It’s been a manic week. Five days in Singapore, and then two nights in Paris. And I’ve still a flight to head office in Glasgow, then a weekend in Dublin to come. I’ve made quite a few blog posts, but if I’ve learnt anything from Martin Belam, it’s to stagger their release. So I’ll be doing that. In my cheesy radio voice: “Stay tuned for a post about Marty, and a post about my new ChiPod! Don’t touch that, er, browser!”

Until the channel tunnel cut off my mobile phone signal, I’ve spent the last half-hour catching up on my RSS feeds, courtesy of Google Reader (for mobile). The last post I read was Matt Cutts posting about Google, using human input to tweak search results). Which set me thinking.

While in Singapore, I was doing a lot of work on the joint presentation Nick and I made; and did a lot of Google searches to back up the information we were using. One such search was launch of dab radio which I punched into the Firefox search without a second thought. It returned information of the launch of DAB digital radio, as you’d expect.

But it returned MediaCorp’s launch of DAB in Singapore. Not the UK launch many years before.

And it struck me that this was perhaps one reason why Google was doing so well. I’ve been oblivious to it for a while, but a search on google.com within the UK gives you UK-biased results. And a search on google.com within Singapore gives you Singaporean-biased results.

I’ve been talking for a long while here about relevant advertising being the way forward. Google’s delivering that - but also delivering relevant content too, depending where you are and what you’re doing.

It reminds me that I ought to be doing geo-location stuff on mediauk.com to add correct dialling codes. Better get onto that. When I’m not so tired. And boy, am I tired.

The Raffles Hotel, Singapore. Where I won’t be staying.

From a LinkedIn email (hello Keith)…
Fact: More people have joined LinkedIn than live in Sweden

Two can play at that game. Almost tempted to add this (true) fact to the bottom of emails from Media UK…
Fact: More people visit Media UK every month than live in Malta.
…but I suspect it looks almost as ridiculously silly.

The population of Singapore, though, is over six times the size of Media UK’s monthly visitor figure. A lot of people to get to know when I go there next Friday to Broadcast Asia. (If you’re going: drop me a line, and let’s meet up.) It’s a few years since I was there, and I’m looking forward to blogging and photographing a lot of cool new radio devices. I’m also going to see many useful and interesting people, too. Apologies, then, if this blog is fairly empty until then; I’ve a lot to prepare.

Listeners to UK commercial radio can discover exactly how badly I’m coping with the jet-lag, when The Big Listen discussion programme (Sunday, 10.00pm - midnight on your local participating commercial radio station) interviews me. Apparently I know something about the future of radio. Not at 6.15am local time, I won’t. Still trying to find a studio with an ISDN line, instead of ‘crap hotel phone sound’, or alternatively, ‘crap mobile phone sound’ - I’ve decided that getting quality audio from anywhere in the world is part of the future of radio. Unless I can’t find anywhere.

Before then, you might like to have a look at The Big Listen website, and take part in the survey. While some questions are rather obviously-designed to relax localness restrictions in commercial radio (which I have mixed feelings about), some questions should lead to some interesting results. And you might win a DAB radio out of it, particularly if you enter in the middle of the night, where your chances of winning are much higher.