hi! I’m from a media website!”), but there was nobody in.

Update: Got questions? Got a Pure Evoke Flow? Visit flowusers.com and join the community!

So, yesterday, I was lucky enough to be at the launch of a brand new radio - the Pure Evoke Flow. As a disclaimer, they laid on a nice breakfast, in a nice location, and have given me a radio to test out. But I am under no obligation to be nice to them. With that in mind…

You remember the Pure Evoke-1? The first under-£100 DAB radio, that kick-started DAB in the UK? Well, this is their first DAB/wifi radio.

It comes with the newer, eco-friendly, power adapter that you’ll be familiar with from Pure’s latest radios. It’s the same shape as the Evoke-1, but finished in a glossy piano-black (the same glossy piano-black as the back of the new iPhone 3G). It feels solidly built - there’s wood underneath all that lacquer, so it still has the lovely, sonorous sound of the Evoke. And the box it’s in is lovely - a fold-out panel on the front with loads of carefully-written detail on the product you’re about to buy. This enables what the retailer sitting next to me describes as “self-selection” - i.e. a person browsing and reading the info on the box. (Note to retailers: I would always much rather see the box rather than your in-store price cards).

The screen is good-looking - an OLED not an LCD - though the look and feel of the menus is not much changed from the older Legato II. Leave it a while and it goes into screen-saving mode (I think this is to avoid burnin); tap the snooze handle and the proper display comes back.

Turn it on, and it does a good job of setup. Switch into DAB mode for the first time, and it does an autotune to discover available stations. Switch into wifi mode for the first time, and it shows you all available wifi connections (and doesn’t bother you with WPA/WEP stuff). Enter your key and you’re in. I forgot my key a few times; it appears quite lenient.

I’ve had one wifi radio before - a very early model - so it’s not particularly fair to compare the two. But the Pure is quick; it’s incredibly easy to navigate; and it works well. There are no herarchies of menus - if you want stations in spanish playing jazz in Argentina, then it’s quick and simple to do a search for them. Some inconsistencies aside, I think Pure have done a good job with the user interface. Particularly impressive are the ’soft keys’, which change depending on the function you’re attempting to perform. The buttons are flat and unyielding - and only light up when they can be used.

DAB works as you’d expect; I haven’t tested FM reception yet. The system also plays media files from your computer (as yet untested too), but it’s The Lounge which is the cleverest thing. Instead of buying in their wifi technology from others, Pure have designed everything inhouse, including their own internet radio portal (which you’ll be able to use at www.thelounge.co.uk www.thelounge.com without a radio).

It’s difficult to explain how quick and responsive the radio is for wifi as a result; so, in the 90-second video above, you’ll see me doing the following things:

1. Turning the unit on
2. Listening to DAB (Radio 2)
3. Going to the wifi radio
4. Seeing it tune into an 80s station I’ve been listening to
5. Looking through the station directory
6. Hitting search to find Virgin Radio stations (old habits, etc)
7. Tuning in to Virgin Radio Italia
8. And finally switching it off.

It also has a few more ludicrous things: something called Pure Sounds, so you can lull yourself to sleep with natural sounds like a rainforest or a the hubbub in a small street in North London (I call the latter my slightly open window). This was excitedly pointed out in the press briefing; I don’t see the excitement, frankly. Might be interesting to accept user-produced sounds, so I can wake up to my nephew and niece playing, or to the sound of a favourite place.

I’ve not yet had a chance to play with The Lounge website, which adds some degree of personalisation to the unit (it’s currently not quite ready for us ‘press’ people to see). Pure plans click-to-buy for radio stations later in the year, and mysteriously also plans tagging (which I guess is a public commitment to the project Nick Piggott and I are working on, which is delightful).

For the techies - the unit has Linux inside it (that bit’s apparently entirely open source), and a portion of the inside gubbins runs on Pure’s own proprietary platform (which isn’t open at all). The getting-started instruction book even warns you that the initial switchon requires a little time (since the radio needs to boot). And no, you’re not getting a full manual with the unit; if the pre-production unit’s anything to go by, you’ll need to download, via PDF, the proper manual from thelounge.co.uk. It annoys me when manufacturers do this, being honest, and Pure get a wag of the finger for it.

Small irritations are that the antenna is no longer connected by an F-connector, and is screwed onto the unit (I have a roof antenna, but no, I can’t use it); that turning the unit off requires two keypresses; that the interface isn’t 100% intuitive with some inconsistencies (but you get the hang of it fairly quickly); that the set shows oily fingers easily. However, these are minor irritations, and they don’t spoil it.

The marketing man from Pure said that this was the best product they’d ever made; and I’m inclined to agree.

It’s in shops in September, and the suggested retail price is £150.

This morning I was lucky enough to go up Tower 42 (thereby completing my “tall buildings in London” tour), to see the launch of the new Pure Evoke Flow.

That’s it, up there, in my designer flat in the Pure press shot.

The live demo looked very cool, and it looks like a fantastic product. But the proof is in the pudding. I have one, and will be giving you, dear blog reader, a near-exclusive “first-looks” review of it tonight once I’ve introduced it to my wifi connection at home.

(I’d have blogged about this earlier, but we were told it was under embargo, which it turns out not to be).