September 2008 Archives

There really are some poor Google Ads kicking about at the moment, and the worst of them seem to be appearing in Gmail (for me at least).

Here's the latest example of something that's thoroughly misrepresentative on many levels.

"Eastenders is Axed"? No it's not. The link is to a strange site called "just-the-issues.com/eastenders".

If you click through you're presented with the following:

Seemingly this is a "BBC Poll" - which I suppose could mean that it's some research commissioned by the BBC (Obviously it's not), or their get-out might be that it's a poll about a BBC programme.

It's strange that someone not connected to the BBC is paying Google to get some response their question of the day. Still, that's what advertising's there for, and if I want to find out the answer to something via research, I'm likely to need to pay someone to get me the answer.

Curiously, the links to both "Yes" and "No" in their "poll" are identical. Hmm.

Clicking through takes you to a random "shopping" site. Goodness knows how I'm supposed to win one their 23 "prizes".

In other words the whole thing is just a traffic driver, and a not very good one at that. Yet Google lets this sort of thing through. I just think that as Google and other online advertisers become bigger, this kind of non-advertising causes me to lose trust in Google as a brand. The top of my email is prime real estate, and it feels like the centre-break of the News at Ten has some kind of Dellboy advertising. It wouldn't happen on ITV, and shouldn't happen on Google.

No doubt if I go through the frustratingly hidden process of reporting the advertiser to Google, I'll eventually get the ad pulled, but since Google makes that hard, I wonder how interested it really is. Yet it should care, and I shouldn't see garbage like this.

Gmail's spam filter works pretty well, but then I get served spam as advertising!

Over the last few years, I've tried to look at lots of different ways to turn audio into text - ideally cheaply or even freely.

Working for a radio station, even one that largely plays out music, being able to search audio to find when a presenter said or mentioned something would be incredibly useful.

I've seen a very expensive product tested a couple of times which has been pretty fitful in working well - and even though one radio group did buy it one stage, it's never been fully utilised. There are also services like Blinkx that seem to do a pretty good job in a controlled environment.

A regular example seems to be based around the BBC News channel. The transcription of what presenters are saying is remarkably accurate - even for far flung place names. But systems can be pointed towards the BBC News website for appropriate names and words to help those trickier phrases.

So it was interesting to see two different takes on this problem in the last week or so. First of all Andy Baio has published details of how he went about getting an interview he'd conducted transcribed so that he could place it on his website. Essentially he chopped the interview into small nuggets, and then used Amazon's Mechanical Turk to get transcriptions of what was said. He's very happy with the outcome.

A couple of years ago, Virgin Radio tried something very similar with our "Snoop Log." Everytime a DJ opens a fader, we record what he or she is saying. That's put into a database alongside details of track listings and adverts so that we have a record of what was played out. If we could also get hold of a transcription of what was said, we'd have a fully indexable database of our output.

DJ links tend to be pretty short - often well under a minute. So the individual "chunks" are ready made. It's easy to transcode them to mp3 or whatever would be appropriate. The difficulty comes from the song titles and artists. If you live in India and English is perhaps a second language, then the exact spelling of "The Kings of Leon" might be tricky for you.

The test wasn't a success. Now it might be that we didn't offer enough cash to get better quality translators, or perhaps if we'd embedded the audio in a Flash player, that might have helped. One way or another - we didn't take it forward.

There are other transcription services that ride on the back of the Amazon Mechanical Turk and cost more than the DIY option. But then they offer higher quality output. It's a question of cost for a commercial radio station versus value of the output. It's certainly something to revisit.

The other fascinating development has come from Google and its "Gaudi" service which has just launched. Initially concentrating on political speeches, the service allows you to search for words within those speeches and jump to the correct part of the video.

Now obviously from a radio perspective, this could be done just as easily with an audio only stream.

But I'd still love to know to what extent the service is only using audio. It's quite clear that pretty much every political speech is captured in text form in one place or another. That's what allows talented souls to put together videos of politicians "singing along" to songs like "Never Gonna Give You Up." So is Google using text alongside video/audio to pattern match?

Anyway, it's promising, and surely in time, we'll truly be able to search audio.

Sunday night in the US saw the Emmy Awards - theoretically, the most important American TV awards. Now their credibility is obviously nil since the best TV series to emerge from the US (and arguably the English speaking world) has had precisely two nominations in five years and no awards. That's The Wire. It's got a black cast and is set in Baltimore. Emmy voters are white and live in LA.

But the big winner at the weekend was another HBO show that I've been looking forward to - John Adams. It's a seven part drama that aired in 90 minute ad-free chunks on HBO earlier this year. It won a grand total of 13 awards including one for Paul Giamatti who plays Adams, one of the Founding Fathers of America.

So I've been looking forward to it, and next weekend it starts on UK TV. Now whereabouts in the schedule do you think this 7-part epic is going to play?

Well it's not on BBC1 or ITV1 - certainly. Nor Five... BBC2 would work, but nope. Channel 4 would be a good fit, but nope.

You're getting warm.

BBC Four? It'd work nicely there. But no.

Instead it's on More 4.

