Radio Pop: Last.fm for BBC Radio

Just wanted to add my congratulations to my old colleagues in BBC Audio & Music Interactive on the launch of Radio Pop, a "social radio listening" prototype from the small but perfectly formed BBC Radio Labs team which promises to do for BBC Radio what Last.fm does for music (i.e. scrobbling your listening, connecting you to friends, letting you favourite/bookmark - a.k.a. "pop" - and generating lots of pretty graphs and charts). It's replete with RSS feeds, APML data and some tasty extras: embeddable badge (below), Mac Dashboard widget, and integration with real-world radio Olinda.


It's a bit unfair requesting new functionality less than a week after launch, but hey, if you don't ask you don't get :-)

Radio Pop feature wishlist:
- Flash streaming (please don't make me download RealPlayer on my MacBook Air!)
- 'Now playing' info
- Details of "popped" tracks (linked to the BBC Music beta, natch)
- Recommendations based on your listens/pops
- Cross-scrobbling to Last.fm
- iPhone version
- Chumby version (ok, maybe a little bit niche)

Read more on Radio Pop on the BBC Radio Labs blog and on the personal blogs of creators Tristan Ferne and Chris Bowley and their boss, James Cridland. Great job guys.

BBC Radio Player - Happy Birthday / R.I.P.

What with all the recent (and entirely justified) excitement about the BAFTA award winning BBC iPlayer, its easy to forget where the BBC's on-demand programme offer all began; with the BBC Radio Player, which is 6 years old today (or rather, it would be, if it hadn't already been rebadged iPlayer). With a more wholesale integration of radio into iPlayer imminent, I thought I'd pen a brief epitaph to the BBC Radio Player before it disappears forever into the annals of internet history.



I had promised (in my first ever blog post) to write more about the Radio Player, after its v2 relaunch in January 2005, but somehow never got round to it. Of course, the original concept wireframes, sketched up by myself and Chris Kimber in a 5th floor meeting room of the old Broadcasting House, have long since disappeared, as have the many pre-launch email threads debating whether it should be in a pop-up, whether users might like to browse by genre as well as radio station (they did) and, of course, what to call it (we went for the Ronseal option). What I do have is screengrabs of versions 1 and 2 (above and below), the former in situ on the old BBC Radio homepage.



Obviously countless people have contributed to the success of the Radio Player over the years (its currently delivering 25 million hours of listening a month), but I'd particularly like to credit three people who were instrumental in shaping the product: Dawn Budge, who did the lion's share of the coding for both versions 1 and 2; Jamie Tetlow, who designed the v2 console (and a gorgeous browser-based UI for the back-end production system) and Chris Kimber, who recognised the transformative potential of radio on demand and made it happen, as this June 2002 Guardian interview illustrates. Thanks guys - I think we did good.

TUN3R: old skool radio discovery

Kooky interface of the week award goes to radio discovery site TUN3R which presents visitors with a giant radio 'dial' populated with thumbnail images of assorted online radio stations. Drag the 'needle' over a thumbnail and you hear a recent sample of the station's output. Beneath the dial you get details of the streaming format and location, a screengrab of the station's homepage and a sample of the recent playlist (if available).

Randomly clicking around the mosaic proves entertaining for a minute or two, although it's the search functionality which is more likely to generate a genuine musical match; typing in the name of an artist highlights every station on the dial which has recently played one of their tracks. Nice. You can also filter by genre or language or search the contents of the station's homepage. Most of the featured stations are promoted for free, although there also an option to buy space in a million dollar homepage stylee.

Whilst I suspect I may not be revisiting TUN3R on a regular basis, it's a interesting attempt to recreate the physicality of analogue radio's dial-twiddling experience (you even get a touch of static when you're roving around the dial) and much more compelling than a list of the stations could ever be.

Born to pun: Is the advent of digital precipitating the death of creative titling?

If once is an accident, twice is a coincidence and three times is a trend, then I've noticed a trend over the last few weeks concerning the impact of digital on the titling of media content.

First up was a fleeting discussion in the 'Democratising content in the user-in-control era' session at last month's MediaGuardian Changing Media Summit about the impact of online search on headline writers (predominantly journalists and bloggers). Ben Hammersley suggested that the best headlines as far as search engines are concerned are those which adopt the does-what-it-says-on-the-tin approach (e.g. Scottish Cup result: Caledonian Thistle beat Celtic), which runs counter to the puntastic tradition of tabloid journalism in the UK which has given us, amongst other gems, the oft-quoted Sun headline 'SUPER CALEY GO BALLISTIC CELTIC ARE ATROCIOUS'. Not what you'd call Google-friendly.

Next came my girlfriend's reaction to my suggestion that we give BBC flagship Sci-Fi drama Life on Mars a go, which was along the lines of 'I don't much fancy a drama set in space' (its actually about a time-travelling policeman). The arrival of multi-channel, on-demand television (plus countless other media options) presents us with so many choices that we don't have time to thoroughly research each one. Instead, we must increasingly decide on the basis of title alone. This was confirmed to me by a piece of audience research on another BBC drama series, Spooks, in which a respondent claimed they'd previously avoided the series on the basis that they'd assumed it was about ghosts (the series was retitled MI5 when it was shown in the States).

