Xfm meets 20six...

Posted August 5, 2003 8:53 PM.

So I've got my hands on an excerpt from a press release that announced that Christian O'Connell from Xfm (a UK alternative radio station) was starting a new weblog for his breakfast show using 20six's service. Whatever you may think of 20six - they've got one thing right - they know how to promote themselves. Blogger certainly never courted celebrities (as far as I remember) as a core part of their strategy:

"What's a weblog? A weblog is the best new thing since sliced bread, thanks for asking. It's a journal, a diary, an online record of your likes, your loathes, your jokes and your photos. A weblog can be whatever you want it to be; an ever-evolving account of your life, a collection of your poems and short stories or your most voracious reviews and opinions."

Comments

Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.

Yeah, but come on . . . that's all very well. But it'll be a mere pissing in the wind when the *god-like* Terry Wogan goes all multimedia on us and updates WoganBlog as part of his breakfast show. Oh, how I long for that day to happen.

→ Posted by: Vaughan at August 5, 2003 10:48 PM

Fellow XFM DJ Iain dot Baker had a weblog two years ago, and has been doing a "site of the day" type thing as part of his show for yonks - eventually incorporated onto the site with archives, etc.

→ Posted by: meg at August 5, 2003 11:20 PM

Wogan with a weblog. Yeah, right.

You'd have to get the BBC interested in weblogs first.

We're talking here about an organisation who pay off staff, then invest in 'Comrades Reunited', a Friends Reunited-style website aimed at the rapidly declining number of war veterans in this country (who probably don't even have access to an internet connection, nor know a keyboard from a hole in their trousers).

I get the impression that Christian O'Connell probably isn't even going to be updating his own weblog, although I could be wrong.

And therein lies the problem with getting celebs on board with this kind of thing: they really have to be into it, and they have to do it - then keep doing it.

Unfortunately, that's rarely what happens.

Usually, they get a hold of a technology like this and simply don't know how to use it - but hey, it seems cool - so they shout about it for a while, because it keeps them in the public eye in some way or another.

Then they get tired of it, and move on to the next thing that makes them look dahn wiv da kids.

→ Posted by: Martin at August 6, 2003 9:07 AM

I wonder if they have a contract with 20six that says that he has to update it at least three times a week for six months. That would be interesting...

→ Posted by: Tom Coates at August 6, 2003 9:37 AM

Tom,

Thanks for the note on thias 20six/XFM thingy.

The Christian O'Connell radio show has four people on team (Christian, Chris and Roque). The blog is called the "XFM Brekafast Show" and is actually updated by that team. Chris (who reads the news and weather) does most of it--and I think he's doing a pretty good job.

XFM is different to Wogan for a lot of reasons. The XFM audience is young and funky. The XFM DJs are not, by and large, such super celebs that they have to attend to audiences in the millions. They are great DJs and they have comparatively well targeted audiences. And that audience connection is important for them: which makes their blog valuable to them.

cheers
aa

→ Posted by: azeem at August 7, 2003 8:39 AM

Thanks, Azeem. And having you here means I can actually ask you the question directly! I can completely understand that it's a good thing for Xfm to get involved with their audience via weblogging, but presumably it's also a relationship that you have to look after, since the weblog's in a public space. So I suppose I'd be interested to know whether you guys have a contract with each other and if so, are there any terms around posting and stuff?

→ Posted by: Tom Coates at August 7, 2003 8:52 AM

Want to add your opinion?