Now that's a good fit. More 4 shows some challenging and interesting programming. In particular they bring us the nightly delight that is The Daily Show (Incidentally, did they give last Friday's episode with the Tony Blair interview much cross promotion on C4? I don't really watch much C4 these days so don't know).

If I tell you it's on at the weekend, when do you think you can catch it? 9pm or 10pm on Saturday or Sunday nights? Well Saturday night has "The 30 Greatest Political Comedies" - a list show presented by no less than Michael Howard (who I saw in the street in Golden Square the other day oddly enough) and Charles Kennedy. Not quite BBC Parliament's coverage of the Labour and Tory conventions is it? That's followed by a recording of the previous evening's US Presidential Debate.

Earlier in the evening there's a double bill of Property Ladder - and we're all thinking about moving just now aren't we? So there's no space on Saturday night in the schedule clearly.

What about Sunday? Well there's a repeat of a Jamie Oliver programme, then a repeat of a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall programme, followed by repeats of two Gordon Ramsay programmes. Clearly everyone's cooking on Sunday nights.

So when can this 13-time Emmy Award winning mini-series air? It cost over $100m to make afterall.

5.30pm on Saturday. That's when.

Now on the one-hand, you could argue that it's good counter-programming to things like Merlin or X-Factor that are on BBC1 and ITV1 at the same time. But it just feels completely hidden, and it's a real shame. Surely there must have been some kind of primetime slot for the programme?

It reminds me of another cracking HBO show that was thoroughly hidden away in the schedule by Channel 4 years ago - From The Earth To The Moon. Produced by Tom Hanks no less, this dramatised the Apollo space race and was made at great expense. It was shown on Saturday lunchtimes or thereabouts here, and consequently most people will have seen it in repeats on something like FX or on DVD.

While I'm highlighting shows that you really should see, More 4 has another Emmy Award winning one-off next week that is airing in primetime, and is absolutely unmissable. Next Friday they're showing Recount, which tells the story of the Florida part of the 2000 Presidential Election. You know, the one that Al Gore should have won.

The scene early on shows us mostly clearly what "hanging-chads" really were and it's a masterly dramatisation of an important, but fairly dry subject. It'd be easy to have made it uninteresting, but a cast that incldues Kevin Spacey, Denis Leary, John Hurt, Tom Wilkinson and a wonderful Laura Dern, makes this an exceptional film. It's followed by the intriguing sounding Vice-Presidential debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin.

[UPDATE] I've just listened to the most recent Guardian Mediatalk podcast and More4 controller Hamish Mykura talks up his channel's showing of John Adams (and Recount) with great proudness. What a shame he's scheduling it at teatime on Saturdays.

Hole in the Wall is BBC One's new Saturday teatime game show. Imported from Japan, it involves two teams of celebrities dressed in lycra space suits and crash helmets trying to form shapes to fit through the holes in a polystyrene wall that heads towards them.

If they don't make the correct shape, then end up in a small pool behind them. It's very silly and is taking the world by storm.

You can watch it on the BBC iPlayer for a week or so here.

Anyway, one of the rounds is a "question" in which the team playing must select one of the two answers and stand behind that answer to go through a hidden door. The wrong door is solid and means that you'll end up in the drink.

This week's question was a maths problem, and you can see it below.

Anyone who's studied GCSE or O Level maths should also see the problem. The answer's neither 11 nor 12. It's 38.

There's something called Order of Operations in maths and it means that you calculate things like multiplications and division first - particularly when there's no more information to help you decide which order to do things.

So, in effect, this sum is the same as saying:

(3 x 12) + (8 / 4) = 36 + 2 = 38

You can't just read it from left to right as the producers (and indeed the contestants did). It's just wrong.

If it was worth it, I'd have complained to someone at the BBC. But it's not, although arguably the points different might have meant the other team won, and their (undisclosed) charity might have missed out on £10,000.

It's just a shame that the solitary question in the entire show was, er, wrong.

So David Lloyd is leaving Virgin (soon to be Absolute) Radio today, and in the time honoured fashion, we made a leaving video.

The video was edited to a couple of copyright songs - It's Getting Better by Mama Cass and We've Only Just Begun by The Carpenters.

I uploaded the video to YouTube.

Now I'm obviously breaking rules here. Those aren't my songs to go sharing. YouTube has a "Content Identification Program" which obviously looked at the audio at recognised it as being owned by "UMG" (I take this to be Universal Music Group). Before the video had even been processed, an email had pinged back to me informing me of this.

Yet UMG's policy is to allow the audio to remain up, but in return it has to feature advertising on that YouTube page, and allow the owner access to the logs of that title.

What a sensible proposal. Now I'm aware that at some time in the future they might change their mind and pull "my" video. But that does seem to be a relatively forward thinking way of doing things. And it's not often that you can say that about record companies.

Anyway, that's alll a long way around of giving me a reason to embed the video here.

(Video shot largely by Paul Sylvester and edited by me. It could be better in places, but it's still quite fun I think, and it worked a treat).

You know how I love watching Bear Grylls' programmes - particularly since he had to tone down what he was claiming in his second series of Born Survivor.

Back in May, when Ray Mears was promoting his latest series - set in the Australian outback - he laughed off Grylls. Now Grylls is conceding defeat in the battle of TV survivalists. Grylls has a new series of Born Survivor starting on Discovery next week and C4 in October.