Finally came a presentation from Leigh Aspin, Interactive Editor for BBC Radio 4 at an internal BBC event, in which he explained how the "clever, sometimes cryptic" titles of some of the station's programming were making it difficult for listeners to find the content of interest to them in an increasingly crowded on-demand media space. The example he used was a programme called 'Out of the Ashes' which the audience sportingly volunteered would most likely have been about cricket. The programme's original title was in fact 'Foot and Mouth: Five Years on'.

So are we destined to endure a mediascape dominated by channel Five-style Ronseal programme titles such as When Pilots Eject, The Woman Who Lost 30 Stone or Selling Houses Abroad (that last one's actually a Channel 4 programme, shame on them) or, to borrow a phrase from NatWest, is there another way?

I believe there is another way, but its not a quick fix. Part of the solution was outlined by Leigh in the remainder of his presentation, which focused on how richer search and navigation can be facilitated by term extraction run on programme descriptions. In other words, your programme can still be called 'Out of the Ashes' if the keywords pulled out of the programme description and flagged to you (and search engines) include 'cattle' and 'foot and mouth'. Similarly, your punning tabloid headline need not change if the correct metadata can be extracted from the article and supplementary contextual information.

Another weapon in the fight against tedious titling is the power of social software. The title of a YouTube video clip or a Flickr photo can be as inventive as its author's creativity allows as my main routes into the content will be via recommendation or tags, not by title.

These are baby steps that we need to start taking towards equipping our content for the digital age. The giant leap is the semantic web, which promises to deliver a greater understanding of the content of digital media, without getting tripped up by the idiosyncrasies of language. If and when the semantic web can start delivering on this bold promise remains to be seen. In the meantime we may well see a shift in media titling away from the cryptic and the punning towards the more functional and descriptive.

My media consumption diet

With nods to Jeremiah Owyang for kick starting this meme and James Cridland for alerting me to it via his blog, below is a rough approximation of my media consumption diet.



(chart created using Zoho Sheet)

Web

The web is undoubtedly my main media channel (maybe because it encompasses all of the below in one?). Excluding work access, I reckon I stack up around 18 hours of web access a week, which probably breaks down something like this: reading blogs/news feeds (5 hours), trying out new sites (4 hours), writing this blog (4 hours), emailing (2 hours), searching for information (1 hour), Flickring (30 mins), buying stuff (30 mins), selling stuff (30 mins), website design/maintenance (30 mins).

Estimated time spent per week: 18 hours

Music

Having parted company with the bulk of my CD collection last year, the vast majority of my music listening (excluding radio) is now done either via iTunes or on my iPod. According to last.fm I've listened to 11,355 tracks since registering at the end of February 2005, which works out just over 100 tracks a week. Assuming a average track duration of 3 minutes, I'm averaging around five and a half hours of music listening a week. Factoring in the listening which last.fm fails to capture I reckon the actual figure is nearer 7 hours a week.

Estimated time spent per week: 7 hours

TV

As previously posted, I don't watch a great deal of live TV, with DVD boxsets and downloads accounting for the vast majority of my TV viewing. It also fair to say that I have something of a penchant for US drama. In the past 12 months I've plowed through assorted seasons of Lost, House, Desperate Housewives, 24, The O.C., The Sopranos, The West Wing, Six Feet Under and Entourage. For my money, the standout UK series of last year was Planet Earth which just blew me away.

Estimated time spent per week: 7 hours

Radio

It's a dilemma whether to count ambient radio listening as, like Mr. Cridland, I work in an office where the radio is always on. In terms of active radio listening then its Jonathan Ross on Radio 2 on a Saturday morning, Stephen Merchant on 6 Music (via the BBC Radio Player as I'm not normally near a radio on a Sunday afternoon) and snatches of the Today programme as I get ready for work. Excluding ambient listening I reckon it's around 5 hours a week; including, it's probably more like 35.

Estimated time spent per week: 5 hours

Books

I have something of a famine or feast mentality when it comes to books, depending on whether I'm on holiday or not. I read 18 books last year but almost none of them whilst in this country. Last year's reading list was predominantly a mix of contemporary fiction (Rupert Thomson, David Mitchell, Jonathan Safran Foer, Patrick Neate) and media geek must-reads (The Long Tail, The Tipping Point, Freakonomics, Everything Bad is Good for You). Assuming an average reading time of 6 hours per book, I spent 108 hours reading last year which works out at just over 2 hours per week.

Estimated time spent per week: 2 hours

Newspapers

I buy The Guardian on Mondays (for the Media supplement), Thursdays (for the Technology supplement) and Saturdays (for the magazine and The Guide). I occasionally get caught without something to read on the tube and pick up one of the London freesheets but invariably feel dirty afterwards.

Estimated time spent per week: 2 hours

Films

Films are an enduring passion of mine although I try to only see films I think will be worth the investment (which I guess is why 30 of the 40 films I saw last year appeared in my films of 2006 list). Of that 40, I watched 23 at the cinema and 17 on DVD. Assuming an average running time of 2 hours (the days of the 90 minute movie are all but gone), I spent 80 hours watching films last year which works out at one and a half hours per week.

