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?