This sounds like the perfect opportunity for a Children in Need or Comic Relief stand-off: first person to Uluru or the North Pole is the winner. Something like that.

It's an unfortunate coincidence that just days after I'd first used The Times' archive for a little project that I'm working on, that they announce to registered users that it'll have a paywall from the end of this week (confusingly, they list the date as Friday 18 September when there isn't such a day).

Still I did at least find what I was looking for on this occassion.

Sadly it mirrors what Guardian newspapers have done with their archive. The Times is a little cheaper with access charged at £4.95 for a day, then £14.95 a month and £74.95 a year. The Guardian is £7.95 for a day, £14.95 for three days and £49.95 for a month - so significantly more.

I fully understand the value of these archives, and the work that must have gone into digitising all those papers. But it's a shame that the prices are where they are. Plenty of people will still be visiting their local reference libraries for access.

This comes a week after Google announced that it was digitising a number of US papers. The Google effort seems to be ad-funded, although I can't see a clear promise that these will be available free in future. And Google doesn't seem to offer an easy way of downloading the articles, something you certainly can do with The Times' archive.

Still, I did enjoy this side-story from The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's coverage of the Apollo 11 landings in 1969:

As Oldham's Revolution changes format, owner and breakfast show host, Steve Penk tells anyone unhappy with the changes to try Xfm:

"What I don't want to deal with every day is a bunch of wining whingeing moaning morons clogging up my voicemail because we no longer play alternative music."

They'd be your listeners Steve. Good luck with your next RAJAR!

As Oldham's Revolution changes format, owner and breakfast show host, Steve Penk tells anyone unhappy with the changes to try Xfm:

"What I don't want to deal with every day is a bunch of wining whingeing moaning morons clogging up my voicemail because we no longer play alternative music."

They'd be your listeners Steve. Good luck with your next RAJAR!

I never knew that it had been given the working title "Picnic", but it seems that Sky has decided to put the whole venture on ice.

Let me explain, 18 months or so ago, Sky suddenly announced that it wanted to take its three current Freeview services - Sky News, Sky Sports News and Sky Three - off the Freeview platform, and use the space to put four or so new subscription channels on in its place. It would use a higher spec of encoding that would mean consumers needed new boxes to both decode this, and to provide a slot for their subscription smart cards.

Ofcom wasn't too happy and the whole thing disappeared deep into Ofcom's Southwark Bridge offices for further consultation. Sky was an original partner of Freeview, and suddently DTT wouldn't quite be so free.

The cynic in me thought that this was a chance to get back at Setanta who was soon to be launching with Premier League football. And due to their tie-up with Top-Up TV, they'd be on Freeview, unlike Sky.

At Sky News, they were a bit unhappy as not only were they off Virgin Media (and still are, I believe), but now they were coming off Freeview.

Ofcom has quite forceably responded to Sky's press statements regarding the suspension of development work on Picnic. In particular they highlight a tardiness on Sky's part to get responses to them on deadline and in full detail.

So a questionmark must hang over how serious a proposition this ever was. On the one hand, the venture had employed as many as 70 people (doing what, exactly, beyond technical work and responding to Ofcom, is a little unclear)., but the original hope had been to put something in place in time for the start of the last football season. The idea was surely to confuse a marketplace that Setanta was then entering into.

I suspect that Sky is now not so fussed about Setanta. They've certaininly come out well following last week's debacle. As yesterday's Observer noted, they've made Rupert Murdoch look like the good guy.

It'll be interesting yet to read what Ofcom has to say, but adopting MPEG 4 still feels like something to do further down the line, when Freeview HD starts. Still, it'll be worth watching what happens to this most popular of digital television formats.

A friend mentioned the other day that when BAA were determining their marketing plans for Terminal 5 at Heathrow, post its opening, "...Is Working" probably wasn't what they were hoping to use. But following the initial fiasco, that's what they're having to do to prove you can fly from there.

I wonder if "Planes Still Flying" mightn't be a better option following the collapse of XL, and the possible-collapse of Alitalia.

It's come to my attention that over the last couple of years, although I still buy and listen to a lot of music, too much of it is through my iPod. Although I've got some half-decent Sennheiser earphones (i.e. not the ones that came with the device which are embarrassingly bad), that's not really the best way to listen.

On top of that, I actually have a quite decent stereo system at home, and when I do listen to CDs via that, the quality is astonishing.

So yesterday I went out and bought an Airport Express. OK - my interest had been piqued by a conversation with Geoff a couple of weeks ago. But I now realised that this relatively inexpensive device is exactly what I needed.

Setting it up was OK, although installation on Windows wasn't quite as simple and painless as Apple tried to claim it was. Indeed, on my Vista setup, I'd have been completely lost were it not for the fact that I've used WiFi for a few years now. Connecting to the Airport Express also meant losing my wireless router connection for a while until I could tie the two together into a single WiFi network.

Even that was a problem because the password I was using for my WEP-protected router wasn't 13 characters precisely. I took the opportunity to upgrade from WEP in the protection stakes, and this also meant some fiddling on XP machines with a patch that mysteriously hadn't been included on either of my machines (including my very recently flashed Asus Eee that now runs XP booting in under 30 seconds).