Estimated time spent per week: 1 hour 30 mins

Magazines

My long-standing subscriptions to Q, Sight & Sound and PC Format all fell by the wayside some time ago and the only magazines I still subscribe to at home are Empire (still the bible for movie lovers) and Web User (can't be wrong for £1.99). I also tend to leaf through the office copies of Stuff, T3, .net and Wired, although less so now that Engadget is taking care of my gadget obsession in a more timely fashion.

Estimated time spent per week: 45 mins

Podcasts

Despite the dozens of podcast subscriptions currently eating up my hard disk/bandwidth, there's actually only one podcast which I listen to religiously and that's Mark Kermode's Film Reviews. Clipped from Friday's edition of the Simon Mayo show on BBC Radio Five Live, it's half an hour of pure radio gold. More occasional listens include the Best of Moyles enhanced and Media Talk from Guardian Unlimited.

Estimated time spent per week: 30 mins

Video games

Until the arrival of my Wii on Tuesday I would've put a big fat zero down for video games, but having had a quick go on the game-changing Wii Sports (and with WarioWare Smooth Moves and Zelda: Twilight Princess waiting to be unwrapped) I think I may have to revise that figure. Let's start with a conservative estimate of 20 minutes.

Estimated time spent per week: 20 mins

Conclusions

- I spend 44 hours a week (39% of my waking hours) consuming some sort of media (although some of those hours are concurrent)
- My media consumption habits aren't very typical

Online video reaches TV via Wii

Getting online video content off the small screens in people's bedrooms and studies and onto the big screens in their lounges is a nut that a whole bunch of big media companies have been spending a lot of time and money trying to crack.

Microsoft was one of the first out of the blocks with Windows XP Media Center, launched way back in October 2004. More than two years on and Bill Gates' dream of a Media Center PC under every TV is still just that, a dream. Put simply, not enough people were willing to shell out for a dedicated media hub to sit in their front room. Whilst the integration of Windows Media Center into Vista (Premium and Ultimate editions) will massively increase the number of Media Center PCs in the market, most of them will be sat on a desk rather than beneath a TV screen.

Apple took a different approach, bundling Front Row with all Macs from October 2005 onwards but waiting until January 2007 to finally bridge the PC/TV gap by launching a set top box (cunningly named Apple TV) capable of wirelessly streaming video (and audio) from your computer to your television. The obvious shortcoming of Apple TV (apart from the fact that it's still not shipping) is that it only works with iTunes.

So, if Windows Media Center and Apple TV aren't yet delivering online video to people's television sets in serious numbers, what is? The answer is the latest generation of game consoles, which are increasingly looking like the trojan horse of the digital home, delivering so much more than small Italian plumbers and hyperactive blue hedgehogs.

One such trojan horse is Nintendo's Wii, which, having sold 4.5 million units in its first three months of launch, is now the fastest-selling console in history. The launch of a (free) Wii-specific beta version of the Opera web browser (a.k.a. Internet Channel) last December turned those 4.5 million Wii's into potential conduits for online video. Whilst the browser can successfully render most webpages, it wasn't long before sites specially designed for the Wii began appearing. Below is a quick compendium of some of the best Wii-specific sites for accessing online video and music.

What's noticeable about these sites is how well designed many of the interfaces are. The limitations of the Wii controller and the likely distance of the user from the screen have forced the designers to come up with bold, simple interfaces which in many cases outshine their web-based cousins (compare the FineTune Wii Player with the regular FineTune site).

Wii video sites

MiiTube
http://www.miitube.co.uk



As the name suggests, MiiTube is specially designed for watching YouTube videos on your Wii. The homepage pulls in YouTube's 'featured videos' and there are separate pages for 'recently added', 'top favourites' and a selection of 'most viewed' charts (i.e. daily, weekly, all time) plus a 'viral chart'. For a site whose USP is accessibility on the Wii, some of the text could do with being a bit larger and there's no option to increase the video size (which you can do on the regular YouTube site).

Rating:

WiiToob
http://wiitoob.com/



Another Wii-friendly window on YouTube, with an infinitely swisher interface, WiiToob's homepage is dominated by a dynamically updating list of recently viewed videos, an alarming proportion of which are not suitable for the office. You're better off heading straight to the 'most viewed' or 'most discussed' lists. Giant font sizes and a visual style which successfully apes Nintendo make WiiToob a joy to navigate.

Rating:

SofaTube
http://www.redkawa.com/sofatube/



RedKawa certainly thought outside the box when developing the interface for SofaTube, using search rather than lists as the main mechanism for finding videos and deciding to present the featured videos as a jumble of Polaroid-style tiles which can be dragged, dropped and bought to the front. It's a neat idea which almost works but ultimately feels a bit gimmicky.

SofaTube's key differentiator from MiiTube and WiiToob is that it indexes videos from Revver as well as YouTube (although you can't search the two together and I wasn't actually able to get the Revver videos to play). Another niggle is that the search results don't fit on the screen (horizontally or vertically) which feels frustrating when the site has just accurately detected what browser I'm using.

An innovative approach let down by poor implementation.

Rating:

Wii music sites

FineTune Wii Player
http://www.finetune.com/wii



The FineTune Wii Player is a big-button version of the Pandora-esque online music service, FineTune (reviewed on this blog a few weeks back), offering streamed playlists/radio stations themed around artist or tag. It boasts a gorgeous interface and enables you to log on to your online profile to access your saved playlists, artists and tags.

