I was listening to LBC 97.3 this morning.

Steve Allen, the “he’s okay for a bit but then gets a bit on your nerves” Sunday morning presenter, was talking about something-or-other and promoted steveallenshow.com as a way of finding out more about what he was talking about.

Steveallenshow.com is an interesting website. It looks as if it’s been put together by Dreamweaver (certainly the HTML source reads that way). It contains details about Steve, and a newsletter you can subscribe to. It contains an LBC logo (confusingly, a logo for LBC 97.3, the station Steve’s on, and LBC News 1152, the station Steve is not on). Crucially, it contains no links to LBC. As a first experience of LBC online, as you’d reasonably expect from listening to Steve promote it, it’s not a good experience at all. Because it’s not LBC online. At all.

Steve’s not alone in this; I’ve heard many other presenters slip in promotions for their own web properties in the middle of their show.

You can apportion some blame, I suppose, to the radio station webteam. Steve clearly wants to be involved with the web; so give him as his production team the chance to update his own site within lbc.co.uk - just as is successfully done on Virgin Radio’s The Geoff Show.

It’s confusing to me why management appear to allow this. After all, they’d not allow Steve Allen to also promote the fact that he was on talkSPORT (if he was, which he isn’t). Competing radio stations are right out. But competing websites appear to be just fine.

This is a little odd. Some radio stations earn in excess of 10% of their entire revenue from their online activities. And if you’re allowing your presenters to ‘own’ your audience, rather than the radio station that employs them, then you’re storing up trouble in the future. Steve can jump ship to talkSPORT, and take every single one of his listeners with him, since he knows who they are and you don’t. Who’s got the upper hand here?

That’s not to stop you from engaging with your audience through your own website - Leona Graham’s page on Virgin Radio contains a link to leonagraham.com, for example. But when on a radio station, promote that station’s website. When on LBC 97.3, you promote LBC’s website. That’s what management should be saying.

It’s evidence, should you require it, that radio stations are run by management who are radio specialists, not content specialists. And in the new multi-platform, non-linear world, you need more than just radio knowledge to succeed.

Photo: allegro Takahi. Of a different Steve Allen. Used under licence.

Derek Wyatt (above left) is the MP for Sittingbourne and Sheppey. A few days ago, after a debate about the future of DAB within the Houses of Parliament (it’s rosy), I was lucky enough to, as a guest of the RadioCentre, spend an hour or so in his company in a get-together afterwards.

I quizzed both him and the rather more youthful Jeremy Hunt MP (who was sitting the other side of me) on their use of the internet and media in general - keen to understand whether MPs really do just listen to the Today Programme and read a broadsheet paper.

Well, I can confirm that both MPs do both listen to Today and read a broadsheet. Hurray. I win the bet. One listens also to 5live, the other also listens to Classic FM.

But then I asked how they used the internet. And I was amazed by Derek Wyatt’s response. First, he reads the FT quite a lot online. (Gosh, I naively thought. He knows how to use a computer). Then, he whipped out his iPhone and deftly checked a text message or two, and mentioned that he’d popped over to meet some French politician a while back to discuss how to make a good website - and I realised that my preconceptions were totally wrong.

Naturally, Derek has his own website - all MPs do these days - but on that website you’ll find RSS feeds of his latest news, as well as votes and interactivity, and podcasts. Yes, he makes his own podcasts. Scroll down the page, and you’ll see a Google Maps mashup showing where he’s been within his constituency. It’s really very Web2.0.

But you probably think he’s just using someone to make this for him. He’s not - he’s creating much of the content himself. Because he also has derekwyatt.tv which is chock-full of… videos. “I take my camcorder along with me and interview cabinet ministers,” he said, “asking them what they’ll do for people in my constituency”. And check out the other links - he uses Flickr, MySpace, Facebook and rather more. (His Flickr photos? Last updated… today. Sadly, all copyrighted, so I couldn’t use one above: indeed, this is the only photo which is CC at all within Flickr, taken by a colleague of mine.)

This is a man who totally understands how to use the web - in a way that puts many of us to shame, especially radio presenters who also have to engage with their ‘constituency’. His website’s actually more fully-featured than many local radio station websites; more engaging than many local newspaper websites. And he’s (and I hope he won’t mind me saying) not really from what I’d call the internet generation. I’m amazed at what he’s been able to do.

If you’re a local radio presenter, take a look at how this man uses the internet. Your ‘votes’ are your listeners, your RAJAR figures. If you did even half of this work, imagine what difference you’d make to your audience figures.

My own MP’s website appears to be subcontracted by some faceless company, and contains none of this stuff. He doesn’t keep any of it updated. Occasionally he uses hearfromyourMP.com to send a boring email. However, he’s never once mentioned the place I live, and I’ve no idea what he does for me. And I’m a floating voter. I wonder if he’s doing enough to get my vote next time around?

Photo: Alan Connor. Used under licence.

A friend of mine registers on all the social networking sites, just to ensure he keeps his online identity blemish-free. I agree with that, and on MySpace I have one friend, Tom, and that’s all. (I’ll reject you, so don’t!)

However, after someone I didn’t consider particularly geeky let me know that she had a Facebook page this afternoon, I thought I’d try it. And goodness. It’s good.

For example, I was asked, when I registered, whether I might like to check my Gmail contacts. I did. It found a bunch of proper friends I had, and handled it in a professional, friendly way.

