Archives for Radio & Music
Visualising your last.fm listening... (September 16, 2007) I've been having enormous fun playing with Lastgraph over the last week or so. You tell it your last.fm username and it runs off and plots you a nice colourful graph that visualises your listening behaviour. I've been with last.fm...
On Minilogue... (October 28, 2006) Right. Nice and simple request this. I've recently been exploring a territory of music that I'm not enormously familiar with. Thanks to Mr Biddulph, I've stumbled upon two EPs of minimalist progressive techno group Minilogue which have completely taken over...
Who's afraid of Ashley Highfield? (July 19, 2006) Today it was announced that the BBC's New Media operations are going to be restructured radically. At the moment most of the content creation parts of the organisation are kind of co-owned - for example, Simon Nelson who was the...
Apple fix iTunes Ministore howler... (January 18, 2006) Presumably bowing to pressure, Apple have changed the way that their new integrated ministore functions in iTunes so that now it's 'opt-in' rather than 'opt-out if you can'. I posted about this situation in a subtly titled post a few...
Cynicism and stupidity at the iTunes ministore... (January 11, 2006) Yesterday's Apple keynote wasn't enormously exciting, but there were a couple of interesting products. I'm still expecting to buy myself an iMac, but now I'll be getting one of the way shinier and fast Intel ones. And the MacBook Pro,...
Who knows where the time goes? (November 18, 2005) Another quick song recommendation before I'm pulled off to bed. There's this song by Nina Simone that I've been listening to a lot lately which you can get on the Anthology album. It's called Who Knows Where The Time Goes,...
Will subscription media kill broadcast? (November 15, 2005) I just got chucked a link to some video by Kevin Marks - an early pioneer of the technology that would eventually become podcasting - in which he talks about his time in broadcast as a cameraman, working at Apple...
On the BBC Annotatable Audio project... (October 28, 2005) This post concerns an experimental internal-BBC-only project designed to allow users to collectively describe, segment and annotate audio in a Wikipedia-style fashion. It was developed by the BBC Radio & Music Interactive R&D team - for this project consisting...
A quick review of Yahoo! Podcasts... (October 10, 2005) Double disclaimer time here - firstly I'm knackered and what follows is badly written and I will edit it later for clarity, punch and drama. The other thing is that - of course - the viewpoints represented here do not...
How to build on bubble-up folksonomies... (September 2, 2005) [This post takes up some of the themes that Matt Webb, Paul Hammond, Matt Biddulph and I talked about in our paper at ETech 2005 on Reinventing Radio: Enhancing One-to-Many with Many-to-Many. A podcast of that talk is available.] A...
Reinventing Radio: On Phonetags... (August 29, 2005) This post concerns an experimental internal-BBC-only project designed to allow users to bookmark, tag and rate songs they hear on the radio using their mobile phone. It was developed by Matt Webb and myself (with Gavin Bell, Graham Beale...
The podcast of 'Reinventing Radio'... (July 19, 2005) After many months, it is with a degree of trepidation that I direct you towards the podcast audio of the ETech paper on Reinventing Radio that Mr Biddulph, Mr Hammond, Mr Webb and I performed earlier this year. As usual,...
BBC Listen Live OSX widget... (July 4, 2005) We've been developing a prototype widget for Macs running OSX at work as an experiment with network-enabled applications. It's allows you to listen to BBC national radio stations on your desktop computer as if it had a built-in radio (although...
Supernova '05: Chris Anderson on the Long Tail... (June 29, 2005) Quick apologies - my notes and write up of Supernova have been thrown out of whack by various unforeseeable pressures. I'm going to try and get through them very quickly now. This session was held last Tuesday at 11am. It's...
iTunes 4.9 is full of podcasts... (June 28, 2005) So iTunes 4.9 is out and includes all kinds of exciting support for podcasts. And with that support comes another way for you to get your greasy mitts on some of the stuff that the BBC has put out there...
On Beethoven at the BBC... (June 17, 2005) This is really more just an exercise in quoting than anything else. You'll remember a week or so ago I mentioned that the BBC was putting up every Beethoven symphony to download as an MP3 - well now the BBC...
Every Beethoven Symphony to download... (June 6, 2005) In a move that genuinely astonishes and stuns me with it's awesomeness, my department at the BBC has just started a week in which every note of Beethoven's ouevre will be broadcast on the radio. And as if that wasn't...
The chain-letter of musical love continues... (May 25, 2005) So I could say that I don't normally do these things - after all that's what I said last time. I don't know how many more times I can not normally do these things before it starts to look a...
The podcasting and download trial commences... (May 22, 2005) A few weeks ago I talked about the upcoming BBC Download and Podcast trial and everyone got terribly excited even though it hadn't started yet. But now it has! Actually it started last Monday, but I've been pretty distracted with...