I got everything back on network with the exception of my PSP which refuses to work. No great loss as I rarely use it online these days.

As for the Airport Express? Well it works very well indeed. I think that Apple might include at least a cable in the box, but I'd bought one knowing that they hadn't.

And once installed, all the computers with iTunes on my network saw it, and gave me the option of streaming music to it rather than the tinny computer speakers.

Now I need to properly work out a single place for my iTunes library - preferably on a NAS drive. And finally I can start to comprehensively rip all my CDs in the same format. I have some as mp3s (and with an ongoing eMusic subscription, I'm likely to continue to do so for the foreseeable future). Others are in Windows Media format, while anything ripped more recently is in AAC - at 256k. That's a particularly important detail, as I don't want my stereo finding the encoding quality wanting.

Any recommendations of NAS devices or enclosures with good power management (I don't want the drives continually spinning), would be more than welcome.

A nice piece of street art spotted in Soho. It links to www.neoexternalism.co.uk.

According to Media Guardian, Setanta is broadcasting free-to-air highlights of Croatia v England later this evening on its own channel!

This is very odd. They're reported to have turned down an offer of £500,000 from ITV. And now, at the very last minute, they offer these free highlights.

The story on Media Guardian was published just before 6.00pm this evening, and I can't see many outlets* advertising that fact now. So basically aside from a few people reading various forums and websites, nobody will know.

And I think it's fair to assume that we'll be bombarded by ads for subscriptions. Still, something is better than nothing, although I can see that something being the goals on the respective Ten O'Clock newses.

[*UPDATE] Well my employer's mentioning it in the 7.00pm news in fact!

"We always intended to make highlights available, and were disappointed that we were unable to reach agreement with any of the terrestrial broadcasters," said the Setanta director of sport, Trevor East.

Hmmm.

[UPDATE 2] Roger Mosey talks about both the Setanta situation and Paralympics coverage over at the BBC Sport blog.

OK - it's a well known fact to people who read this blog or sit near me at work that I hate all reality shows.

That said, there are a couple I watch despite myself. The Apprentice is getting close to boring me as they choose a nice cross section of generally inept people, but I'm still bearing with it. Then there's Strictly Come Dancing and most recently Maestro.

It's those latter two I'm going to talk about here - if only to question myself.

Maestro has busily been taking a group of "celebrities" and teaching them how to conduct an orchestra. At the end of each week one or more of them is eliminated. The contestants are scored by judges, and because that's far too straightforward, the BBC Concert Orchestra votes to decide which of the bottom two stay in the competition. I suppose we should count our lucky stars that the public largely aren't involved. At least they weren't until last night.

It's been an unusual show in the sense that particularly in the first programme, I felt as though I was actually learning about something hadn't previously really understood - a conductor is doing somewhat more than just waving a baton in time with the music. But by the second week, the show had changed tack, and although we weren't quite "following their journeys", we had less time to learn about the intricacies of what's involved, and more time just watching the contestants perform.

In the final, as I mentioned, suddenly we were presented with an audience vote to determine the winner. The real problem with this isn't that I might be overcharged in a rigged phone-vote; the problem is that I don't have the skills to be able to determine which is the better performance. Many's the time during the series that I thought I'd just seen a good performance, only to be corrected by the judges who said that they were smiling too much or bouncing around or whatever.

In point of fact, this series would have worked just as well without famous people at all. Ideally all the contestants should have had similar musical training/backgrounds. As it was, Sue Perkins who won, can play the piano to a significant level. That's got to help.

Moving onto my other guilty pleasure - Strictly Come Dancing. Again the viewing public is being asked to judge something they're really not able to. Most of us can't dance, and while we might know what we enjoy when we see it, don't understand the technicalities of it.

But more to the point, it's the dancing that we enjoy. The format is accessible and there's plenty of concession for the new viewer about what we should be seeing in a particular dance.

OK - so we'll leave Strictly alone. But then last Saturday saw the second edition of the Eurovision Dance Competition, and in a tweaked format, we suddenly had to have an amateur (who was in most cases a celebrity of some sort in their home country). Why did we need this?

Someone who stars in The Bill in the UK is unknown throughout most of the rest of Europe, so that's only a sop to the UK audience. If we appreciate good dancing, why don't we just have professional dancers representing us?

Frankly, the BBC should simply bring back Come Dancing. The old format would need a tweak, but I'm sure it could work. There's just no need to have the public vote at every moment, and for actors, singers, sportsmen and women et al taking part. The change would be refreshing!

• It's all getting very lively over at my "other place".
• Radio 3 has some interesting new drama coming this autumn. Of course, it's always easier to think "I must listen to that three adaptation of the Duchess of Malfi," than actually sit down and listen to it.
• Radio 4's new season sounds intriguing. I'm less interested in ex-Eastenders' actors joining The Archers than I am listener to a 20 hour adaptation of the Le Carré Smiley novels and the SF season.

Here's a stat for you:

Number of hours of coverage of the Beijing Olympics on US television: 3,600 (2,900 of which was live)

Number of hours of coverage of the Beijing Paralympics on US television: 1.5 (0 of which is live)

That's right. Of all the US TV channels, there is a single 90 minute highlights in the middle of next month. That's it.

