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October 29, 2019
Goodbye, And Keep ListeningA lot has happened since November 2014.
At the time, I was working in the roof - quite literally. My office space was in a room that was so illegal that when I bought the house they weren't allowed to call it a room, even though it had stairs leading up to it.
In the winter months it could be made quite warm, since there wasn't much of it. The room was at the top of the house and you could just about stand up in it--if you bent your head and you stayed right in the middle, where the top of the roof was.
The window gave a view of the rooftops of North London suburbia: a view past some lovely trees which some joyless bureaucrat cut down, over to a park, and beyond it, Enfield--a little country town that had inexplicably ended up rather too close to the rest of London.
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October 22, 2019
Radio Alive - Australia's Radio Conference With A DifferenceLast week, the big Australian "Radio Alive" conference was in my home town of Brisbane. I popped along to it, and was quite pleasantly surprised. The high quality of the event wasn't the surprise. It's always been a large, flash event. The first time I went to it was ...
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October 15, 2019
Confessions of a radio commercial copywriterQuite a long time ago now, I wrote radio ads for a living. I wrote them for seven years in all, mainly for local clients. Smartly-dressed sales executives used to take a scruffy creative along with them to take a brief, or to read a script. The dress code was on ...
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October 8, 2019
The Misguided Quest For ControlThere's a new copyright law in Europe. It's aimed at people like Google, forcing them to pay news organizations if they used more than just a headline to link to stories on news websites. In France, which is the first country to put these new copyright rules in place, ...
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October 1, 2019
Reminding Listeners How To Tune In, In A Multi-Platform WorldI once sat at the end of a telephone line, helping people tune into their favourite radio station. This was a real eye-opener. Many don't even know the difference between AM and FM; and some sets are marked in strange ways that make it really hard to tune in. You ...
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September 17, 2019
5G - The Future For Radio?If there's one thing being talked about a lot over the last year or so, it's 5G. It's a new technology for mobile broadband. 5G is interesting to large public broadcasters, because, I think, it's the only platform that can deliver everything that they produce: radio, ...
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September 10, 2019
Video Killed The Radio StarIt's been 40 years since Trevor Horn wrote the Buggles' "Video Killed The Radio Star." Video didn't, of course. 9 out of 10 people listen to the radio every week, in countries as diverse as Malaysia, the U.S., France and Australia. Radio's reach hasn't changed in the ...
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September 3, 2019
Visually Augmented Audio - Is It Our Future?Something called BBC Notes was posted on the BBC's Research and Development blog the other week. It's a web app "that shows text, images, and links, to enhance the listening experience during live events, live broadcasts, and on demand". There are quite a lot of these ...
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August 27, 2019
Google, Facebook And The Power Of RadioAs Google knows, I'm in Kuala Lumpur today, in Malaysia. Google knows exactly where I am. It knows where I was yesterday; what airline I used to travel here; what news stories I read this morning; what's in my diary for tomorrow. It knows what music I listen to, what ...
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August 20, 2019
Podcast MovementRecently, I was at Podcast Movement in Orlando. It's the largest podcast event in the world, I think, with a variety of sessions covering almost everything you needed to know about podcasting. The event grows each year. Podcasting is an increasingly serious business, ...