TrackInTheBox, the NPR API, and more things UK radio misses out on
Posted on Monday, April 26th, 2010 at 12:52am. #
The above photograph is from Keyhaven, a little village in Hampshire which has a nice pub in it. I went there on Saturday, and this accounts for my regular “Sunday reading” blog post appearing, er, early on a Monday morning. Apologies.
Radio things
Tom Webster from Edison Research mentions that people “don’t fire their friends“, a great reason to examine social networking rather more intimately. He describes three ways that radio broadcasters use these tools, which I reckon are pretty spot on.
“We’ll send you new music every day, and we promise it won’t suck”, says TrackInTheBox. Much of it is available as a free download. The obvious question: why aren’t radio stations doing this kind of thing? Aren’t we the home of new music? Don’t we do advocacy like this? Where’s Steve Lamacq’s similar list? (Or do we have to use mflow?)
NPR’s API, which I’ve written about before, delivered 1.1 billion stories in March. The readwriteweb article I’ve linked to goes into detail about numbers, and snarkily points out the difference between NPR opening its content up to Murdoch stopping any access to his content – or, by the way, the BBC running partial RSS feeds with much more onerous licence terms.
This regular ‘Sunday reading’ blog post got a mention in RAIN last week, and check out what Pandora are doing with Facebook in this same piece: the ability to get a personalised experience when visiting a website for the first time, by using Facebook, could be crucial. Very interesting indeed.
Photo things
My Flickr photographs keep being used, which is nice. Here’s the Heathrow Terminal 5 one being used in an ash travel story; and a salutary tale of the benefits of crowd-sourcing (with that crowd-sourcing photo of mine). The second is interesting, since it is a nice example of crowd-sourcing for additional facts, just like I mentioned that CBC do.
Android mobile things
Got an Android phone? You’ve now got free satnav, thanks to Google: I tried it last week and I think it might be better than my TomTom, at least for quicker journeys. I can’t quite work out whether it avoids traffic hotspots (though it does know about traffic jams); and how to tell it to avoid a particular road. Phandroid reviews Twicca, my favourite Android twitter client, and likes it. Meanwhile, Android Community reckon that Android v2.2 is out soon on the Nexus One: probably May 19th. Goodies to come include Flash support, the trackball flashing in multi colours, and one site reports activation of the FM radio that lurks inside. Here’s hoping.
Fun things on the internets
Bitterwallet notice the rather amusing messages you get when you type “is ” into Google… you can also try “has ” and “what is” for some interesting insight into Google’s users. Poor old Lady Gaga. Meanwhile IanVisits has visited an old cold war bunker. Amazing these places still exist.
Boring things for coders
Oh, and finally, if you send email from a website and you really want it to get through, you might like this blog post which goes into all the SPF and DKIM nightmares you need to do. I’ll be doing this for Media UK instead of working on new features (sigh).
