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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Some Recent Music
I’ve seen some great concerts recently which were all very different, but all worth mentioning here. 15 May saw Icelandic “Music Through Unconventional Means” which featured the Southbank’s artist in residence, Shlomo, who’s a beatboxer, performing with one of my favourite groups, Amiina, and another Icelandic performer, Valgeir Sigurdsson. The first half of the concert…
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Guardian’s Listings Get Worse
What has The Guardian done to its daily listings this week? They’ve got substantially worse – especially for radio. To give you an idea what I’m talking about, here’s an example of last Thursday’s radio page: And here’s the equivalent page today: The more observant may notice that it’s now only half a page. We’ve…
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CCTV Is Everywhere
Last night BBC Two aired the first in a three part series – Who’s Watching You. It examines the surveillance state that we’ve been walking headlong into over the last few years. Despite a very annoying production technique of sending everything in and out of focus like a small child was operating the camera, it…
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How You Can Use Parliamentary TV Coverage…
…or not. I’d completely forgotten this, but then I saw last week’s edition of Have I Got News For You presented this week by Alexander Armstrong. The MPs’ expenses scandal is the gift that keeps on giving as far as satirical programmes go, but when illustrating the resignation of the Speaker, Armstrong pointed out that…
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Nokia’s Ovi Store
Now I’ve genuinely been looking forward to a decent competitor to Apple’s iTunes App store, so today’s launch of the Ovi store by Nokia has been something to look forward to. Sadly, all is not that great with it. Early in the day there were issues of too many people hitting the servers too frequently.…
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Radio Head
I’d completely missed the fact that this book existed until I saw a reference to a Daily Mail extract via a friend’s blog (obviously I wouldn’t ordinarily link to a Daily Mail extract – it’s not as though I was surfing the site or something). Written by John Osborne – no, not our John Osborne…
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Teleshopping… Coming To A Channel Near You Soon
Over at Media Guardian, their big Ofcom news is that C4 has been cleared of any bullying on Celebrity Big Brother, but I don’t think that’s the big news from Ofcom today. The really interesting news is the changes in advertising that are being announced. There are some smaller changes like the number of breaks…
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And What Is Andy Duncan On About?
Channel 4’s Chief Executive, Andy Duncan, has been appearing in front the House of Commons culture, media and sport select committee. He’s been complaining about the BBC buying acquired – that is to say, American – programming. C4 was outbid for the 13 episode Harper’s Island, which is still to air here. That may be…
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What’s Sky One Up To?
Broadcast magazine has a story about Sky One (or should that be Sky 1?) trying to lure Harry Hill from ITV1 to its channel with his BAFTA winning TV Burp. ITV has the series signed up for the autumn and winter, but beyond that I guess that negotiations remain open with indepedent producer Avalon. The…
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Star Trek
I must admit that although the enormous build up for this film had left others frantic with excitement, I’d not really been one of them. But by the time it arrived in cinemas at the weekend, I was certainly intrigued enough to want to go and see this “reboot” of the Star Trek franchise. I’ve…
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The Book of Murder
Back in 2005 I read a book called The Oxford Murders which was a perfectly enjoyable thriller set in Oxford around mathematics and murders by Argentinian author Guillermo Martinez. In the meantime, it’s been made into a film which I’ve not seen, and wasn’t exactly well reviewed. Now comes The Book of Murder, which is…
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The Housekeeper and the Professor
I picked this interesting little title up after reading a review of it in The Guardian a week or so ago. The story involves an unnamed housekeeper who is assigned by her agency to look after the professor. He had an accident years earlier, and now his memory only lasts 80 minutes. That means he…
Hadrian’s Wall
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