Brian Greene

News is up; todays JNLR results show that newzy progs are on the up in figure terms, something the podshows wont dent for along time.

2FM’s Gerry Ryan has lost 40,000 listeners, while Marian Finucance and Pat Kenny have also lost some of their audience. Liveline’s audience has also fallen by 20,000.

Ryan Kenny Finucance listeners are not your normal iPod audience so where have the 100K+ RTE radio listeners gone to? Talk is cheap, and perhaps its flavour is not in fashion.

The survey results demonstrated that 86% of the adult population were listening daily to a mix of national, regional and local radio throughout the country. Willie O’Reilly of Today FM told News2 that they are contending with an audience that have iPods, he’s right, but rather than contending with these me me me listeners, Willie should and Willie will embrace them.

The biggest climber in the figures is Ray D’arcy, and he trades his fortune on the format that has anonymity via txt for punchy fun, as does NewsTalk’s Sean Moncrieff. Oh yeah, and the iPod can’t send txts yet!

Skip back to that 86%. Its climbing.. and still the largest in Europe. We love to talk, we also love to listen to the wireless, well day time TV, Video, DVD and the internet ain’t killing radio. Radio is killing radio. Over formatting is killing radio. look at the winners in the JNLR, weekends! yes the graveyard of scheduling, its gaining massively on its richer weekday, why? guess the formatting is way more flexible. Who else is winning? the guys that have the power to chuck the rule book out the studio window.

so (some) figures up close

National Weekday Reach
Any Regional/Local 55% (-1)
RT� Radio 1 26% (-1)
RT� 2FM 22% (-2)
Today FM 16% (+2)
RT� Lyric FM 3% (Same)

Only one winner! Today FM

Dublin Weekday Share
RT� Radio 1 33.2% (-0.8)
FM104 13.9% (-1.1)
98FM 11.2% (-4.8)
RT� 2FM 11% (Same)
Q102 9.1% (+3.1)
Today FM 6.8% (+0.8)
Spin 1038 4.3% (+1.3)
NewsTalk 106FM 3.8% (+0.8)
Country 106.8 FM 3% (+1)
RT� Lyric FM 2.6% (+0.6)

look at Q102 – 98FM must be bricking it!

As a single listener my (broadcast) radio listening has dropped about 10 hours a week, replaced by podshows, my TV viewing is way up thanks to a DVB card, and by blog posting count is down but not out, now if only I could podcast more.

[SiliconRepublic.com] If you?ve ever passed by someone in the street wearing the distinctive white earphones of an iPod, did it ever occur to you that they might be listening to the radio? Welcome to podcasting, a service for downloading radio shows as MP3 files for playback on a computer or digital music player.
Unlike live streaming,……

which requires the listener to be present while a show is being broadcast over the internet, podcasting is suited for consumption whenever the user wants. Strictly speaking, it doesn?t even require an MP3 player, as it can be set to run on a CD burner. Podcasts can be recorded radio programmes made available after broadcast or they can just as easily be a brand new show created by enthusiasts or amateurs. Shows on any subject can run from mere minutes to hours.

Podcasting uses RSS (really simple syndication) technology that allows people to subscribe to a podcast by topic as they would to a website or blog. Podcasting spent close to a year gaining momentum as an underground movement of sorts ? an estimated six million Americans have listened to a podcast ? and iPod maker Apple embraced it by adding podcasting features to the recent release of its music player software iTunes 4.9. It says customers have subscribed to five million Podcasts from the iTunes Podcast Directory, which features more than 6,000 free audio programmes, making it one of the largest Podcast directories in the world.

The first media organisation to podcast in Ireland is NearFM, a community radio station based in north-east Dublin. The new service is already a major driver of traffic to its website, www.nearfm.ie/podcast. ?Podcasting?s very interesting because it?s audio on demand, for when you can?t sit in and hear a programme,? says Gavin Byrne, IT co-ordinator for Media Co-op, the organisation that runs NearFM.
The station started by podcasting its omnibus show, Encore. Other presenters at the station are currently being trained to upload their own programmes. ?It?s a little tricky to set up on the server but once that?s done the rest is quite easy. If you can send webmail then you can set up a podcast,? says Byrne.

As with the internet itself, there is the potential for podcasts that cater for all kinds of niche interests. ?It?s similar to an ezine or blog that?s been turned into a radio show,? says Brian Greene, technical manager of the web development company Doop Design, who has also been involved in the independent radio sector for 20 years. He has been recording radio content specifically for distribution online since 2001 and he podcasts at http://radio.wxtc.net.

