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.

My highlight from the Internet World show this week:

Says it all, really

Channel 4’s Andy Duncan (to the right); Jemima Kiss (to the left). Photo: Bill Thompson.

I spoke at the Oxford Media Convention on Thursday. I was appearing for the recently-departed Fru Hazlitt, ex CEO of the company I work for.

The event was fascinating, and brilliantly organised. My panel, one of a break-out of three, was held in a small-but-full-to-capacity room. Speaking just before me was Tess Alps from Thinkbox, the television marketing body for the main UK commercial broadcasters. Her message was that we should ‘get real’ - stop believing the hype about YouTube. Commercial television is in fine form and won’t die just yet. She had a lot of information to back that up, and apart from a little bit of knocking copy against commercial radio, spoke sense - particularly her argument that television should stop talking itself down.

Unlike Tess, I’d been told not to bring Powerpoint - by far my preference in a panel anyway. So, I was free to riff on her points, as well as make some of my own.

My points? That radio is already multi-platform. I gave some research from my employer in terms of how regularly people use particular platforms for radio consumption (some of which are uncomfortable); and also argued that younger people are different, but not that different. Older people still consume radio in new and exciting ways: multi-platform is not just a young preserve. It’s a fact that out of everyone in the UK using the internet right now, 20% of them are listening to the radio. Nearly 60% of people check things out on the internet right after they hear them on the radio. Radio tells people what to type into the Google search box.

So, given that we’re already in a convergent media world, we - hang on. Again, it’s time to ‘get real’. The media industry has a long way to go.

The advertising industry is not converged at all. It’s stuck in media-specific silos. An ad on the radio goes to the radio department. They hate the more-fashionable online department. Online hates the television department, because they get to go to Barbados to film ads. So who pays for a video preroll on a radio website? TV? Online? Radio?

The content industry is not converged at all. To launch a satellite-only radio station, I have to pay three times as much to play records than if I am on FM: yet it’s consumed in exactly the same way. To launch an internet radio station can cost hundreds of times more.

And the regulators are not converged. The rules for product placement, for example, are vastly different between radio and television - yet on my Freeview box, TV sits next to radio, and it’s consumed in the same way: but regulated very differently. (And no, I’m not arguing for radio’s regulation to be tighter).

There’s plenty more to say; and the hour of discussion that followed was refreshing and interesting for, I hope, all concerned: though incredibly mentally draining. But Tess is right. We need to get real about the issues our industry is facing.

Excitingly, our panel was selected for a live blog, by Jemima Kiss from Media Guardian. I get a nice (albeit ever-so-slightly-incorrect, my fault) write-up, which I’m delighted with. It focuses the mind when you know that anything you say will be written down and possibly used against you.

Incidentally - I (or Fru, originally) was the only person from the radio industry invited to speak. Were it not for an appearance by The Guardian’s Emily Bell, the event would probably have had to be be renamed the ‘television convention’. Disappointing: I would guess that the UK spends a similar time with radio and TV during any given week, so it would be good to see it given its correct emphasis. I’ll not hold my breath, though.

Dan Taylor is one of the most intelligent internet writers I’ve discovered recently: his ‘key technology trends for 2007′ is a brilliant executive summary of everything to watch out for. I’ll be recommending it to some of my colleagues: and I recommend it to you, too.

John Naughton comments on Jeremy Paxman’s grumpy technophobic outbursts. Of course, Paxman’s pretty famous for doing this - and he’s not alone.

Tonight, John Pienaar notes that a recent song about him being a porn star in the 1970s (he wasn’t, it’s a joke) is now on YouTube - but then adds “I don’t really know how you dial things up on YouTube”. Staggering - if true. (Incidentally, either Pienaar has a head twice as large as his co-presenter’s, or someone needs to understand how to use PhotoShop a little better).

Christian O’Connell frequently talks about his web-team being net-nerds, is disparaging towards them, and pretends he doesn’t know what podcasts are; yet in ‘real life’, he owns a BlackBerry and is as in-touch and net-savvy as most people. Elsewhere, older speakers at media conferences joke about not being able to send texts or even set the video - leaving that for “the younger generation”.

Somehow, it’s seen as trendy to be ignorant about technology. Perhaps there’s a feeling that it somehow means you’re closer to your (similarly ignorant) listeners. It’s clearly dangerous to assume that your listeners or viewers are tech-savvy, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the cleverest thing to pretend that technology is too complicated or, worse, that new stuff just doesn’t matter: you stand just as much chance of alienating your audience.

If Terry Wogan can get to grips with emails and text messages, then so can everyone: Paxman included. But I doubt Paxman doesn’t understand it; just that he sees it as useful to his on-screen persona to pretend.

(I did wonder why the BBC is filming its top talent using mobile phones - then realised that the only people allowed to touch cameras are in the cameraman union, I suppose…)