Month: November 2014

  • Twitter is Searchable: My Early Timeline

    Twitter has finally built a full search engine for its archived Tweets. That’s important because it has been incredibly hard in the past to find specific Tweets. I’m on Twitter of course, and have been since sometime in December 2006. But this search engine fills in a few blanks. My first Tweet was not the…

  • Podcast Numbers – Does Serial Tell Us Anything?

    In a world where there are so many metrics available, there’s often a curious shortage of figures in some parts of the tech industry where you’d like there to be. Amazon won’t tell you how many Kindles its sold. Netflix won’t say how many episodes of House of Cards it has streamed. And so on.…

  • Breaking News: Most People Still Watch Linear Television Most of the Time

    If you’re reading this, you’re probably not normal. And neither am I. You and I probably have a bit of an unhealthy interest in all things media – radio in particular. You probably don’t watch an enormous amount of television – less than the 3 hours and 52 minutes a day that was the average…

  • How Effective is the Charity Single in 2014?

    In the last full series of More or Less, there was a really interesting episode that looked at charity giving and what is the most effective way to give money. It is not an easy question to answer as the programme clearly addresses. I was thinking about this over the weekend when Bob Geldof was…

  • Podcasts – A Rebirth?

    Earlier this year, I was sad when The Guardian shut-down a number of podcasts including the Media Talk Podcast (Phoenix style, an entirely independent-of-the-Guardian podcast, The Media Podcast, rose from the ashes through a Kickstarter – I’m a backer). But with a certain amount of irony, the final episode of the Guardian’s iteration included contributions…

  • The Future of The Radio Academy

    On Friday, The Radio Academy released an unusual press release that detailed how next year’s Radio Academy Awards were being cancelled, as was the Radio Festival. Furthermore, buried at the end, was news that the “Executive Unit” was being closed down. A new, unspecified London-based event, would replace both the Awards and Festival in due…

  • A Lovely Day To Be Out On A Mountain Bike

  • News by Email

    On the one hand we keep hearing that email is dying. The young don’t use it, and anyway, we have an app for that. On the other hand it still feels pretty much impossible to do a lot of things without email. Where do your online purchase confirmations go? A myriad of apps? What if…

  • Bad Visualisations

    There’s a really interesting piece to write about Taylor Swift, Spotify and iTunes revenues, and the music industry in general. But this isn’t it. I’m writing this because TechCrunch has an interesting piece about European Spotify earnings overtaking iTunes earnings. The piece reports that Kobalt, a publishing company that collects music royalties on behalf of…

  • The Helmet Debate

    I have a confession to make. On my daily commute, cycling on my Brompton from King’s Cross Station to work, I don’t wear a cycling helmet. Come to that, I don’t particularly “do” high-vis either. I realise to some I must be dicing with death by behaving so recklessly. Part of my reasoning is that…