Greene sees opportunities within the medium for savvy businesses prepared to think a little differently about how they communicate with customers. A company that organises children?s parties could create a podcast with kid?s stories being read, emailed to previous customers on their sales list who could then play it for their own children. A hypothetical outspoken airline CEO, for instance, could do a weekly show on subjects that annoy him, instead of being restricted to soundbites on other radio shows with short timeslots.
Long term, podcasting?s growing popularity has the potential to affect listening habits, Greene believes. ?If you have the capacity to subscribe to radio programmes that you would like to listen to, you?ll find your listening time to ?wallpaper radio? is going to go out the window.?

This also has implications for radio advertising, as it offers the same ad-skipping features as new TV recording technology. Greene suggests product association and programme sponsorship may be the way forward. ?[Commercial] stations looking at podcasting will have to think again and look at the golden age of radio where you had programmes such as the Odlum?s Hour,? he says.

By Gordon Smith

my server txts me every other hour to say all is well and a few bits of data that make me feel happy, like the number of downloads of my latest podcast… as I watch it grow. So its buzzing along at 500 server interactions eg. 200 full downloads every 14 days to 28 days. Then all of a sudden it jumps to 1300 in 11 days, holy bandwidth problems I think. So I dig into the raw log to see whats going on.

My show notes mention axe_l F c_razy fro_g, and Yahoo read and indexed the xml rss2.0 feed. Dogpile audio search pulls yahoo’s results and coz my result for the search has a 17MB file, and everything else looks like a 29 second sample, I’ve been getting traffic. I want organic growth, not kiddies looking for ringtone idols. a review is under way, but if you really want hits and don’t care from where, well now you know.

what google ads needs is a sensitivity filter. the great Irish breaking news portal breakingnews.ie has ads for “Cheap Flights to Cyprus” x four. While the news content makes this association, the system lacks a filter that could deem these ads to be least apt to place on this site now. Perhaps Im over sensitive but at a time when people least want to book “Cheap Flights to Cyprus” maybe google ads could offer up something else. if site-type = news & google-news top 100 knows disaster-in xCounrty then google-ads-mode = sensitive.

Not till you get interested in the night sky do you notice how cloudy Ireland is, plus living in or near a city gives you major light pollution, (it was this week last year when the ESB @ poolbeg was blasting the night sky). So when sky?s are clear, take a look, last night was cloudy but Wednesday was clear, I was spotting satellites and meteors at a ratio of 3:1. the biggest shower of the year is peaking tonight (6pm~) so tonight if clear we should see Perseid Meteors peak.

Friday, 8/12 [US east coast time/location source space.com]
Perseid Meteors peak, 1:00 p.m.
Obviously the timing is not perfect, as this occurs during daylight hours. However, observers before dawn should be a good view because there is no bright Moon to interfere. Look high in the Northeast quadrant of the sky before dawn. There is also a well-known secondary peak about 14-15 hours earlier, putting it in the Thursday evening twilight for much of western North America. Unfortunately this timing has the disadvantage of poor placement of the radiant (in Perseus) to the far Northeast, and in the presence of a bright, nearly First Quarter Moon. Thus, before dawn on Friday is the best bet.

some questions that this raises for me

What caused the sub to get trapped? Fishing nets or underwater antenna listening device? Or combination of both has also been reported.

was there six hours air remaining or 36 hours? was help only called in on day two of the event?

did the Russians on board the nearby ship order the UK navy to stop cutting the sub free, asking the sub to blow pressurised air out to break free?

the most detailed account I found was here

but I don’t know who to believe.

what does an underwater antenna listen to? now that atlanic 252 is gone.

Of course this is no way as cool a story than the shuttle returns story, which is getting so much more coverage than Niger Appeal is, see editorial in today’s Examiner

perhaps we need a media outlet that is so fair and balanced that it needs to trade itself with such a slogan. the kind of TV news that calls its bizness show “the cost of FREEDOM”

show seven is now out. click here 2 hear

SHOW NOTES
anniversary of Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
OMD enola gay – harry s truman remix by BHG
Moving Hearts – Hiroshima Nagasaki Russian roulette
Eleanor McEvoy – Easy to lose hope – www.eleanormcevoy.net
www.shelltosea.com
Stocktons Wing – Skidoo
Crazy Frog – Axel F – sam tempo/pitch experiment
www.spacialaudio.com
KT Tunstal – Black Horse and the Cherry Tree