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…

Over the past 6 months or so, I’ve been involved in a research project with the BBC. We’ve been looking at what listeners and fans do online. The project investigated notions of interactivity; it looked at the ways in which fans of specific presenters express their fandom online; it examined the things that fans of radio soap The Archers do in order to connect and discuss their favourite show; and my bit, with Professor Tim Wall, was about specialist music online.

Specifically, we looked at three things:

1) What do specialist music fans do online?
2) What does the BBC do for specialist music fans?
3) How do BBC staff think about specialist music provision?

The findings, I think, are quite interesting – and a summary of the project is being published on the BBC Radio Labs blog.

But one of the things I found most interesting was the notion of ‘orientations’ that we noticed among BBC staffers. There were clearly people who thought about the online world as a central part of what they did, and others for whom the broadcast was the thing – and anything that the radio station did online was simply there to extend and reinforce the brand.

Now, these orientations are not polar opposites, and lots of people had a mix of both orientations, but people were predominantly facing one way or another. And in fact, we considered both of those to represent missed opportunities.

Now, of course, what the BBC does for specialist music, it does so for reasons of public service, and we go into some detail on that in our report. But it got me thinking about radio personnel in general, and the ways in which they think about the online environment.

If you’re the kind of music radio person with a broadcast orientation, all the internet is to you is a bigger transmitter. Or it’s a kind of a trap that you lay out there in the world, and when people stumble into it, you can grab them and pull them in to your broadcast programming.

If you have more of an online orientation, you may consider the medium on its own terms, but may not be making the most of the music programming which, if your station is doing anything right, is where all the real action is.

The trick is to step outside both of those frames and consider your station as a media organisation in a broader sense.

You are particularly good at media that uses sound – music, speech and effects – but a holistic view of your organisation as ‘media in general’ encapsulates both the online experience and the broadcast one, so that these can work together with a common goal in mind.

In the case of the BBC, it’s specialist music for public service. In your case, it might be music and entertainment for commercial purposes. Or information and debate for community purposes. Either way, the cognitive step outside the two orientations into a wider media perspective allows you to think about broadcasting and the internet, radio and new media, as part of one coherent thing.

And when you begin to do that, a lot of the problems facing radio in the 21st century begin to melt away, and a lot of really interesting opportunities emerge. I’ll be talking more about that idea here on New Radio Strategies in the coming months.

I suspect that this will only work in the UK – but I’d be keen to hear your thoughts on it.

Nothing kills a technology faster than a format war. HD-DVD, if you haven’t heard, is over before it has even begun. Nobody owns mini-disk players anymore. Consumer DAT is a joke. They’ve all gone the way of the Betamax video cassette: that is to say, there are some commercial uses for these devices, but they are hardly mainstream consumer technologies.

In digital radio, decisions about formats are being made – not by the consumer, but by the nation-state. America has different digital radio to Britain, for instance. The Japanese and the French have their own ideas.

In my home country of New Zealand, the debate is still raging as to which format to choose for DAB. But here in my adopted home of England, I enjoy digital radio services that allow me to hear some programming that I would otherwise not be able to hear. Not because I can’t get those programmes without a DAB radio – I listen to 6Music online, actually – but because the only reason those programmes exist is because there was a platform for them to exist on.

My favourite music radio station is – in a sense – just a mechanism to encourage people to migrate to a digital platform. And yet, that’s not the digital platform on which I listen to that station. I suspect I’m not alone in that.

Of course, HD Radio is a non-starter as far as encouraging new and exciting programming is concerned. The same frequencies are used by the same incumbents, and the same fare is dished up through slightly more expensive and shinier-sounding technologies.

That same Phil Collins track will sound slightly closer to the sound of a CD of Phil Collins than to a terrestrial broadcast of that CD – but it’ll still, sadly, be Phil Collins. After the break… Dire Straits.

But these – and even, I suspect, satellite radio – feel like an interim technology. Because nothing breaks a format war faster than a universal enabling technology. Say… like the internet.

Imagine if you could pick up the internet at high quality bitrates on portable, personal devices without connecting via modems, cables and dial-up infrastructures.

Ubiquitous wi-fi you say? Just around the corner? Portable wi-fi devices capable of tuning into any streaming service without reference to the geography of that signal’s point of origin?

Is it, in fact, possible that New Zealand – being the last developed country on the face of the planet to even formulate coherent digital radio policy – might have been right to drag its feet over a format decision for DAB and leapfrog over these interim technologies altogether?

Oh no… wait. Now they’re spending money on infrastructure. When it comes to broadcasting, it’s never too late to make a mistake.