I sit down in a pub in San Francisco’s Haight and Ashbury area. It brews its own beer. It sells simple, uncomplicated, pub grub – but with a certain style and panache. All that is missing is someone else to enjoy this experience with. And it is lunchtime, after all. So thankfully, I’d made plans. Or, rather, a man called Brent Noorda had. And those plans included me. Which was good.

Brent walks in, accompanied by two others. Brent is a large, well-built man, with an impressive beard. He looks like one of those types of people who would be at home wearing a check shirt, wrestling with large logs in a dense forest. He isn’t. He’s the CEO of a company impressively called Yik Yaq. And the entire company had come for lunch.

The product that Brent runs is something called Radio Weave, and this was the reason I’m in this pub, on this sunny day in wintry San Francisco.

Radio Weave is an interesting proposition. It’s an iPhone app and a website, and it “weaves” great pieces of audio together into a non-stop personalised “radio station”. I can pull in content from existing radio stations, music tracks from creative-commons musicians, content from online-only broadcasters, or I can even pull in traffic news, weather news, headlines and my friends’ Twitter feeds: all produced using some speech synthesis. Or even your friend’s Radio Weave channels. And it weaves the lot together to make a quite compelling audio experience. It’s like Pandora but for speech.

In my meeting, Brent’s candid about some of the issues he’s faced. “It’s really difficult to get people started,” he says. To expect people to start from scratch when creating their channel is an almost impossible ask. So Radio Weave have experimented with some different ways of helping people take their first steps. On logging into the website, I’m asked which of the following six people I’m most like. I plump for a bloke who lives in San Francisco who isn’t particularly interested in sports. It instantly starts playing me a selection of audio – which I can then start to personalise, to make it for a bloke who lives in London who isn’t particularly interested in sports.

This way of producing radio is interesting: because none of it is live (though it can have been produced only minutes ago). Unlike live radio via a 3G phone (which, in my experience, stutters and fails so much when on the move to render it entirely useless as a replacement for broadcast), small segments of audio are simple and easy to cache on a device like the iPhone. Download as much stuff as you can when the reception’s good, and keep playing it back from memory when reception’s bad. In a recent blog post, Brent details a rather long drive, which covered places without any 3G coverage (indeed, without any wireless data at all); and Radio Weave didn’t skip a beat.

Radio Weave is hugely interesting to play with. I’m not a massive fan of their UI; but there again, they themselves acknowledge it isn’t perfect. That said, the audio experience is a really interesting one. Particularly neatly, they can chop long podcasts up into shorter sections, so you break away to listen to other things, like travel or news headlines, just like a radio station would.

But Radio Weave got me thinking.

First: aren’t we all guilty of thinking of our radio content as three-hour programmes (or thirty-minute programmes) when we should be thinking of our content as carefully-crafted two-minute pieces of short-form content? Radio 4′s Today Programme and some of Radio 5 Live’s output are ‘disaggregated’ in this manner; but precious little else is. In an illuminating presentation last November at the Radio At The Edge conference, Michael Hill from Channel 4 Radio outlined their plans to produce each part of content on their radio stations as individual nuggets, rather than start from a position of a three-hour music show that needs editing down to produce a podcast. Why isn’t anyone else doing this?

And second: how much of radio needs to be live, really? Great swathes of Radio 4′s Today Programme are pre-recorded; even many of the interviews. When the Sunday breakfast presenter on Hallam FM, I pre-recorded my links about fifteen-minutes ahead of time. I managed to always hit any vocal effortlessly, and never got tongue-tied, but talked about last night’s television and the weather and the sport in a relevant way. Is this live radio, or voice-tracked? And if there’s nothing wrong with doing this, why aren’t other presenters doing this? Why don’t we broadcast live only when we absolutely have to?

An extra blog from my round-the-world trip that I’ve been holding back: though mentioning in my presentation.

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