It’s a social networking site that just works for geeks. I can read my friends’ “notes” (Facebook parlance for blog entries, kind of) via RSS within Google Reader. I saw this and didn’t like the prospect of another blog to update, but - guess what - this blog now gets imported directly into Facebook. And there’s a full developer section, with a full and fearsome API, to allow all manner of interesting things.

And it’s a social networking site that looks great. Really clever bits (like “The next step”, to hand-hold you through what to do next on the site), made to look simple and easy. It’s quick, and it looks nice. It’s both simple, and incredibly feature-rich. It’s really, really, really good.

Compare with MySpace, which apart from looking like a dog’s breakfast and with a user-interface that must give Jakob Nielsen, nightmares, simply works terribly. Example from tonight: when I tried logging in with an incorrect password, the error message was “You have to be logged in to do that!”

If I was staying with Virgin for a little longer, the first thing I’d be doing is using that API to allow Virgin Radio VIPs to interface directly with FaceBook, and both import their ‘notes’ into the Virgin Radio site, or explain how to export their blog postings into FaceBook. I’d not be losing control of our VIPs, but enabling them to bring their FaceBook friends into Virgin Radio, too.

I’m really quite flabbergasted at what a splendid site it is; and I might finally have found a social networking site that I like: because it’s both simple and fully-featured, giving me the tools, as an advanced user, to do what I want to do wth it. Bravo, team.

For no apparent reason, I’ve just discovered Tom Loosemore’s blog, which contains The BBC’s fifteen web principles.

Fifteen, blisteringly obvious, you’re a complete idiot if you haven’t already thought of them, principles.

Which means, in my book, they’re damn good. Very clear, and very to the point.

Read them now, because I’ll test you on them later.

No, I’m not taking XFM’s advice: but I notice that Sky News’s Paul Bromley has been ill recently.

He posts…

I have been off sick for the last week.

So your comments, although submitted, have not been read, moderated or posted - apologies.

I will read all your remarks and add the relevant ones to the various posts.

If you only have one person doing a job, and don’t bother with any sickness cover, then it smacks of a company that doesn’t care. Would they do that with their sports news or business news? Of course not. So why do they feel that their website is any less important? A peculiar admission.

Writing a (since deleted) paragraph for my discussion about commercial radio, I visited the BBC Radio homepage to discover it had been redesigned. And, later, I note Tristan blogging about it. [As a hello to non-UK audiences - I'm talking about the UK version of that page. You can toggle it with the options in the blue bar at the top of the page.]

Tristan’s excited about it: and with reason. It looks lovely. I especially like the ‘ways to listen’ navbar underneath the main station - a really graphic way of demonstrating how accessible radio is these days.

I’m not sure about the roll-over stuff, though. It’s anything but accessible: I regularly over-shoot with my mouse, for example, which means if I want to listen to BBC7, it’s too easy for me to find myself listening to BBC Radio 2 or BBC Radio 3 by accident. Particularly with the trackpad on this oh-so-slow iBook G4, I don’t have very good mouse control; and I do worry about others with similar conditions.

I’m also quite glad I’m not an Interactive Editor for one of the networks: because this redesigned website could easily make their life harder. Virgin Radio’s most popular audience path is “Home page > Listen Now page > Radio Player”; which allows us to sensibly promote our website content to our audience. This new redesigned homepage offers the chance to listen (and thus bypass the website); to see the schedule (and thus bypass the website front page); and three deep-links into the content (thus bypassing the front page).

All in all, I hope that the Interactive Editors are clear about what this new front page could mean to them.

As an aside, the BBC Audio & Music Interactive section has been busy the past week: with Chris Kimber announcing they’ll give weekly unique users instead of monthly. This is odd; comScore and Neilsen both give monthly unique users only, and the web community understand monthly figures so much, I even quote monthly RAJAR figures instead of weekly.

I guess that the BBC, unencumbered by any advertising-based revenue, are quoting weekly figures so that the comparison with weekly RAJAR figures is easier. Might be interesting, then, to do the maths: for radio stations with comparable demographics: BBC Radio 2 has a 13,269 weekly RAJAR reach, but only 400,302 weekly unique users - that means 3.3% of their weekly audience visits their website. Virgin Radio had 2,470,000 weekly RAJAR reach, and an average of 141,588 weekly unique users in January: which says that 5.7% of our weekly audience visits our website.

Interesting.

Interesting post from Jeff Jarvis, saying that the pageview is dead.

Curious. I’ve always measured any website success on visits - so if you’ve two hundred people reading your website every weekday, then that’s 4,000 visits in a typical month, give or take. A high monthly pageview figure only tells me that a website has a lot of pages: not that it performs well as a website.

The reality, of course, is that a typical website earns its money from pageviews. That’s how we charge for websites, after all. (As I’ve written here before, cost-per-click ads aren’t always the right way to charge advertisers, since they don’t reflect the actual benefits an advertiser gets when advertising on your website). So, if we charge for a pageview - and advertisers are, by and large, buying on a CPT basis - it’s irreversibly linked to how much money a website can make.

Additionally, services like Google AdSense actively rotate ads round, to entice users into clicking them. Again, more pageviews will result in higher revenues; AJAXy goodness won’t.

So, perhaps it’s easier to agree with Jeff in that a website’s popularity shouldn’t be based on pageviews; but if it’s advertiser-funded, a website’s revenue should be still based on pageviews.

As an aside; a website I work with had a redesign recently: but some of the nicer AJAX-type functionality was removed at an early planning stage, so that we could gain extra pageviews, and thus, extra revenue. There, I suspect, is the thing to think about.