Weinberger on the BBC / Are presentations redundant? (May 7, 2005) So this is nice - via my boss I'm directed to a brief piece by David Weinberger on some of the work going on around the BBC at the moment and featuring some of the stuff we've been doing in...
On iTunes and iPods and the data they don't capture... (April 24, 2005) The more I think about it, the weirder I find it that iTunes doesn't keep track of every time you've ever listened to a track from your library. It would seem like such an obvious thing to do - why...
On movement in my view of the "Future of Music"... (April 21, 2005) As ever, I should probably remind people that unless explicitly stated, the views on this weblog are my own and not those of my employer, the glorious and all-powerful British Broadcasting Corporation. I salute thee, Oh Auntie! (Oh, and I'm...
Some news on the BBC and podcasting... (April 14, 2005) The other big news today from BBC Radio & Music Interactive (where I work) is that we're about to open up twenty more programmes - mostly from Radio 4 and Five Live as podcast feeds for people to download. As...
A question on the lifecycle of songs... (April 4, 2005) I've just posted this question to Ask Metafilter, but I thought I'd cross-post it here to see if anyone knows the answer: When I was a kid, I remember hearing on the news about a study that had determined that...
On Reinventing Radio: Enhancing One-to-Many with Many-to-Many... (March 16, 2005) So our first presentation is over - much to my relief. I think it went fairly well - Webb was busy addressing people's questions on IRC, and Biddulph, Hammond and I performed our little hearts out. There were some interesting...
On trying to get an image right... (February 19, 2005) A long time ago during all the Warchalking palaver, I got interested in the idea of trying to find imagery that might convey they concept of an available wifi network to people. Warchalking obviously had its utility - it was...
The BBC releases In Our Time in free-to-download MP3 format... (November 8, 2004) I was planning to post about this last week, but I got distracted with something. Hope you can forgive me. Anyway, a while ago BBC Radio and Music Interactive (where I hang out during the day for cash) released Radio...
The New Musical Functionality: Portability and access (July 26, 2004) The other day I started this run of posts on the New Musical Functionality by arguing that the behaviour of an until-recently small group of digital music fans seemed to be now spreading into the mainstream. I also listed four...
The New Musical Functionality... (July 17, 2004) Over the last few months webloggia has been full of discussions about the new musical functionality that's starting to emerge around the web. I wasn't immune from this trend - I wrote about MediaUnbound (On MediaUnbound and Recommendations Engines) and...
Developing a URL structure for broadcast radio sites... (June 27, 2004) One of the most common questions I've had about the Radio 3 redesign work that we've been doing has been about the URL structures that we have used to identify individual episodes of individual programmes. I'm really keen to address...
The new Radio 3 site launches! (June 26, 2004) Ladies and Gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to direct your attention towards the new Radio 3 website, which I (along with a great number of other people from every discipline and from all across the BBC) have been working...
On MediaUnbound and recommendations engines... (April 22, 2004) I've been playing with a demo over on MediaUnbound, which is a music discovery engine that runs in Flash and assembles pseudo-radio players that are designed to meet your every musical need. The concept isn't particularly new, but I have...
BBC releases Reith Lectures online as MP3s (April 8, 2004) For those of you who don't know, basically my job at the moment is to be one-half of a rapid-prototyping and R&D unit with Matt Webb over at the part of the BBC that handles the interactive aspects of the...
Precisely One Hour of House-Cleaning Music... (April 4, 2004) New concept - don't clean until your house is clean, instead merely allocate time to the cleaning process and clean until that time is over whether you finish or not. Also if you finish before the time is up (unlikely)...
On the benefits of competing audio formats... (January 27, 2004) There's a fascinating clump of posts going around the place at the moment about the various DRM-based digital audio solutions that you can buy at the moment. The one that kicked stuff off initially was a post on The Sobleizer...
iPod local syncing... (December 12, 2003) So imagine that you're coming home from work with your iPod and you're listening to a song. Let's say that you're listening to Don't be Light by Air, because it's an extremely good song. Now let's imagine that your iPod...
Why has the cheese returned? (December 6, 2003) A weekend without my beautiful Powerbook means lots of time to sort out my disasterous financial / bill-paying / mounds of paper situation. This - in turn - means that some forms of music television have become an essential part...
On album sales and piracy... (August 18, 2003) I'm not particularly in the mood to get too involved in this discussion at the moment, but I just thought it interesting that the music businesses hysteria about piracy destroying the music business doesn't seem to be being borne out...
In love with radio 4... (June 5, 2003) "The history of mankind in the last three hundred years has been punctuated by major upheavals in human thought that we call scientific revolutions - upheavals that have profoundly affected the way in which we view ourselves and our place...