The BBC, incidentally, is showing 5-6 hours live a day (albeit on digital) alongside a nightly one hour highlights package on BBC2, with more live action at the weekend.

In the 2012 London Paralympics, I think it's a fair assumption that the US team will probably include a significant number of athletes who are ex-military and have been injured in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As the Setanta issue rumbles on with no terrestrial highlights likely to be available for a terrestrial service for the Croatia away game for England on Wednesday, I've just had a scary thought.

Essentially Setanta purchased both live coverage and highlights of the fixture. But they've declined to sell on those highlight rights. The radio rights were sold separately and the match will be on BBC Radio Five Live (I don't think that Talksport is also covering it, but I'm happy to be corrected).

The radio rights are obviously significantly cheaper than television rights. But what's to stop Setanta buying up those rights as well? Is there any reason they could buy them and not use them? Or perhaps just put the "radio" out on their own subscription TV channel to show that they're using them.

That'd incur even more wrath of the fans, but they could do it. Of course we might see the return of the old Talksport trick of reporting what's going on from a television.

Just a thought!

Congratulations to all in Sheringham today, after Tesco finally lost an appeal to build a massive supermarket in the small Norfolk town of Sheringham.

If you've never visited Sheringham then perhaps you won't understand quite what this means. You probably live somewhere where most of the small independent shops, from bakers and greengrocers to butchers and fishmongers have disappeared. You go to your local supermarket to buy all those things - perhaps out of choice, but most likely because it's simply the only place to buy those things. And of course supermarkets sell far more than just food - books, magazines, clothes, CDs, DVDs, electrical appliances and so on.

Sheringham is a town which still retains all those small locally run indendent stores, adding to the unique charm of the seaside town. Instead of a town centre filled simply with identikit chainstores, all empty lots, it has a thriving variety of retailers selling all and sundry.

And this is more important than just a local planning concern of interest only to locals. There national interest in this outcome since big business usually wins.

Tesco's avariciousness is unbounded, and it's been trying to put a store in the town for years, even going so far as to put a secret deal in place with a previous local council's administration.

But now, finally, they've lost their appeal, and Sheringham won't have a superstore that would leave the town centre bare and bereft as business is lost by the rest of the town.

This is great news because large supermarket groups have much deeper pockets for legal fees that local and district councils. They simply can't always afford to fight these battles.

Now of course Tesco can put in a new application for a different store. And they probably will - supermarkets never seem to let go. But it'll have to be smaller, and better designed to fit in with the local town.

Read the full findings here.

Neilsen Media Research - a fine media research company who I have contracts with via my employer - has released details of a story suggesting that 4.7bn people watched at least some of the Olympic coverage last month. That's out of a rough estimate of 6.6bn for the planet's population.

I'm always deeply suspicious of stories like that unless you have some really strong material to back it up.

As ever, there's no obvious detail on their website.

Let's try to break down the data a little. In China, the most populous nation on earth, we're told that 94% of their 1.4bn people watched at least some. That's high, but not unfeasible since these Olympics were in China, and the state TV company pretty much carried nothing but Olympics for the duration. If you watched TV in China, then you watched the Olympics. Perhaps that missing 6% don't actually own or even have access to a TV?

The next most populous country in the world is India with around 1.1bn living there. But the Olympics are not popular in that country, and it seems unlikely that even with India achieving its first ever individual gold, that the Olympics will have had strong viewing figures.

The next biggest countries are the US, which had strong viewership, and Indonesia.

Viewing was said to be strong in South Korea and Mexico. But how many of Pakistan's 165m or Bangladesh's 147m were watching?

The population of the entire African continent is just under 1bn. What proportion were watching the Olympics?

I'm always suspicious when global audiences are guestimated - 1bn for a domestic football cup, 1bn for a sport not widely played outside North America, etc. So I'd just like to see some detail to determine how these figures were derived. Apparently 37 markets were used. But which 37, and more importantly, which countries with large populations were excluded?

A friend of mine pointed me towards this story based on some research that suggests that your musical tastes are linked to your personality.

I think she took exception to the idea that "heavy metal fans are gentle."

Obviously, making broad genearlisations like that is nonsense, but I wanted to learn a little more about this survey. It could prove very interesting with commercial aspects for radio stations surely?

A bit of Googling revealed this BBC story on the research, conducted by Prof. Adrian North of Heriot-Watt University. Prof. North is a highly published academic, who I believe has worked with Capital Radio in the past. And it would be terribly unfair to ridicule research that I've not seen the full findings for.

But then the BBC story states that the research is still ongoing (so I suppose that means no published findings, I certainly haven't turned any up), and says that they're still looking for more participants. Helpfully, the BBC provides a link to the research survey - peopleinmusic.com.

Well I had to have a look at this survey. I should note that it does randomise the order of the questions, and I didn't actually complete the questionnaire, but I reloaded it a few times to see a large selection of the questions (it's not as short as the BBC report claims), and I do have a few questions about some of the things it asked me.