Rating:

WiiHear
http://www.wiihear.com



Besides a pun-tastic name, WiiHear offers genre-based streaming radio stations (85 stations across 15 different genres at the time of writing) and supports the three 'R's of Web 2.0 sites (reviews, ratings and recommendations). The interface isn't a polished as FineTune's with too much small text, although there are a few nice touches, such as the 'past tracks played' lists which accompany every station.

Rating:

The number of Wii-specific video and music sites is sure to mushroom over the coming weeks and months (keep an eye on Wiidesigned.com) and will no doubt soon be joined by an array of sites tailored specially for Sony's PS3 (which launches in the UK on March 23rd and features a built-in browser). Opera has also indicated that Wii web widgets are on the cards, which could be very interesting.

As suggested in my earlier post on key technology trends for 2007, the converged digital media hub is arriving by stealth. The next trojan horse looks likely to be the set-top box, which are getting smarter and more connected by the day.

New (to me) music apps - part two

Following on from last year's posts on next generation music discovery and new (to me) music apps below is a round-up of some other web-enabled music services which have caught my attention in recent months, which broadly divide into six categories: Playback & Promotion, Playlists & Personalised Radio, Plug-ins, Portability, Performance and Search (damn, I was going for all Ps there...)

Playback & Promotion

radio.blog.club
http://www.radioblogclub.com



radio.blog.club aims to make it easy for Joe/Josephine Public to add commercial music to his/her site/blog/MySpace page either via an embeddable Flash player (which can stream individual tracks - see below example) or by linking to a playlist (known as a juke.blog). It works by playing out mp3 files (cunningly renamed .rbs to flummox the would-be pirates) made available by other users, which inevitably results in a fairly haphazard catalogue with some very messy metadata. On the plus side, no registration is required to embed single tracks and the playback experience is pretty smooth (check out the crossfade!) It's owned by French company Mubility which explains not only why it hasn't been taken down for breach of copyright yet but also why you are invited to update "your informations". The radio.blog.club backend has been given an iPod front-end at blogmusik.net.



Rating:

Alternatives: Sonific, SeeqPod

iJigg
http://www.ijigg.com



iJigg allows users to upload their own MP3s (music or spoken word) which subsequently appear on the site in an Odeo-style embeddable player. They are then rated (jigged) by the community (à la digg) with the idea that the best bubble up to the Most Popular page. Launched on the 15th January it's still early days for the site which, whilst refreshingly easy to use, is struggling to find content which isn't either copyright or crap. Still, it's a potential boon to unsigned artists looking for a straightforward way to upload and promote their music and it gets bonus marks for not requiring a desktop download.

Rating:

Alternatives: CC Hits, Project Opus, Jamendo

Streampad
http://www.streampad.com



Streampad is an awesome browser-based music player which combines remote access to your entire digital music library (via a downloadable Java app) with some great tools to find music on the web, including an archive of live concert performances and a web search which provides one-click access to MP3s scraped from blogs. It also offers integration with MP3tunes.com (who host online 'lockers' to store your music remotely) and last.fm (so your listening stats are safely scrobbled). Factor in 'Now Playing' info which not only pulls in album reviews, Flickr photos and related blog posts but also shows you who else is listening to the same track and you've got one kick-ass music player.

Rating:

Alternatives: Songbird

Playlists & Personalised Radio

finetune
http://www.finetune.com



finetune's core offering is a playlist creator and artist-themed radio stations. Unfortunately, a really rather slick interface (including an embedded player with CoverFlow-style visuals) is let down by the limitations imposed by finetune's rights agreements - namely that each playlist has to comprise exactly 45 songs with no more than 3 tracks from any one artist. Whilst there's an option to auto-complete your playlist using recommendations provided by finetune (the audaciously titled "I'm lazy!" button), the suggestions seem very linear (mostly other tracks from the same artists) and it doesn't offset the sense of frustration at having to create a playlist of a set number of tracks. It just all feels a bit laborious for those used to last.fm logging their listening and creating lists automatically. The artist-themed radio station element also suffer in comparison to a major competitor; Pandora enables you to give the thumbs up or thumbs down to specific tracks to educate it about your tastes which feels like a significant omission from finetune. It's a shame because it's a nice site nobbled more by rights than technology or design. Close, but no cigar.

Rating:

Alternatives: FIQL, SonicSwap

Plug-ins

Twones
http://www.twones.com



Twones is an iTunes plug-in (Mac or PC) which uploads your Top 100 Most Played tracks and then matches your musical proclivities with other users in the Twones database. Whilst it feels a little basic in comparison with the likes of MyStrands, iLike and last.fm it has the advantage of giving you useful recommendations from the off (the others take a while to build a useful knowledge of your listening habits). Incidentally, Twones was developed in the Netherlands so don't be alarmed if you get the error message 'Gebruikersnaam en/of Wachtwoord is onjuist' - a quick Dutch to English translation on Babel Fish revealed I'd simply entered an incorrect username or password...

