Podcasts, Radio, TV, Books, Cycling, Photography and More
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How To Incentivise Your Audience to Skip Podcast Ads
If you publish a podcast, your podcast may well take advertising. And if it does take advertising, you probably want people to actually listen to the ads. Your audience listening to podcast ads increases the likelihood of products being sold, and therefore the advertiser coming back to buy more advertising. If your podcast doesn’t increase…
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Kindle Pricing
Interesting news emerges from the US, where Amazon has decided to release a lower priced Kindle. The base model wi-fi only Kindle was $139, but Amazon is now retailing a $114 version which comes “with Special Offers”. That effectively means GroupOn style one-off discounts and other advertising messages. A couple of things occur to me:…
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Lost and Found
It’s been a lovely weekend, so today I was out on my bike taking some photos. I headed down to the South Bank and was near the front of Tate Modern capturing a couple of pictures of the people nearby. There were thousands of other people about. Tourists; locals; people working. I moved on further…
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Monsters
I missed Monsters in the cinema. And more fool me. It’s now out on DVD and Bluray, and it’s superb. What director, writer, and visual effects producer Gareth Edwards has managed is wonderful. This is low budget film-making without looking low budget. Andrew Kalder (Scoot McNairy) is a press photographer who’s asked to find out…
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Source Code
I very much enjoyed Moon, Duncan Jones debut film from 2009. Source Code is his follow up and it’s great that he’s stuck to his guns and made another film in a very similar vein. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Captain Coller Stevens, a member of the military. He suddenly finds himself in another man’s body on…
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Wake Wood
Wake Wood is one of the new breed of Hammer horror films, this one getting a direct to DVD release (as many horror films seem to do). The film that Wake Wood seemingly bases itself on is The Wicker Man. In Ireland somewhere, there’s a community of people who have some slightly unusual beliefs. But…
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The Unthanks
You can only hope that the current Unthanks’ tour must surely be coming to an end very soon. Their website suggest a few days time. The reason I say that is that Rachel Unthank is currently very heavily pregnant! She and her sister Becky shared the singing duties last week at The Junction in Cambridge…
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Piccard in Space
A couple of weeks ago, saw the premiere of Will Gregory’s Piccard in Space at the Southbank. Before you think anything else: no this is not about Jean-Luc Picard, the fictional Star Trek character, but August Piccard (although if Wikipedia is to be believed, there is a link). In 1931, Piccard and Paul Kipfer attempted…
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Yuri Gagarin
On April 12th it will have been 50 years since Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in outer space. There are a fair few programmes coming up devoted to this anniversary, so I thought I’d link to a few. First of all, here’s a great piece from Robin McKie in The Observer a…
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Radioplayer
Radioplayer is finally here! Indeed, if you listen via the internet, you may have already spotted it, since it has been live for a few hours now. I’ve got to say that this is a really exciting development for the UK radio industry, and I don’t just say that because my employer is one of…
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Sony Radio Academy Award Nominations 2011
Well the Sony Radio Academy Award nominations were announced earlier this evening (in a much nicer venue than previously) by Classic FM’s Margherita Taylor and BBC 6 Music’s Huey Morgan. They fairly rattled through the categories, with Morgan in particular entertaining us even if he mispronounced the odd nominee. Once again, Absolute Radio (my employer!)…
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How I Ended This Summer
I’ll be honest and admit that I’m not too up on Russian cinema. Although to be fair, there’s not a great deal that makes it to the UK. What we do get tend to be the more commercial films like Nightwatch and Daywatch alongside the odd fantasy title like Wolfhound. Then there’s the odd breakthrough…
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The Killing
Like many people, I’ve been obsessively watching The Killing for the last ten weeks, and Saturday saw the denouement. Fear not – no spoilers here. Because if my friends and colleagues are to be believed, there’s going to a be a significant demand for the DVDs which are released a week today. I first learnt…
Hadrian’s Wall
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