The return of the Bangles... (February 28, 2003) The Bangles are back! And the Thriller-like corpse of my trashy, teenage self has risen from the dead and is doing a little dance inside me. I mean - it's the Bangles! I had my first major crush while listening...
Observations and Speculations on Music (January 19, 2003) Being a long list of observations about the ways in which people are starting to use music and its relationship to computing practice generally, with some thoughts about how the music industry should be working in the longish-term...
Danger! Danger! High Voltage! (December 7, 2002) Prepare to have your world widened - for Meg is right - the song (and video) for Danger! High Voltage by the Electric 6 is about to colonise your consciousness and redefine music for you for the next twelve months....
Apple and the Pirate Everyman (November 17, 2002) "Don't Steal Music" says the sticker on every new iPod. But is Apple being disingenuous? Because no other platform in recent history has done as much to help information (and entertainment media) to be easy to create, copy or disseminate...
Where's the urge to change the world gone? Where's the idealism? Where's the naîvety? (November 15, 2002) Over my life I've found myself motivated by music more than almost anything else. That push that the right song can give you more often than not is the thing that shoves my mood or sensibility forward. It's a spiritual...
On Tom's Ten Tip Top Tunes... (November 14, 2002) Ten Tip Top Tunes for Tom: Being a list of songs that I'm listening to over and over again at the moment and which if you had less conscience and were prepared to (immorally) steal music through some kind of...
How to fill a 5Gb iPod... (October 27, 2002) So here's what the thing would be if I were really bored and absurdly anal on a Sunday early-evening... As an iPod early-adopter, I may be the last person left in the Western hemisphere with a mere 5Gb to fill....
Cut-up musical culture... (October 18, 2002) Every medium for transmitting music brings with it new practices for listening to it - and these in turn filter back into the way we interact with it, categorise it, manipulate it. The earliest ways of transmitting music were memory...
Aimee Mann returns (and no one saw fit to tell me about it)... (September 6, 2002) I don't know what's worse - that Aimee Mann should have just released a new album or that no one saw fit to mention it to me. If I wasn't such a crumbling wreck of proto-senility of course, then I'd...
On the bankrupcy of music (September 3, 2002) In the spirit of the Royksopp video for "Remind Me" comes a new infographically inspired video for a song by Legowelt. As videos become more and more spectacular and sophisticated (Michel Gondry's work being particularly astonishing), I increasingly begin to...
Musical Juxtapositions... (December 17, 2001) Putting all your favourite songs onto an iPod throws up a few interesting juxtapositions. You're happily wandering through Clerkenwell listening to The Sisters of Mercy in a kind of retro-bohemian, Berlin goth style and you're feeling quite self-satisfied in a...
Introducing the Megway... (December 12, 2001) Jason finally reveals what Danza/WHAT is, and all I can say is I've got to get me one. They look neat! [And yes, I was in on the joke, I'm afraid]....
My first impressions of my iPod... (December 11, 2001) I just got an iPod. I've been thinking about it for ages, and the angst of my financial situation has always consumed me. But a momentary glimmer of financial light appeared, and rather than invest in my future I decided...
Is this a Big Gay Song? (December 9, 2001) Question - is this Sisters of Mercy song actually a big gay song? Something Fast all the things we never needed i don't need them now all the things were always confidential and hidden from me anyhow you can stand...
Songs that couldn't be played after 9/11... (September 18, 2001) Meg just threw me a list of songs with questionable lyrics that she found on the web. Songs - presumably - that people have decided not to play during the current events. Which possibly explains why everyone feels so suffocated....
What's the most important album of your life? (August 23, 2001) Paul Simon: Graceland It's 1986. I'm fourteen years old. I've had a few albums bought for me before, but I'm basically illiterate when it comes to popular music. I'm living in a village of eighty people, ten miles away from...
Paul Burston on Eminem... (February 23, 2001) From London's Time Out Magazine: Feb 14-21 2001 No.1591 (presented without comment). "I'm writing this week's column under my hip new pseudonym, Thin Cloudy. So when I say that I want to incite acts of violence against Eminem, I hope...
On music and asymmetrical encryption keys... (July 26, 2000) I've been reading this really interesting article at Hack the Planet: "Route around the labels", which describes a form of voluntary payment scheme for MP3s. To be honest, I've read it a couple of times and some of the technical...
My 100 Favourite Albums Ever... (June 14, 2000) Having thought about it carefully, I have decided that lists like "the best albums of the 90s" are mildly pointless (if endlessly diverting). But that doesn't matter surely? They are interesting exercises, and so without apology or explanation here is...
