I lead the R&D team for the BBC’s Audio & Music interactive team – we call ourselves BBC Radio Labs- and we try to take new technologies and internet trends and apply them to the BBC’s radio stations and music services. And I plan to write about some of these prototypes and experiments here – it seems appropriate for somewhere called New Radio Strategies after all. Our most recent prototype is a new web application called Radio Pop which tracks your radio listening and builds a social website out of it. Radio Pop is our attempt to fuse the trend of social networking sites with radio. To take the best of each world and combine them into something new.

Primarily we built Radio Pop to learn things about radio and social software. The really popular social networking sites are based almost purely on social interactions – think status updates, poking and throwing sheep – but lots of other social sites, like Flickr or last.fm are built around the idea of a “social object“. This social object is something which you can have conversations around or find that you have in common with people; like books, music, last night’s TV or your holiday photos. We wanted to create something where radio was the social object; because radio has always been about the shared experience – whether it was gathering around the radio set in the living room, chatting about last night’s programme with your friends, calling a phone-in programme or just knowing that you’re one in millions of others listening to Chris Moyles right now. And we were also looking at the trend of “presence” or status updates on the web. Hopefully you’ve all seen that on Twitter or Facebook; the archetypal “What are you doing?”. Well, could we create something where “What are you listening to?” was a core feature?

Sign up to Radio Pop and we will store your listening to BBC Radio whenever you listen online. Radio Pop can then use this data in a number of ways. You can see a history of what you listened to – maybe you heard something last week and you’d like to check it out some more or even track how your listening habits have changed over the years. You get your own profile page with statistics and graphs showing your favourite radio networks and programmes (here’s mine). And you can share your data – show off those statistics to your friends or add a blog badge that shows the world when you’re listening. And as well as listening, Radio Pop features a Pop button for when you hear something you really like. The site will then remember when you clicked it and add it to a list of your Pops. It’s a bit like bookmarks, but for your radio.

Like most social networking sites out there you can add your friends – then you can see what they’re listening to right now, subscribe to their latest programmes feed or see the combined statistics for all your friends. Soon we’ll be able to use all this data to create personalised recommendations for radio programmes, a bit like you get on Amazon.

Since we launched we’ve had lots of great feedback, some of my favourites are: “BBC’s radiopop.co.uk gives terrestrial radio a change. Love it. Best new online music property going.” and “I think the Radio Pop site is actually compelling me to listen to MORE radio”. I particularly like the last one – there certainly seem to be some people who, once you let them track consumption, feel compelled to do so (cf. behaviours on last.fm).

Finally, this doesn’t all have to happen through your computer. With our experimental Olinda radio we can track your listening from a real kitchen radio. But that’s for another post…

Here’s a little local story. I spent a LARGE chunk of my working life, just under 20 years, working for BRMB, the first commercial station in Birmingham, in the UK. I joined them 35 years ago, pre-launch, as a baby rock jock, and left as Head of Music and Research, having done pretty much everything there was to do in old-style commercial radio.

News came out last month that their current owners, Global, are selling them off, along with three other stations in the West Midlands. This lets Global off the anti-competition hook, so they can carry on in the much more lucrative London market with, er, Capital, LBC, Heart, Choice, Classic FM and several other AM and digital brands. Go figure.

I’m not really concerned with London radio right now. It’s like New York: the lack of diversity and interesting programming is striking, and of course it’s all down to hyper-competition and the perceptions of the executives who make the programming and marketing decisions. But I still have have stupidly fond memories of the old station where I plied much of my trade, back in the last century.

For me, there are two big questions hanging over BRMB (and Mercia, Beacon and Wyvern):

Question one: given that we are now in a recession, and that, in the UK, radio advertising suffers first and worst when they cut the ad budgets, is there still a shiny future for ‘traditional’ local radio when it is cut adrift from a well funded network? Remember that these stations were all launched as full-service stations, and all those old-time features have been ruthlessly stripped away as competition piled in from Networks and the Internet.

Question two: That old-fashioned appeal is fondly remembered by many who listened twenty and thirty years ago. It was that same old-fashioned approach that let me experiment as a Rock DJ, with a degree of freedom inconceivable by today’s standards. I went on to record many of the region’s finest bands, and in so doing built up frankly extraordinary listening figures, again, by today’s standards. But is this kind of approach remotely cost-effective, appealing though it may seem? In short, have we seen the best, and maybe last, of old-school radio?

I do know that it’s possible to do great things really cheaply, and that is encouraging. Modern kit means it now costs less to run a business and far less to cover some of the radio basics – doing the accounts, keeping in touch with staff, building running orders, assembling a library, scheduling advertising, setting up promotions via email and the web, and so on. But that’s only part of the picture.

Are these old businesses worth paying good money for? Is it worth breathing life into them anew, once all emotion has been put aside? You tell me. I’d love to see it done the right way. But I wonder how many people share my opinions.

It was a nice night. The current crew are pleasant, clear-headed, and there seems to be a lot of talent. I was impressed by how many are already building paths into the industry. I approve heartily, but then I would, because that’s what I did too.

College radio has, of course, been feeding mainstream broadcasters for some time. My first paid job was at a US station which regularly hired DJs from the local college stations. Of the six ancients at the URY dinner, two, me included, are still in the industry. And among the younger alumni who attended, there was an impressive sprinkling of industry-specific email addreses. That’s not too shabby for what is, after all, a volunteer radio station. A station, moreover, that has developed its own sequencing software for overnight automation.

It strikes me that we may be missing a trick or two. College Radio is there for fun. It has has absolutely no statutory obligation to be a training ground. But URY and its counterparts are clearly functioning exactly this way. These stations run all the time (well, during term time), broadcasting online or with very restricted coverage, only venturing out on RSLs once in a while. To join in calls for time and commitment. Like others, I only bailed out in my final year to concentrate on actually getting a degree. Often it also calls for volunteers’ money, like many student organisations. But that sort of commitment is exactly what most real-world stations are looking for.

So here’s a thought. Many Universities run Media Training courses. They tend to go on air with short term restricted service licenses – maybe two weeks each year. But across the campus, there are these kids doing radio for love, 24/7… at least during term time. Maybe it’s time for the teaching wings and the student radio stations to come together? Nowhere else will there be such a convergence of disciplines and interests.

Breaking the output down to work out how they put it together seems to go like this: lots of short, produced speech items, concise studio links, urban music never more than a few minutes way. All local people and local issues, with sympathetic production linked by comfortably confident presenters. To start I was less than impressed with the output – neither Jamiroquai nor Michael Jackson paedo gags would be my first choice – but some punchy social issue audio drama, with live studio commentary and discussion, tightly produced, picked up the pace. And now I don’t want to switch off, because it’s interesting, and I have no idea what’s coming next, and it’s doing what I want my radio to do: painting a picture.

Over on the website, there are loads of archived podcasts – with maybe not quite enough context – and the whole thing looks not unlike a Myspace page, full of graphics and user input. This is probably not the first attempt to mix up web 2.0 with radio stream; clearly they have given it a LOT of thought, and it shows. It’s web first, radio second: the stream idents the website, not the FM frequency.

If this is the new face of public radio in the US – where, according to the New York Times, listenership is up – then there’s grounds for some serious optimism. As long as they’re hitting their audience, not just old hippie liberals from the UK like me, that is. At least they’re not playing the same Amy Winehouse material everyone else is playing. Is this the future of community radio? I bloody well hope so.