The end of an interesting yet partially deflating week, where I’ve achieved the first bit of paid work (as well as doing some significant improvements to Media UK). Here’s my weekly roundup of things to read over Sunday breakfast. Let me know in the comments whether this is interesting or not. (The blog comments, by the way, not Buzz or FaceSpace, or wherever else you can comment on this, because I’ll not see those).

First, radio listeners of the world rejoice: CBS Radio reckon their better financial position is due, in part, to investment in programming, according to Jacobs Media. Yay!

Earlier this week, I posted about NPR’s clever shortlink system, and linked over to my fuller post about NPR. The Columbia Journalism Review posts a nice long article about NPR, which is worth a read – even if it is written with slightly too much ‘If I was writing this for an NPR programme, I’d do this…’. RAIN picked up my praise for NPR, and made it a lead story in their newsletter, which was humbling.

Notable in any comparison between NPR and the BBC is the two organisation’s attitude towards content: NPR has a decent API and wants its content to be (attributed and) free (and commercial-free); while the BBC appears to want to keep all its content for itself, thanks very much. This week, The Register reported a rather poor demonstration of the BBC’s unwillingness to open up iPlayer (even when contacted in advance by the software developer in question) that ought to be read in context to BBC News still producing partial (and thus next-to-useless) RSS feeds.

The big news of the week has, of course, been the closure of 6 music, Asian Network, and a completely pointless pruning of the top-level addresses of bbc.co.uk (closing, in the main, websites which are already, er, closed). The best comments are within the ever enjoyable MediaTalk podcast, which is worth a listen. Coverage has been interesting, with Adam (off of Adam and Joe, off of the radio) challenging Mark Thompson to a fight on Channel 4 news; a rather good mashup showing MarkT’s performance on Newsnight spliced with bits from The Thick of It, Paul Battley having his say, David Hepworth pointing out that they’ve made their mind up anyway; Diamond Geezer poking fun at the whole thing; and Adam Bowie looking at the effect it’s had in social networks, while there’s some excellent commentary from Forrester Research in paidContent:UK about the BBC’s cuts to their website. Meanwhile the Media Guardian wondered where the ‘save BBC Asian Network’ campaign was, and it took another three days for asian stars to get together to criticise the BBC Asian Network’s closure.

Andrew Dubber – a great blogger who is an academic, music fan, and keen cyclist – is giving away an idea a day for March. So far, he’s posted two that are right for radio: good to see these ideas given rather a lot of detailed thought. One is about personalisation by disaggregation of radio programmes. I wrote a paper about this for the BBC, called ‘BBC Radio Me’, which essentially was the idea of disaggregation (or, as Andrew says, modularisation) of the whole of the BBC’s output of 50 48 radio stations. It wasn’t taken up, though. Andrew’s other idea for radio, so far, has been a rather neat radio alert system: really rather nice idea. Looking forward to more.

I’m also looking forward to speaking at Radiodays Europe, and doing my ’round the world’ thing again. Also speaking is the founder of Pirate Bay, who comes out as liking what radio has to offer. Tickets are still available. I’ve not yet checked out the speaker’s programme to see whether I can make Peter’s speech (I fly direct to CPH from Ghana, where I’m doing some work earlier in the week).

RadioDNS continues to get coverage: this week from veteran radio producer Steve Campen, who’s put forward a few ideas for how to use it. There’s still time to become a Member, incidentally.

Away from the world of radio, I happened upon a video showing some lovely statistics about the internet – well worth a watch to see a good way to show information as well as rather interesting info. There are more stats over at the BBC, where someone has taken it upon himself to say that the BBC iPlayer won’t change the way we watch telly (which must make the iPlayer team delighted, given that they publicly argue the opposite).

Staying with the web, even Google needs to do some SEO, and they’ve shared their search engine optimisation report with the rest of the web. People who come up with good internet ideas for a living might enjoy the email that became Picnik – the photo editing software that’s just become part of Google this week. It’s a great email; go read it.

I’m really enjoying the experience of using my Google Nexus One. This week, I’ve been lucky enough to get onto the beta of Swype, which is a replacement keyboard that works just by, um, swiping a word rather than typing it. Worth a look at the website to understand how it works, and see if you can get onto the beta programme as well.

Londoners might enjoy this map of London from 1787 – my village is on here, though the area I live in appears to have had a different name; people with a fascination for either DictatorMadness or UndergroundDecay might like Beijing’s huge secret underground city – everyone might enjoy a rather unfortunate Amazon incident, the disappointing news that Sir Clive Sinclair can’t be bothered with computers, or this astounding photo of a pusscat in full sprint.

This coming week, I will be doing the maths to see if I still need a car, and sending my CV to some people. Have a good one.

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