always listening in

Find songs that have played within the past 7 days on the nation’s top 2,600 radio stations, CMT, FUSE, MTV, and VH-1. Rate currently playing songs right now to influence charts & chat with other listeners.

• Yes

Over at GigaOm Rags Guptagives his view on the future of radio:

Social networking around music has emerged as a class of Web service. While terrestrial radio has yet to fully embrace this, music social networking represents a large opportunity for terrestrial radio stations to gain relevance and currency online. Fundamentally there are two functions around music that social networking can fulfill…

• GigaOM » Can Social tools save plain ole’ Radio?

He’s got a fair point, radio is really well positioned to gain from music lovers sharing and comparing music online. Nokia have been trying to bridge this with visual radio (pretty awful multimedia content and radio mash-up) and yes.com aggregates 2,600 US music stations output to show the zeitgeist.

Stations like XFM are really trying to bridge the gap and have excellent content to drive people to the site and some great forums to keep people there. Part of the problem is radio is still fairly fragmented when it comes to marketing with stations mostly managing their own budgets and never really having a huge push together to tackle online. The exception of course being good old aunty who is fantastic at building online service and discussion around music radio as well as branching into social networks like Second life.

Thanks to Ed for the link.

Couple of great ones in the there.

• Boing Boing Five favorite podcasts

Thanks Ed.

I can’t tell you how sad I was when Sky nabbed Lost series 3 from under Channel 4’s nose, not because I was going to miss the show, I was sure I could get the DVD or ask a friend to record it. No I was upset because Channel 4 radio has an excellent podcast dissecting every episode. It was hosted by comedian Iain Lee and really was one for the best podcasts I’d heard.

A friend lent me the first 6 episodes on video and it was with a heavy heart I sat down to watch them, knowing I’d still enjoy it, but knowing that I was not going to have the podcast to go with it. So imagine my surprise when I saw an ad for th podcast, and guess what? Sky had got Iain Lee to present - fantastic.

I’ve watched the first couple of episodes and listened to the podcasts and they are every bit as good as Channel 4’s (if a little shorter) . Never thought I’d say this, but nice one Sky, thanks for understanding shows like Lost really benefit from extras like this that improve the experience.

If you are reading this after having bought either Series 2 or 3 of Lost on DVD, go download the podcasts, watch each episode and then enjoy the podcast. It really does make the show.

• Lost Series 3 on Sky with video clips and podcast
• Lost Series 2 on Channel 4