It wanted to know the ages of my parents (or how old they were when they died if they were no longer alive) and the age of my best friend. I can't quite work out what that could be used for in the nature of a music research survey. While I don't doubt that my parents might have had an influence on my musical tastes, knowing my current age and the age that my parents died wouldn't be especially helpful. E.g. My dad might have died aged 30 yet I might be 35 today.

The questionnaire asked me if I was bi-, hetero- or homosexual. How is that musically relevant? Will that define whether or not I like Erasure?

Another question asks me to what extent I agree or disagree with the following:
a. Music is very important in my life
b. Music can arouse feelings of thrills and excitement in me.
c. It's really important that I am able to share thrilling, intense and stimulating experiences with my partner.
d. I often get bored with my partner.

Huh? What have the last two got to do with anything?

More questions ask me about whether or not I'm in a romatic relationship, who ended my last relationship and why it ended (If she cheated on me, does that make me more likely to enjoy country music?). How happy am I in my current relationship, and how long I've been in that relationship.

Now I'm not a psychologist, and I've never studied the subject, but it feels to me that this questionnaire is trying to look at more than just my personality traits in relation to the music I like. There are plenty of questions about music that I've not ntoed here, but I've got to wonder what the ultimate aim of this research is. I don't think the press story that's out there is the whole thing.

Self-selected samples - i.e. you've made the decision to go to this site and fill out an online survey - aren't great. And without seeing details of the findings, I can't really be certain whether Prof. North's results really are "significant" as he claims in the BBC piece.

The 2008 edition of the Tour of Britain kicked off today with a 10 lap circuit of London running down the Embankment from Big Ben to the Tower of London and back.

There's a widely reported story today about a report examining how alcohol is covered in the media. In particular the perceived glamourisation of excessive drinking by radio DJs such as Chris Moyles.

You can read coverage at the BBC News site, and in all the papers (here are links to the story in The Guardian and the Telegraph).

An interesting and worthwhile story? Undoubtedly. But the critic in me would quite like to see the full report. It's not that I don't trust the reporters the papers and news organisations allocated to the story, but, err, I don't always. For example, Chris Moyles is repeatedly mentioned but there's no mention of, say, Christian O'Connell or Johnny Vaughan. Now that might be because they're exemplary models of restraint who don't glamourise excessive drinking. Or it might be because the report didn't cover them. Yet we read that "Commercial radio stations were worse offenders than the BBC."

In fact, according to the Telegraph's piece:

The study focused on BBC Radio 1, BBC 1Xtra, Kiss 101 broadcasting to the South West and Wales, Key 103 for Greater Manchester, Galaxy Birmingham and Kerrang! Radio for the West Midlands.

But that fact doesn't appear in most of the reports. That's why I wanted to read the full document. I know that what actually has happened is that a press release for the report has been sent out, and most stories are probably generated from that. The report's author Professor Norma Daykin will have been available for interview, and that'll differentiate the reports. Finally, the report itself may have been sent to journalists, but how many do you really think read it all the way through?

That's why I'd like to read it for myself. The BBC site doesn't include it, and neither do stories at the other papers' sites I've looked at. The research was carried out at the University of the West of England, but their website reveals no obvious links. The research was funded by the Department of Health, but again I had no luck finding it online there. It's part of the Know Your Limits campaign conducted in association with the Home Office. No luck there at either or the two websites I found - your guess is as good as mine as to why there are two.

The report is being presented o the British Sociological Association in Brighton, I read, but once again, an online search is fruitless aside from an abstract (P12 of this Word document).

The reason I want to see the report is that it's important to understand how much audio was listened to over what period (e.g. Was it carried out over the Christmas period? Answer: Yes - from December to February according to the Telegraph piece, but then they had a medical reporter rather than a media reporter cover the story). I've mentioned the issue regarding stations monitored and they've obviously concentrated on youth orientated services. But they ignored Scotland and Northern Ireland which might have thrown up different results for example.

The internet allows us to be able to present primary material and given that this research was state-funded, it should be easily available for us all to download and read. It shouldn't just be kept to attendees of academic conferences, and published in expensive journals or online in locked academic databases.

Radio Pop was something I first saw at last year's Radio At The Edge conference.

It describes itself as "social radio listening." Once logged in (and it uses Open ID - which might be good if it was ever made clear to the broader public how it should be used), you start listening to a BBC radio channel and the system logs your listening by network and by show and you get presented with a nice set of charts.

Then you add a few friends, and you can see what they're listening too as well.

Future iterations will include tracks so that you can actually specify pieces of music and highlight them for your friends. Strangely, I think the delay in the implementation of that is less to do with technology than some quaint internal rules.

As well as monitoring your own listening and that of your friends, you can also see what everyone across the system is listening too.

I can get a nice badge for my blog, but because I'm trying to keep things clean, I'm going to just put it in here.

I've just been listening to a very strange jazz rendition of Bowie's 'Life On Mars' on Late Junction (the new schedule for The Geoff Show means that I won't have to choose between these two now). Robert Sandall's presenting a rather fabulous programme of cover versions. Sandall was a co-presenter of Mixing It, once broadcast on Radio 3, but now to be found under the guise of Where's The Skill In That on Resonance FM. Because I liked it a lot, I gave it a "Pop".

The "Pop" records the date and time so that, iPlayer willing, I can go and listen to what my friend enjoyed so much about the show.