Rating:

Alternatives: uPlayMe, Muiso, Musicmobs

Portability

phling!
http://www.phling.com



phling! aims to give users access to their digital music collection (and that of their friends) on their mobile phones. There's a decent selection of supported handsets, including my now rather aged K750i, although the desktop client is only available for PC and only supports Windows Media Player friendly file formats (so no access to tracks purchased from the iTunes Music Store). The mobile phone client is a 289Kb Java app which downloaded in a jiffy and worked straight off the bat. The interface is nicely implemented with navigation through your music collection proving fast and intuitive. The sound quality is excellent with surprisingly little buffering and the ability to rate tracks is a nice feature. phling! also enables you to access photos stored on your computer and (handset permitting) save photos taken on your mobile direct to your home PC. My only reservation is data charges which I'm guessing could easily rack up if you used phling! as your main portable music player.

Rating:

Alternatives: Mercora M, Orb, Avvenu

partyStrands
http://www.partystrands.com



partyStrands is an intriguing offshoot of MyStrands (ne. MusicStrands) which aims to get partygoers using their mobiles to influence the music at participating bars /clubs. The idea is that the partyStrands interface is displayed on the venue's TVs and punters can vote on what music they want to hear and send pictures and text messages to the screens. The messages and details of the tracks played are then aggregated and uploaded to the partyStrands site so you can log on the following morning and relive the night. It's only rolled out in France, Spain and the States at the moment and there are just three events listed on the Upcoming Parties page. Definitely one to watch though.

Rating:

Alternatives: Er, can't think of any.

Performance

eJamming
http://www.ejamming.com



eJamming is another service aiming to facilitate live music, this time by enabling musicians with MIDI-enabled instruments to jam online in real-time. I haven't had the opportunity to try it out yet but the demo video looks pretty damn impressive.

Rating:

Alternatives: NINJAM

SingShot
http://www.singshot.com



SingShot gives karaoke the Web 2.0 treatment, enabling the great unwashed to upload their warblings to be tagged, shared, rated and commented on. It's strangely compelling in a car-crash kind of a way and seems likely to succeed in these X Factor times of ours.

Rating:

Alternatives: kSolo, Internet Karaoke, bix, MyVideoKaraoke

Search

midomi
http://www.midomi.com



midomi's USP is enabling users to search for music using their voice (singing, humming or whistling) so the service pretty much stands or falls on how successfully it does that. Fortunately for parent company, Melodis, the answer is really quite well, especially when you consider that the service has only been up and running for a couple of weeks and its database of user-submitted tunes can't yet be that large. I sang it a quick ABC of karaoke staples and it successfully identified Angels, American Pie, Bohemian Rhapsody and Crazy (both the Patsy Cline classic and the Gnarls Barkley chart-topper). Assuming midomi's proprietary Multimodal Adaptive Recognition System (MARS) scales successfully, it's an interesting (and free) alternative to Shazam.

Rating:

Alternatives: Nayio, SongTapper, Musipedia

TuneFind
http://www.tunefind.com



TuneFind is all about exorcising the earworm and finding the name of the track from that TV show/movie you saw last week. The homepage features recent additions, hot songs and all-time popular artists (Snow Patrol are currently the most soundtrack-friendly band, with a whopping 38 entries). Song listings are submitted by users and then verified by the rest of the TuneFind community who can flag submissions as correct or incorrect. It's not exactly cutting edge but it's a useful resource and may stem the flow of 'what was that song...?' submissions to Yahoo! Answers.

Rating:

Alternatives: Commercial Breaks and Beats, Sounds Familiar, TV Ad music.co.uk

Virgin Radio launches VIP area

Following on from the introduction of digg-style music news in August and a full site relaunch in September, Virgin Radio this week introduced a VIP area to its site, enabling users to build an online profile detailing their favourite artists and introducing basic social networking functionality such as shout boxes and blogs.

In order to enter the VIP area you first need to sign up for a free Virgin Radio VIP account and confirm your email address. Once in, you're encouraged to add a welcome message and image and list some of your favourite artists in order to start building a picture of your musical tastes. This list then acts as a filter to the content on the rest of the Virgin Radio site, flagging up any music news, forum posts, blog posts or other content related to your chosen artists.

Adding artists to your profile is a smooth process with auto-suggestions appearing as you type, although it is only possible to add artists who appear in the Virgin Radio database and you must fill out a Contact Us form if you wish to have less mainstream artists added - arguably not an issue for the average Virgin Radio listener... ;-)

It is also possible to add friends to your profile (by username, real name, age range, location or by the artists they love) whose activities (e.g. submitting, commenting, rating) then become visible on your profile. There's an option to specify up to three favourite artists and five favourite friends who will then receive a greater weighting in your recommendations.

The addition of user blogs into the mix is a worthwhile enhancement and is particularly well executed. Whilst obviously not massively sophisticated in functionality, the ability to add artist tags to each post and the quick launch toolbar bookmark are options that some of the major blogging outfits are only just getting around to adding.

The VIP content is also well distributed throughout the rest of the Virgin Radio site. The Artist Dashboard appears on all artist profiles and enables you to add an artist to your favourites, blog about them or submit a related news story. Some pages also feature a tag cloud of the most popular artists which gives a nice snapshot of the audience's musical proclivities (or at least what they're prepared to admit to).

On the down side, navigating around the VIP area can be confusing at times with the naming conventions adding to a lack of clarity around whether specific bits of functionality will be found in your VIP Dashboard, your VIP Profile or your VIP Lounge.

