Gordon Woolf's Blog

Future in Internet Radio

Most of my media experience has been with newspapers and magazines, but there have been a couple of short periods of involvement with radio, once with the ABC and then with community radio. That may explain why I was intrigued with the idea of internet radio and had been listening to the internet feeds of a few radio stations. Unfortunately that ties the listener to the computer unless you go for extensive wiring or set the volume excessively loud. It is thus not surprising that my latest toy is an internet radio. What is an internet radio? This one looks like any other "kitchen radio", somewhat bigger than a bedside clock radio, mainly so it can have a better quality speaker, though still just one; it picks up its signal not from normal broadcasting but from your own wireless router. That means it connects to radio stations for their digital online services but directly to their web address via the router/modem without needing a computer. I'd been looking at what was on the market, but felt that the prices of from $299 up was too expensive for less electronics than in a $15 alarm clock. Then I saw that Aldi were offering one at $149. Still expensive but below my current mental limit for something I might play with and then discard.  I've since discovered that the current awareness of what these things are is so low that Woolworths were having a cleraance of Sagem models at some DSE and Tandy stores. It did not take long to get it going, with only a couple of "switch off and start again" detours. I was concerned that the manual says the date and time which show when switched on will not survive the power being turned off. Would the other settings hold? Answer: yes they do, switch off the radio, unplug from the transformer/power supply plug, reconnect, turn on and it automatically reconnected to my router (I'm using WEP) and to the station that was playing before. So I can shift it from room to room and turn it off at the socket, which I'd need to if it is the bedroom as the backlit blue screen is as bright as Lunar Park (well, almost, definitely bright enough to keep us awake). The other thing I miss is even a basic tone control. My office is somewhat reflective (lots of windows and vertical blinds, no curtains) so I'd like to knock the top off a little — but it seems this is a fault not only of the Aldi radio but of most models, and of internet radio on the PC too unless you go deep into software settings. Incidently it is clearly branded "Pure" despite the model number of AV-BT1506 indicating it may have been contracted out by Pure for the Aldi order. Pure's current internet radio as seen on their sites is more advanced but also more expensive. The radio comes with an access code to the Frontier web site which works well as the radio picked up my new account listing there within a few seconds, and you can use folders to separate listings into genre or whatever. Apparently Frontier make the chips used in many brands of internet radios. There are around 7000 radio stations available from the two-line LCD display but it can be a lot easier to set up your own list of favourite stations on the Frontier web site and then allocate the best of those to the eight presets. One of the first accidental finds was Australian Showcase on a station called CMR Nashville that seems to be based somewhere in Europe. (I'd prefer jazz but this is my wife's favourite kind of music and showing her that she can get the music she likes while the ABC was at this time obsessed with the football Grand Finals by simply pressing a couple of buttons was easily justifying the expense). Since then I've found that CBC (the Canadian ABC equivalent) seemed obsessed with the US elections despite having one of their own, from the BBC London station that the jewish bakery/deli that my dad used to take me for a salt beef beigel on a Sunday morning when I was about 10 is still in business (alongside the more recent Bangladeshi curry houses), and that it is a novelty for most Londoners to be getting water meters. So, what will be the future for internet radio? There seem to be signs that they may become much more portable. A battery operated version the size of the old transistor radios would be more portable around the home and garden even if restricted to the coverage of the user's wireless router/modem. And outlets for headphones and audio in general should become universal. Perhaps they can be combined with MP3 players of the iPod kind.  Tomorrow's internet radio may not be like the ones we have today but with many thousands of radio feeds already available and with dozens being added each week, my guess is that they'll become much more common. Even in the past few weeks the number and quality of ads on a couple of stations listed among my favourites have shown a healthy increase, so the financial return to stations may also become better even against current trends. There are already network ad inserters offering ads on up to 600 stations but the best returns for advertisers are likely to be for those ads which are relevent to the listeners either by interest or region. The other problem to overcome is the relationship in the music forms of internet radio between income from ads and the payments out to music rights owners. Currently there is a reprieve from high rates originally proposed for US law.

How long do CDs and DVDs last?

