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Radio One has just launched Musicubes.
The block on the left there (my musicube) is made up of my prefered music genres. Hover your mouse over each coloured block to preview.
It seems to be a pointless but pretty widget and a nice way of driving more people to the Radio One site.
Picture the scene; I get home from work late after a bad day. Feeling tired and low I tune in to Radio 4. Imagine my surprise when I hear Count Arthur Strong’s Radio show. Instead of the usual six thirty comedy I hear some variety show out of the 1950’s. Confusing, unfunny, clichéd rubbish by someone pretending to be some has been variety star and what’s worse? It’s on again next week.
Come on Radio 4 get him off air now!
Did anybody else hear it? If so tell the world what you thought.
The Engadget podcast is going from strength to strength. The gadget and technology site has recorded record listener figures - so if like me you have the geek gene and know your Origami from your video iPod you’re sure to love it.
The Beeb have introduced a couple more podcasts. Simon Mayo’s 5 Live show and the very entertaining Sunday morning show Broadcasting House have been added.
Interestingly a section has been added for BBC2 podcasts - looks like the Beeb may be setting up some companion podcasts to popular shows. I’ll keep my eye on what’s happening and post if something is added.
This looks good, coming up next Monday at 11 am on Radion 4:
It is 20 years since the first computer virus appeared. Now experts estimate there are 115,000 viruses at work on the worldwide web, with 2000 new ones being added to the internet every month. Quentin Cooper investigates their impact and discovers how antivirus companies are battling to beat them.
There seem to be a lot of online radio stations out there as well as music recommendation sites (Last.fm, MusicStrands, etc) but until now nothing that combines the two.
Pandora is a personalised radio service that takes an artist or song you like and it generates a station of music that is related and supposedly similar. The songs it suggests can be rated - if they don’t match your selection it stop relating it to your original choice - which in theory means that the more people using it the better it’ll get.
It’s heavily American focused meaning there’s far too much crappy soft rock but the more you persevere with it the more it learns what you like. Typing the Artic Monkeys the first thing suggested was the LA Guns (a awful 80s soft rock outfit) but later on I got some good Henry Rollins and Screaming Trees.
There’s no advertising at the moment but no doubt they’ll be some very soon - let’s hope it’s text ads on the screen and not audio ads as part of the stream, one of things that puts me off other streamed suggestion music players.
My thoughts and opinons on UK radio, podcasting and listening online. 