Arguably the biggest shortcoming of the Virgin Radio VIP area as it currently operates is the lack of visibility on the whole community. Where sites like Flickr offer a three-tier view (Your Photos, Photos from your Contacts and Everyone's Photos), Virgin Radio only offer the first two. With the exception of the tag cloud, there is very little indication of how big the Virgin Radio VIP community is or what it is current doing.

Still, early days. Whilst inevitably not as sophisticated as dedicated music communities like Last.fm, the Virgin Radio VIP area is a significant step forward in creating online communities around real-world radio stations.

GCap launches Mi-Xfm

GCap Media this week launched what it is calling an "interactive online radio player". Mi-Xfm (enough of the 'my' prefix already!) is actually much closer to an online jukebox, randomly shuffling tracks consistent with the Xfm brand which users can rate or skip in a manner familiar to users of Pandora, LAUNCHcast and last.fm. Critically, it features no DJs and no advertising - commercial radio without the commercials (and come to think of it, the radio).



So, what's the game plan? Well, primarily it appears to be a brand building exercise, attempting to position Xfm as a brand whose focus is on music and putting the listener in control. Not that the whole enterprise is a lost leader; whilst the player may be free of spot advertising, it is sponsored (by Xbox 360 for its first 2 months - hence the player's unpleasant lime green hue) and carries banner advertising. Users must also register in order to use the player, enabling GCap to find out more about the Xfm demographic and start building a relationship with them via email/text etc.

So, it is any good? Sadly many users won't ever find out as getting the player up and running required almost as much tenacity as installing Channel 4 on demand last week. For starters, it's another Microsoft DRM fest, insisting on a Windows PC running Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player. They do, however, gets points for the candour/humour of their Technical Requirements blurb:

"There is currently no Mac or Linux support as we're using Windows Media format and we need to put some Digital Rights Management over it to prevent our friends in the record industry having sleepness (sic) nights."

"Does not work with Netscape, Mozilla, Opera or any of the other good browsers out there because they don't like integrating Windows Media Player as an object, and/or some of the mad Javascript to make it all work. Try it, but it probably won't work."

Bizarrely, it also didn't work with Windows Media Player 11 and I had to roll back to version 10 (having only just upgraded at the behest of the 4oD software).

The final hurdle to clear was preparing the browser. In order to successfully launch the player you must switch off IE's pop-up blocker or temporarily allow pop-ups not only for the Xfm site but also for rcsworks.com, which is where the player is hosted (Mi-Xfm is actually a re-badged version of an off-the-shelf product from RCS called iSelector).

Once finally up and running (assuming you haven't thrown your PC out of the window by this point), the listening experience comes as a pleasant surprise. The audio is quick to load and the sound quality is good. There are four streams to choose from - Chill, Loud, Hits and X-list - which by and large do what they say on the tin. The main interface controls work well, but its very easy to see the joins on the elements which didn't come as standard. Clicking on the Playlist or Reactivate links launches (another) pop-up which lacks the visual finesse of the main playback window. The Playlist window also gives false hope by presenting each artist name as a link which disappointingly all point to the Xfm homepage.

This highlights a key shortcoming of the Mi-Xfm service. It's entering a space already very well served by the likes of Pandora, LAUNCHcast and last.fm which all offer a greater degree of sophistication and contextual depth. Unsurprisingly (but still disappointingly) GCap have opted to placate the record labels by limiting the skip/rest functionality of Mi-Xfm. The FAQ states that "By agreement with the recording industry, this service cannot be an on-demand jukebox and we don’t want your player to run out of songs or have so few that it plays the same ones over and over" which inadvertently draws attention to the limited size of the catalogue.

For all it's faults, GCap deserves praise for trying something new with Mi-Xfm. Whether it's radio or not remains a moot point (see earlier post). It's certainly poses interesting questions about the future of radio advertising and the role of on-air talent. At a time when most radio podcasts are comprised of DJ banter with no music it's interesting to see the opposite configuration being tried in the streaming space. My suspicion is it will prove fairly popular with existing Xfm listeners who will be sold on the music they love without the ads. Whether it will make an impression in the (increasingly crowded) wider online music market I'm less sure.

Relaunched Virgin Radio site

The Virgin Radio website has relaunched with a much cleaner Web 2.0 look. Gone is the rather oppressive red, blue and yellow colour scheme in favour of a white-with-pastel-gradient-fills design which is infinitely more inviting. Gone too are the fiddly DHTML drop-down menus and the global nav options have been reduced from seven to a more manageable five. Navigation through the rest of the site is also now much tidier with a contextual left-hand nav for each of the main areas.

The homepage now features a bbc.co.uk-style main promo with an image loop and five associated text links. Alongside is a similarly proportion animated ad (for iPod + iTunes at the time of writing), beneath are three 'latest' lists (music videos, sessions and interviews and playlist additions), no doubt intended to give the impression of a dynamically updated site.

The 'on-air now' section has been given more space to breathe at the top of the page, with a decent sized image of the presenter which shrinks to make space for a banner ad when you navigate away from the homepage.