The charting is exceptionally fine and it all looks wonderful.

At the moment, the player is a little basic, and because it can only monitor listening via its own player rather than the BBC's rather more fully functional player, there's no opportunity to measure on-demand listening. That's particularly a shame because that's how I listen to most of my BBC radio online.

I suppose the only other problem is that I have to keep making my friends over and over everytime I sign up for something. Once for Facebook, again for Flickr, then again for Twitter, Pounce, YouTube etc. While I might want to keep my "professional" Linked In colleagues well clear of my Facebook profile (I've got nothing to hide - honest), for the most part I just want to maintain one list of friends. But that's a separate issue.

Still it's a fine development worth watching. I seem to remember that when it was presented at the conference last year, there was talk of other - commercial - stations being able to get involved. The fact that the URL sits apart from the BBC makes it interesting. Maybe it's something that Absolute Radio could get involved in?

• I've always liked DJ Andy Kershaw, so it's tragic to read about his recent problems with both the law and his broken relationship in an interview in today's Independent.
• I can't say I'm exactly in tears at the news that Wippit has shut down. Just ask Danny Baker what he thinks about them.
• Albion has blogged about the re-branding of Virgin Radio as Absolute Radio. Worth a read. You're already reading Onegoldensquare right?
• I don't quite understand why the Inland Revenue's Working Tax Credit radio ad employs Rhys Thomas playing essentially his Gary Bellamy- DJ character from the excellent Down The Line. We're supposed to be taking it seriously, so having the faux naif Bellamy asking the questions to determine your eligibility for the credit misses the point a little. Have a listen below.

So if you don't have Setanta, and can't make it to a pub that's showing Setanta, the only coverage you're going to have of England's World Cup qualifiers against Andorra on Saturday, and Croatia next week is going to be goal clips on the news. There is, of course, radio coverage too.

Media Guardian reports this morning that Setanta still hasn't sold terrestrial highlights of the games to either ITV or the BBC. They're fulminating that the offers they're getting don't exceed what the stations paid for Champions' League qualifiers. Last week BBC Three showed Arsenal's game against FC Twente (effectively a dead rubber since Arsenal were a comfortable 2-0 from the first leg, and they won on the night 4-0 to go through 6-0 overall), while ITV had the more attractive proposition of Liverpool's must-win game against Standard Liege which ended with a last minute extra-time goal. But these were live games and thus more valuable.

I would have previously said that Setanta will come to a last minute deal to sell on terrestrial coverage, but with the bigger of the two games being next Wednesday's Croatia fixture, I'm not so sure. Setanta desperately need those subscribers - it's never clear how many they really have, and what price they're paying. So I don't think that this time we're going to see the games on terrestrial.

I would hope that the FA are a little embarrassed about this. They've just entered into a big new deal with ITV and Setanta, and yet here are one of their partners effectively denying much of the football viewing public the chance to see even highlights. Of course Setanta are perfectly within their rights to do what they like, but I think using phrases like "emotional blackmail" makes it obvious that we're not going to see any capitulation from them.

A sorry state of affairs for the national game...

There's an entertaining blog on Media Guardian that compares the route that my employers have taken in rebranding Virgin Radio as Absolute Radio compared with the route taken by Revolution in Oldham:

For years the station bucked the trend of better music mixes and instead served up alternative indie and rock, making presenters out of local musical icons...

But then a fortnight ago, without any prior announcement, the station's music policy changed beyond recognition. The curious sounds of credible bands you'd never heard of dispersed into the Mancunian ether, replaced overnight by perennial favourites James Blunt, the Bee Gees and Take That. No explanation. Big gaps everywhere. Lots of adverts. Ace of Base.

Bizarrely, the clearly furious presenters were still allowed to go on air. Upon playing Elton John's I'm Still Standing, one presenter commented angrily: "No, this isn't ironic." It was to be his last comment on the matter; non-stop music followed.

[UPDATE] Steve Penk bought the station!

That could explain a lot!

You may notice that it all looks a bit different around here. On the otherhand, you may well be reading a feed in which - hopefully - nothing's changed.

The look and feel of this blog has basically been unchanged for nearly six years. So with great trepidation I've finally completed an overhaul started nearly a year ago. If you don't like the header image, then holdfire, there'll be another one along in a minute - 25 to choose from!

I suspect that all sorts of things are broken, so do feel free to let me know if something's not working, or if some kind of feature doesn't work properly on Safari or whatever (like I'd care).

Here's hoping commenting works, otherwise it could be a little silent.

Last night I was sitting at home tinkering with this blog (it will have its five-year overhaul soon), when my brother called me to say that there was someone from Virgin Radio on Dragons' Den. I flipped on the TV and saw that the person being called "Christian" was Robin Banks, a DJ who used to work here and who I know a little. He's since spent quite a lot of time at Kiss 100, and more recently joined Leicester Sound. You might also know his voice if you ever watch Mythbusters in the UK as he re-voices them in an English accent.

I rewound the Sky+ as I'd been recording the show anyway and watched the full segment. Rachel and Christian were pitching for cash for their business - the Tiny Box Company.

