I’ve just come back from CES, and one of the overwhelming impressions I’ve had is that screen displays get better and better every year. There are many devices with beautiful UI – but radio within them is a bit of a boring, 97.3-like affair.

Radio has to compete with visually-rich media on the same device if it isn’t to look old-fashioned and boring. But there again, we need to ensure that we get these visuals right – nothing worse than, as I see in many European countries, a few TV cameras shoved into a radio studio, so we can watch the breakfast producer picking his nose.

The BBC is trialling, this week, a visualised radio player which is allowing us to experiment with the content on these platforms. It has a number of different ‘modes’, from the inevitable live video stream to other interesting ways of dealing with listener feedback.

I’ll help myself to another super-strong coffee, and try and stave off the jet lag – while my Creative Director, Yasser Rashid, takes up the story on the BBC Radio Labs blog if you’d like to discover more.

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…

That makes Pandora’s new app the third most successful in the iPhoneverse. Pandora can sadly not now be received in the UK because of our obscenely restrictive copyright restrictions, and I truly regret not being able to listen to them any more. They are, for me, the best webstreamers by far. The iPhone hookup got them 180,000 new users in three days. They claim a new user every two seconds. This is BIG stuff.

So what do we take from this? I think we are finally seeing another conjunction of new technology, audience, demographics and circumstance. You need ease of use; you need attractive programming; you need affordability; and you need someone to spot the gap and fill it. This is uncannily similar to events in the 50s when Rock and Roll and Top 40 Radio came together.

This may be a huge step forward. I hope so; Pandora deserve it. I still won’t call it radio, though. In my luddite book, radio still involves someone communicating with you. I’m sure Pandora have an adorable detailed and fantastically well-connected database, the fruit of their very savvy staff. I’d kill to be able to play around with it. But I can’t relate to databases. I still want to hear from real people. But if I was living permanently in the US, Pandora’s app would be enough to make me get an iPhone.

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But the new bosses appear to be – bloggers? Not only that – but bosses that give presentations at the Skype offices and then upload them to Slideshare. Don’t they realise they’re running an old media firm and that they’re not supposed to understand – let alone be ahead of the curve on – this whole interweb thing?

Still stranger, these are not just bosses posing as bloggers for the sake of appearing hip. They actually say things to their staff like:

We know some of you write blogs – we enjoy reading them… We want to reassure you all that you can speak your minds about what’s going on. We’re serious when we say we want your input, and you don’t have anything to fear about expressing doubts or concerns

And what is One Golden Square anyway? Just a blog? A street address (my London geography knowledge is near nil, other than the odd round of Mornington Crescent)? A hint at the new name for the radio station?

The team: Donnach (silent ‘ch’), Clive and Adrian are Absolute Radio – essentially a consultancy firm who have been given the reins of one of the UK’s leading commercial radio brands. And their mission, as they see it, is to remind people how much they’ve always loved it.

The weird thing (for me, anyway) is the chatty, approachable, ‘call me Donna’ feel to the blog. It’s immensely encouraging and great to see this sort of open, communicative, new-era thinking applied to station management.

Commercial radio will no doubt find it very confusing. And, for the moment, so do I. But regardless of what will end up coming out of the speakers, I think I like this new station.

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.

What, exactly, do we mean by ‘Radio’?

Is it a stream of music on the net, with no segues, links or context? You can call it that; many excellent net providers do, but I don’t really think that’s it. Is it terrestrial radio streaming? Maybe… but that’s not new, it’s just brand extension, surely. Is it podcasts? Well, for me that’s closer, but I’ve got issues there, to do with timing, spontaneity, and the shared experience, so probably not.

So what is it? Something else, something new?

Here’s a definition I pulled off the web two minutes ago: “The sending or receiving of messages or effects, and especially of sound, by means of electromagnetic waves without a connecting wire” Now, that’s very literal, and very accurate. But that’s not it either, for me.

‘Radio’ has been going since the 20s (here’s details of the first US and the first UK stations, from 1920 ands 1922 repectively). It’s a perfect example of technology enabling a new medium, something we’ve seen a lot of recently. But what started nearly 90 years ago has never stopped evolving. We need to dig a little deeper.