Lower down the homepage are promos for the latest competitions, Virgin Radio podcasts and the news, sport and entertainment area. There is also a submission form for the user-sourced music news area (currently down) which I posted about last month, while it was still in beta. The main News area is comprised entirely of syndicated feeds - Sky provides the News and Sport headlines whilst The Sun is entrusted with the latest Showbiz goss. It's a whole section of the website which effectively runs itself.

Interestingly, Movies has been promoted to the global navigation, with a focus on celebrity interviews and details of major new releases (although they're looks to be a problem with the data feed as they're currently all blank).

The DJ/Shows area pretty much does what it says on the tin. One nice feature is the dynamically updating schedule, which greys out programmes in the past and highlights the show currently on air.

Unexpectedly, it is the Music area of the site that proves to be something of a let down. The Complete artist A-Z is surely in breach of the Trade Descriptions Act with just one artist listed under 'A' (Aerosmith) and most entries offering only a photo, a one sentence trivia nugget, a link to the artist's official website and a discography provided by Amazon. As a station which sells itself on music, it seems like a missed opportunity to not have a richer offering in this area, perhaps encompassing contributions from users. Some particularly Virgin-friendly artists (e.g. James Blunt, Keane, Paolo Nutini) do have a 'Fan forum' or the option of voting to create one, but it feels slightly tokenistic in view of the current climate of very impressive user-generated content sites.

One redeeming feature in the Music area is the Song search - a simple but rather splendid feature, whereby you can query the now playing database by time and day to find out what that track was that you couldn't identify. The Charts area is also pleasantly diverting if you're of a Nick Hornby persuasion, where you can discover that You're Beautiful by James Blunt really did come tenth in Virgin Radio's Top 500 Songs of All Time.

One unexpected treat was the About Us area, which is linked to from the site footer and features a nice Digital Media section which introduces the team and shows the evolution of the site since it launched in "1996-ish". It also reveals that the whole site was built in-house by just six people, which is pretty bloody impressive.

Inevitably there are still one or two bugs which need ironing out (if you're reading James, the Search box on the homepage isn't working and Dominic Johnson's Football Blog appear to have gone AWOL). Nevertheless, its an attractive site and a quantum leap on from the previous site not only in terms of design and user experience but also in its greater integration with the wider web (the adoption of wikipedia-style icons for linking to external sites is a particularly nice touch). All in all, a very nice job - well done guys!

Virgin Radio dips its toe in Web 2.0

Interesting stuff from Virgin Radio who are beta testing a Web 2.0 approach to music news, whereby 'VIP listeners' can submit links to music news stories elsewhere on the web and then rate them or comment on them in a digg stylee...

Oono MiniDAB

Look again at the above photo. The device on the right isn't an iPod, it's an Oono MiniDAB, which went on sale in the UK today. Yes, its an MP3 player, available in a choice of white or black, which apes the iPod both in styling and form factor, but the MiniDAB has a little something extra to offer and the clue's in the name; DAB - the digital radio technology which promises listeners more choice, better reception, easy tuning and accompanying text and data services and is flying off the shelves as a result (over 3 million DAB sets have now been sold in the UK).

First things first, this isn't an iPod killer. But then again, what is? The iPod does what is does with such finesse that its difficult to see it being improved on by anyone other than Apple. That said, there's a lot the iPod doesn't try to do and one of those things is radio. Yes, there's the add-on FM radio remote, but it offers a clumsy analogue interface which feels incongruous with the rest of the iPod experience. Surely a digital music device deserves a digital radio?

Enter the MiniDAB, the first product from Oono, which aims to bring "quality audio products to areas of the market where none existed before". Of course the MiniDAB isn't the first combined DAB/MP3 device - PURE got there some time ago with the PocketDAB 2000 - but it is the most pocketable.

The Oono is not only shorter and slimmer than the iPod it also weighs 41 grams less. The trade-off is depth (an extra 8mm) and inferior build quality, although I understand both of these will be addressed in future iterations of the MiniDAB. It also trumps the iPod in terms of battery life, promising 22 hours of MP3 playback versus the iPod's 14 hours (although DAB playback drops the Oono's battery life to a less impressive 8 hours).

Other selling points of the Oono include an FM radio, a built-in speaker and the ability to record direct from the radio into MP3 format. All in all, it's a nice piece of kit which, despite appearances, offers something distinct in the crowded digital audio player marketplace. My only reservation is the asking price - I can't help feeling that £179.99 for a device with just 128MB of built-in memory might prove a little steep...

Apple iPod (30GB)
Dimensions: 104 x 61 x 11 mm
Weight: 136g
Claimed battery life: 14 hours
Memory: 30GB
Price: £219

Oono MiniDAB
Dimensions: 99.2 x 56.2 x 19 mm
Weight: 95g
Claimed battery life: 22 hours
Memory: 128MB (Expandable to 2GB via SD expansion slot)
Price: £179.99

Channel 4 Radio

Thoroughly intrigued by the recent launch of channel4radio.com, not least because of its eagerness to play an active role in the redefinition of the word 'radio', lacking both live programming and a presence on the FM dial (although a DAB multiplex bid is in the pipeline).

Not only is it a wholly on-demand, it's also predominantly downloads (with the exception of the 'T-Mobile Street Gigs' and the meager 30-second preview streams which start at the beginning of the programme and therefore rarely take you past the opening credits - doh!). Potential listeners must register before they can download programmes, which is no-doubt attributable to a commercial broadcaster's desire for a trackable demographic (yes, date of birth is a compulsory form field) but nevertheless does function as a barrier to entry and indicates Channel 4 aren't gunning for a huge audience at this stage.