The editing of Dragons' Den has to be good to keep us in suspense, although it has to be said that as last contestants on, the chances were that they'd do a deal. One of the problems with the format is that sometimes it's just a little too formulaic.

Their business was for the manufacture of recycled cardboard gift boxes - the sort of item you might get jewellry packaged in. From an external point of view, on several levels the company seemed to be a bit of a non-starter. The idea was unpatentable - indeed there must be hundreds or even thousands of packaging companies. They hadn't sold all that many, although they had a couple of decent clients. So it was surprising that in relatively short time, three of the dragons had dropped out.

Then something strange happened. I'd have expected that, however well the pair came across, the last two dragons would surely give them short shrift. But Theo wanted to know about their backgrounds. Christian said he'd worked in radio... on-air. He namechecked Kiss and Virgin, and talked about broadcasting in general. But then he'd gone into rehab after which he'd met his business partner. Rachel had a good business background but some kind of illness had struck her causing the loss of both her job and home.

Theo announced that he thought that there might have been some kind of broadcasting background to Christian. How? Theo doesn't strike me as someone who listens to a lot of Kiss, although his kids might. Maybe he used to listen to the Robin Banks evening show on Virgin? But even then, it might have been hard to tie together a familiar radio voice with a face in a different environment.

Could the producers have suggested that asking about the entrepreneaurs' backgrounds would be an "interesting" thing to do? In this case, it livened up an otherwise so-so pitch, and in the end, both Theo and Peter pitched in together for £60,000 to back the firm.

It made me think. I know that television is an artifice, and on something like Dragons' Den, producers will see fit to ensure that a few mad inventions are put in front of the dragons as well as more investable business enterprises. But are the dragons being fed details? Unless they've got an uncanny ability to dig into people (and they are shrood investors so they weren't bprn yesterday), they do seem to have an unerring ability to find out the more interesting backgrounds.

How many times have you seen a pitch going seemingly quite well before a leftfield question - something that might not otherwise be asked - knock the pitch off-course. Perhaps there are hidden debts, or some kind of technical issue. On other occassions they'll suddenly probe deeply about forthcoming orders, and a contestant will eventually admit that - yes - they have had conversations with Tesco, suddenly making them very investible.

I suppose that I'd naiively expected that the nature of the "Den" with strict rules about not contacting dragons in advance, and the nature of filming meaning that many more ideas passed through the den than made it to air, might mean that the series was slightly more honest.

But in this instance, I think it's pretty clear that the dragons were "directed" a little. I wish Christian/Robin and Rachel all the best with their business, but I'm just left a little

More about the changes here.

[UPDATE] Have a look at the "brand book" for Absolute Radio here.

Martin Kelner's been penning some very honest pieces about radio over the last few months, and today's is as true as any of them.

Talking about Kenny Everett is possibly a little hackneyed - sorry if that sounds heretical. But in essence, what he says is true. It seems to be TV personalities only who get shows. It's always nice to see a radio talent shine through.

What a lot of things have been happening in the radio world in the last week or so:

• The Global takeover of GCap has finally been given the all clear by the OFT, with the full text of their decision being published. Many of the programming savings have already been made, but it's now the turn of the respective former Global and GCap sales teams to feel the pain.
• Xfm in Scotland is rebranding as Galaxy this autumn.
• GCap is shutting down some AM services in Devon and Cornwall.
• And Lisa Snowdon is going to permamently replace Denise Van Outen who decided that the Capital breakfast show with Johnny Vaughan was a gig too far.

The Global moves aren't too surprising, but morale won't exactly be high over at Leicester Square just now. Meanwhile I suppose that the slow death of the Xfm brand isn't too surprising either. They've sold the South Wales station which was only won last year and still had significant local obligations. That now just leaves the mothership service in London and Xfm in Manchester. There already is a Galaxy service in Manchester so rebranding Xfm there isn't an option.

But what about London? Well popular opinion suggests that Choice is more likely to fall under the Galaxy brand.

Last week Alex Zane was suspended from his own show for a week for playing a song of dubious taste. A cynic might suggest that this is either being done because news is scarce in late August days and it's guaranteed to get coverage, or that Zane is paid more than anybody else at the station and they're looking for ways to get rid of him. Obviously these ideas are utterly without foundation and I'm sure that it's just diligent management doing its job. I mean - we're all waiting for the James Whale v Talksport case.

Lisa Snowdon probably isn't a bad sparring partner for Johnny Vaughan. We went through a phase at Virgin Radio a few years ago where we had a slot regularly filled by what some impolitely called "tarts"; you know, people more frequently seen on the front of Loaded or FHM than heard.

Now it wouldn't fair to include Lisa Snowdon quite within that group even if a Google Image search reveals a fair amount of modelling. She actually held down her programme for a few months, and was much more natural than most of the rest.

But is that enough to make the pairing a viable long-term show to take on the rest of the capital's breakfast shows? While I think most people were suspicious of Jamie Theakston when he started, he's proved himself to be a radio talent over time. But the rest of London's breakfast shows are radio DJs first and foremost.

Capital still does have the largest commercial breakfast show in London (whatever Neil Fox and Media Guardian might say) if we compare shows on the basis of their actual show hours. Fox finishes at 9am while Vaughan goes on until 10am - that makes the difference.