I think a narrower definition most people might generally accept is one centred on music output, with or without speech-based radio for Sport, News, comment and ranting/informed discussion. Implicit in that concept is a relationship, as Billy pointed out. For the most part, it centres on some communication flowing from station to listener. This is almost always passive on the listener’s part, and almost always one-way.

Until now. Here’s where the technology of the web aces the 20th century model. The web has weakened the power of all the traditional media powerhouses of the 20th century.

The web gives you lots of ways to access hot new music – so Radio is no longer the go-to place for hot new songs.

The web allows feedback. Smart cookies like last-FM and Pandora spotted the possibilities of user feedback, and they are reaping the benefits.

Terrestrial Radio is looking hard at ways to fight back, and to offer what they still have – the listener relationship – across multiple platforms.

Radio has one more powerful USP, and Bill spotted that as well. Not everyone wants to spend time messing with configuration settings and preferences. We do enough of that stupid computer stuff already, right? Even geeks like me just want to be blown away by something fresh and new. Asking us to invent, quantify or define that for a Radio service provider is plain stupid. We like stuff, or we don’t. Maybe we can be persuaded something is good. That’s the battleground.

That’s where Radio – on whatever platform it adopts – has the upper hand. It’s a question of offering the listener something they can relate to. It’s a question of trust, dammit. And it should involve feedback. Now if I could put my finger on the way to combine all this stuff, I’d be a very rich man.

I recently attended the annual IBS Conference in New York. (You’ll be pleased to know my digestion’s fine – it actually stands for Intercollegiate Broadcasting System). I was surprised to hear representatives from University Radio across America sharing the common concern that many students no longer own a radio. What!? No radio? At first I couldn’t believe it… but of course why should they? They’re all ipod’ed and wifi’ed with more than enough music and can find out what’s happening on campus from Facebook etc.

I guess this is one of the main reasons why development radio appeals to me. There are still huge regions across the world where traditional AM/FM/SW broadcasting is still very much king. While many western kids are turning their old radios into landfill – traditional broadcasting is still highly valued in the so called “third world”. Everyday, development radio imparts messages of real substance to millions of receptive, appreciative listeners.

There’s been quite a bit of debate for and against the fabled “$100.00 computer” that’s being designed by MIT for educational use in developing countries. The intention is to create a super-cheap Linux-based, full-screen, full-colour laptop with WiFi capabilities, USB ports, a 500MHz processor, and one gigabyte storage.

A noble enough concept – but how about a “$5.00 wind-up radio” to accompany it?

In terms of education, radio represents a far more practical method of distributing information – especially to highly illiterate populations. It affordably reaches across huge distances and follows the tradition of oral learning that’s fundamental to many African nations. Besides, a radio set doesn’t represent the same risk of theft that a snazzy new computer does.

Sure, wifi-computers and cellular phones open up many exciting new possibilities, but in my opinion the most interesting technological advancements in terms of development are not in new methods of transmitting information, but new ways of receiving old formats. Sir Trevor Baylis should be canonised as well as Knighted for his wind-up radio. What a fantastically simple – yet powerful invention. In regions where electricity is scarce and batteries are often prohibitively expensive, wind-up / solar powered radio sets provide an almost infinite means of communication where it’s needed most. (Green techno-geeks should check out the new “Trevor Baylis Eco Media Player” www.ecomediaplayer.com )

Although it’s easy to get carried away with all the latest radio gizmos and bolted-on extras we shouldn’t forget that all we’re ever really going to do is deliver sound to a pair of ears. (That is, until Apple plugs directly into your temporal lobes – and I’ll be first in line for that upgrade). Good old fashion radio is already a superb conveyer of informative messages and not necessarily in a didactic, “teacher to student” style. There are many examples of NGO’s delivering entertaining and educational radio dramas and programmes in developing nations across the world. However, the radios needed to hear these excellent productions are often in short supply. So, although the “$100.00 computer” is certainly a worthwhile endeavour – wouldn’t it be great to also have wind-up radio’s produced at a low enough cost to enable mass distribution to where they’re needed most?

For more information about wind-up radio in developing regions, check out the The Freeplay Foundation at; http://www.freeplayfoundation.org