Another indication that this launch is on the soft side is the decision to effectively exclude the downloads from the influential iTunes Podcast Directory by offering personal (and therefore unique) RSS feeds rather than programme specific podcasts. Whilst this does enable Channel 4 to keep control of the subscription process, they're forfeiting a significant shop-window in the burgeoning podcast marketplace.

So, what about the content? Well, there's not a huge amount of it yet. Navigation is by genre (Arts, Comedy, Entertainment, Music, News & Current Affairs and Racing) and the programme selection is unsurprisingly dominated by no-brainer TV spin-offs (e.g. Lost, Big Brother, Richard and Judy's Book Club), although it's exciting to see some original speech formats being developed in the commercial radio sector and it will be interesting to watch how their Co-Creation space progresses.

There's no advertising on the current site and the main revenue models appear to be programme sponsorship and pushes to featured content (e.g. the audio book being discussed on Richard and Judy's Audio Book Club) which will be made available as DRM-protected Windows Media files (the free stuff is MP3).

It's clearly early days for the site and Channel 4 seem genuinely keen to shape the offering in response to feedback from the audience. My personal plea would be to lose the audio ident which plays every time you hit the homepage and make a definite decision on branding (the site is branded 4radio, but they don't own 4radio.com).

What is radio in 2005?

A big question, admittedly, but one which 10 or 15 years ago wouldn't have been half as difficult to answer. First and foremost, radio was a communication technology, or, in dictionary speak: "the transmission and reception of electromagnetic waves having a frequency in the range 10⁴ to 10¹¹ or 10¹² hertz, especially those carrying sound messages" (AskOxford.com). However it also came to refer to both a physical device ("an apparatus for receiving radio programmes") and, perhaps most interestingly of all, the content broadcast to it (the OED lets me down here). Whilst the first two definitions may be more dictionary-friendly than the third, my strongest and most immediate associations with the word radio are almost all related to content.

The advent of digital distribution technologies clearly challenges the first of these three definitions. Radio is no longer an exclusively analogue technology, reliant on the transmission and reception of electromagnetic waves. It can now be broadcast in binary via a plethora of broadcast/communication technologies (e.g. DAB, IP, satellite, cable). The radio programme I am listening to as I write this (Radio 4's excellent Reith Lectures) is being delivered to me not 'over the airwaves', but via the internet, as a string of 1s and 0s.

This expansion in delivery methods is mirrored in the range of ways in which it is now possible to receive radio, which brings into question our second definition. Is my computer/television/mobile phone/MP3 player a radio because it is capable of receiving radio programmes? As multi-function devices become more and more commonplace, the notion of radio as physical apparatus becomes increasingly problematic.

So, if radio can no longer be comfortably defined as a delivery mechanism or as a physical device, that leaves us with content. Is there something intrinsic about radio content that marks it as 'radio'? The diversity of output disseminated under the banner of radio suggests not. In which case, does the producer/broadcaster get to decide what is and isn't radio? Inevitably, the digital revolution is blurring the lines here too. The nascent podcasting industry is promising a democratisation of the radio production process, wresting control of what is and isn't radio from the hands of established broadcasters.

Maybe we should look instead to the audience to try to understand what defines radio in 2005. Is it the perceived communality of the listening experience? Or the concept of 'liveness'? Is genuine interactivity between listener and broadcaster the new hallmark of radio?

One thing is clear; our current definitions of radio are inadequate. Perhaps the time has come to redefine radio for the digital age? Or then again, perhaps not. Perhaps attempting to define radio is to miss the point, failing to acknowledge its ultimately ethereal nature. Maybe we should put the semantics to one side and be content to enjoy the manifold pleasures of a medium assured of a bright digital future.

Real life radio in a virtual world

The concept of radio in virtual environments is far from new. Console games have been flirting with the idea of radio as soundtrack for a few years now, most extensively in the driving genre, from the fictitious radio stations of RoadKill and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City to the real life radio brands (Capital, XFM, Virgin) which feature in Project Gotham Racing.

However, all of these representations of radio lack one it's most compelling ingredients: liveness. Whilst station idents and barracking DJs may give the veneer of broadcast radio, most users are aware that the 'radio' in SSX 3 is just tracks being played off the CD/DVD in their console.

That all looks set to change. Listening to live radio in a virtual environment is now a reality thanks to the 'Second Life Fever' nightclub, which streams Virgin Radio Groove 24/7 in online digital world, Second Life. Any user can drop in on the nightclub and listen to the music live, with the Second Life application acting as a media player client.

If it hasn't already, it's surely only a matter of time before streamed radio starts appearing in games developed for the burgeoning generation of connected consoles (e.g. Xbox Live).

A hardware solution to bringing real life radio into virtual realms is also on the cards. Last month the chairman of XM Satellite Radio announced that the company was "investing in ways of building its pay radio service into gadgets ranging from MP3 players to video game consoles" (Reuters).

It's intriguing that in this increasingly 'on demand' era there is a concomitant demand for 'liveness'. Fortunately, technology is evolving to facilitate both...