So how long do CDs and DVDs last? Sometimes things on the Internet take on a life of their own. That's why I occasionally engage in what is often called "egosurfing" -- that's searching for your own name in Google or other search engines. It can be done by authors to check on illegal use of their material and I've known several fellow writers who have found their words in places where they did not expect them. In my case I have a lot of content that is offered free for non-commercial use provided it includes my byline and a reference to either a specific book of mine or to a more general description of the kind of books I write, (Googling my name will show that a good number of computer user groups have used my articles with correct attribution). It is seven years since I wrote an article for the Melbourne PC User GTroup, the largest computer user group in the world, asking "How long will a CD-R last?" It received widespread republication worldwide and many crosslinks to the original article at http://www.melbpc.org.au/pcupdate/2106/2106article14.htm Then it started to take on a life of its own, and as the article got older I'd still get fairly frequent emails from all over the world with questions on whether the conclusions in the article were still current. I had to reply that while I could not vouch for most, one of those conclusions, that most problems with CDs and therefore most likely with DVDs too occurred while they were being written, rather than in their storage, did seem to be still accurate. Only last month I was given a CD by a relative which was supposed to contain a mass of family photos. It contained nothing. The person who gave it to me was reluctant to go back to the person who had produced the CD but eventually, after getting several people to try it, got another copy -- which again did not work. I suspect that many backup CDs will have the same problem. They will fail when needed a few weeks or months later but not because of any gradual failure in the material. They were not created properly in the first place. However, returning to my theme, my latest find on Google was that the article is referenced as a source in a new book, Robots in Space: Technology, Evolution, and Interplanetary Travel by  Roger D. Launius and Howard E. McCurdy, published this year by Johns Hopkins University Press. You'll find it on Amazon. The real question is, as my article was really just a layman's summary of published research and manufacturers' claims around eight or more years ago, why has no one produced similar advice brought up to date?

But does it look OK in print?

Have you noticed an increasing use of yellow and cyan for headlines and text in otherwise well designed magazines. I wonder if this unreadable print is a result of on-screen proofing where light colors do tend to show up more clearly than when printed. When this problem occurs in multiple issues I wonder whether graphic designers ever look at the finished product. Maybe the on-screen version is regarded as the final version and no longer is there the thrill of having someone pick up a first batch from the printer and throw a copy on to ever desk at the publisher's. With everything now seen on screen in what we are told is what it will look like in print, have we collectively lost the excitement of seeing "the real thing" -- and why? The problems of light type and the loss of readership and understanding it causes are dealt with in Type and Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes, the book by Colin Wheildon.

Do we need bread for the bread?

The sandwich shop owner appeared on TV screens around the world. His shop was on Wall Sreet and he was being asked how the credit squeeze affected him. It was, he said, making it difficult. He was having problems borrowing the funds to pay wages, and to buy stock.

Hey! Time for a reality check: if a sandwich store owner has to go into debt to pay wages and buy his fillings, then we are all facing disaster. This is the true cash business. Buy bread and butter in the morning, sell it at lunchtime and pocket the profits in an afternoon. The founder of the Subway empire, so legend states, needed only a thousand from a friend to get not only the stock but the equipment he needed.

Of course we now have a new definition for “market trader”. It means the denizens of Wall Street and their ilk around the world who believe in derivatives and that you can sell things before buying them. The true market trader is of the kind who had a stall in London's Petticoat Lane or on Portobello Road; he or she had a simple business plan: buy, markup, sell, buy again... There was generally no place in the expenses which had to be covered by the markup for loans to run the business.

Loans exist to provide capital. Sometimes that capital is of a short term nature. I recall from my own past of going to see the bank manager because we had planned a trade directory and the idea had sold so well that we did not have enough money to print it; the ads we had sold more than covered the print cost and we had an advance order from a government department for a couple of hundred copies, but none of that money would come in for at least two months and the print bill had to be paid on delivery. We'd actually done quite well in getting prepaid ads but the print bill for a book a lot larger than we had envisaged was therefore way above what we had budgeted.

The manager, in a major bank in London's Fleet Street, heard our tale, looked at our figures and allowed us the few hundred pounds we needed. He chatted about our plans for a magazine in the same field as the directory and then told us he had to leave for a meeting with another client who had a similar problem. We might even read about it next day.

We did. Rupert Murdoch bought the News of the World.

Our tale is a good example of what banks and other means of getting credit are for. They are not to provide daily running expenses. Unfortunately many people seem to have forgotten that.

Afterthought: We wonder if the conversation between journalist and Wall Street sandwich shop owner really went like this:

J: You must be hit by this credit crisis...

SSO: Well, maybe a little. It'll cut our sales if the businesses upstairs cut their staff.

J: How about I bring our cameras in and we'll do a piece on how this affects the little guy. You'll get your face on screen and everyone around here will recognise your shop in the background.

SSO: That's be good. Yes, I can say I need credit... I've got wages and I have to buy the bread. That's it, I need bread for the bread.

J: We won't go overboard! But the news director told me not to come back without some man-in-the-street footage.