Quite 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 purpose, of course.

As any period of listening to the radio will tell you, quite a few radio commercials are…well, they're not the best part of the output.

There's one I heard recently which seems to consist of two older ladies talking to one another about pain relief, and one of the women seems suspiciously knowledgeable about a particular tablet that she takes. I've also heard the clichéd "we only have thirty seconds to tell you about all the features in this new car," and the "no, that can't be right" producer on talkback to the voiceover, expressing amazement about some deal or other.

There'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, ...

I 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 ...

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, ...

It'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 ...

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 ...

As 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 ...

Recently, 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, ...

I don't much like talking about radio in negative terms. And I'd rather people didn't compare radio, a medium I love, with a cockroach, an insect I hate. Some cockroaches can live for a month without food, or even survive just using the glue from a postage stamp. And ...

RAJARCLICK TO ENLARGE RAJAR, the audio research company best known for the radio figures in the UK, also releases a survey called MIDAS every quarter; and it's always a good read. Some pieces of data are the same every quarter, but they seem to put new bits of data in ...