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I love listening to the radio. I love podcasts because it means I can listen to my favourite radio programmes from around the world whenever I like. And I’ve recently made a fantastic discovery. (more…)

Last week I ruffled a few feathers with a post about the sorry state of Labour and the internet. One of my main points was that Labour seemed to be drawn into a battle of the blogs and was neglecting investment in a responsive email campaign. Thomas Gensemer, founder of Blue State Digital, the firm which helped run Barack Obama’s online campaign for the US Presidency, gave a talk a couple of days later at City University. He made the same point. Hopefully City will publish a video of the talk before too long. I watched it live on the web stream and it was compelling. Click on the image below to watch the talk.

Gensemer really understands this stuff. If only someone in the Labour Party did too.

Each month the Mayor of London faces a grilling from the London Assembly, a kind of Mayor’s Question Time. It lasts up to a few hours and there is a webcast of it. But the image quality is spectacularly bad:

I suppose this is what people mean when they talk about ‘faceless officialdom’. It’s only recognisable as Boris Johnson by his trademark shock of blonde hair. And this is not just a one-off error, ALL the GLA webcasts are like this, with the faces blurred out like they used to do when represenatives of Sinn Féin were on the TV. You wouldn’t know it, but here is my representative on the GLA Val Shawcross chairing the Transport Scrutiny Committee on 9 September 2008:

Compare London’s foggy blur with the very clear feed of Prime Minister’s Questions:

The Mayor’s Question Time ought to be a showcase event for democratically holding to account the man who runs the world’s greatest city. You’d think they could set up a half-decent camera, and give its lens a wipe every now and then, wouldn’t you?

In a post earlier this week, I referred to my ‘weekly diet’ of podcasts and I thought it was only fair to open up the larder. I have been podcasting the radio show I present since May 2005. Initially I didn’t know what podcasting was or how to do it. A kind listener explained and helped me set it up. For a long time I harboured suspicions that it was just something for the early adopters out there and was never going to go mainstream. That was until BBC Radio 4 issued an edict that presenters had to say the word ‘podcast’ every thirty seconds. In the past 6 months I’ve become a true convert, particularly on a three week solo cycle-camping trip in France, where spoken-word podcasts were regular evening listening. I’d add that not owning a television set also helps free up time for radio and podcast listening.

Just like blogs, there are a thousand awful and pointless podcasts out there for every one worth listening to. There’s also this thing called podfade, in which a podcast starts off really well then becomes less regular, less interesting before it runs silently into the sands of the presenter’s own guilt and self-loathing. In other words, not every podcast stays the course or lives up to its early promise. Then again, there are podcasts that get better with time, usually amateur productions in which the presenter(s) get more comfortable in the role and find their niche. In short, a lot of filtering, and scratching and sniffing is required. Beside the iTunes Music Store podcast area, a recommendation from a friend is probably the best way of finding out about what’s good.

It’s clear that not all of these are strictly speaking podcasts, rather radio broadcasts which are subsequently made available as podcasts. I don’t see that as a disqualification. So here goes, you can read the list after the jump. (more…)

Credit crunch, sub-prime mortgage, collateralised debt obligations… Obscure terms that now feature in everyday pub chatter, even more so after this week’s spectacular events involving the collapse of investment banks, unprecedented interventions by governments and a looming global economic downturn. But can you, hand on heart, say that you understand what the credit crunch really is, and where it came from and who’s to blame?

Fear not, for the brilliant radio series This American Life aired a superb hour-long documentary that tells the story of the US sub-prime mortgage bubble and bust as I’ve never heard it told before. From the people who were there, from the Wall Street bankers at the very top to the no income no asset borrowers at the very bottom. And all the middle-men in between. It’s a very human story of hope, greed, hubris and self-delusion.

The Giant Pool of Money show is highly recommended, not just as an explanation of the core cause of the seismic events of this week, but as an example of public service documentary radio at its very best. And it’s not just me that thinks so, according to the programme-makers it’s been listened to online by more than half a million people. It’s still available to listen again online. If you need any convincing, check out the first five mintes, on the link below:

[audio:http://jackthurston.com/audio/giant_pool.mp3]

Update 1: The success of The Giant Pool of Money has apparently led to National Public Radio launching a new podcast and blog about the global economy, called Planet Money. It’s presented by Adam Davidson from NPR (who worked with TAL’s Alex Blumberg on The Giant Pool of Money). Both men rank up there with Evan Davis of the BBC in terms of talent at explaining what the hell is going on out there in the miasma of global financial markets and relating it to real day-to-day economics. In just its first week the show has already featured some excellent guests and if they keep up this level of quality, Planet Money will find a regular spot on my weekly diet of podcasts.

Update 2: This American Life aired a second excellent collaboration with NPR the other week, this time dealing with the banking bail out. Listen over here.

The London Festival of Architecture goes from strength to strength and this year runs from 20 June to 20 July.

Along with the exhibitions, talks, guided walks, debates and parties there is a series of excellent architectural podwalks produced by Ruby Wright. I did one about my neighbourhood, entitled ‘Backstreets of Southwark’. It was featured on BBC Radio 4’s iPM programme on 14 June.

The walk passes both cutting edge and utilitarian architecture, secret pocket parks, an unconsecrated boneyard where 15,000 people lie buried, the wine bar where local magistrates go after hard day on the bench, the remains of the debtors prison where Charles Dickens’s father was banged up in 1824 and much more.

It’s about 2 miles long and starts and finishes at Southwark tube station, on the Jubilee Line. A map of the route (including a GPX trace) is over here.

[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/SouthwarkPodwalk/SouthwarkPodwalk_64kb.mp3]

Download including various file formats (128kb MP3, 64kb MP3, Ogg Vorbis) from here.

I spent Saturday at “barcampUKgovweb” and met a very interesting group of people who care about how government behaves online. Among the 60 or so participants, there was a roughly even split between people working for government, people working for companies and people who are - for want of a better term - civic hackers. (more…)

Many Eyes is a web-based data visualisation tool that is still in alpha but already looks impressive. It’s very simple. You cut and paste data (numbers or text) and then choose from a variety of data visualisation tools to make your dataset come to live. We hope to be doing some cool things with it over at caphealthcheck.eu and farmsubsidy.org. In the meantime, here is a rather silly visualisation of the most frequently used words in speeches made by the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Conservative Party Leader David Cameron. Can you tell whose words are whose? Answer after the jump.

Many Eyes has got some glitches but it seems a lot better than its rival Swivel. Here is a good comparative review of both.

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Last night I attended an interesting talk at the Frontline Club where Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, argued that blogs, social networking and user generated digital content pose a threat to our culture, economy and civilisation. Very quickly it became clear that Keen relishes his role as contrarian and provocateur and that his tongue was very often in his cheek. Even so, he did express with passion his concerns about Web 2.0 as a toxic mash-up of, as he put it, ‘the countercultural Sixties, the free market idealism of the Eighties, and the technological determinism and consumer-centricity of the Nineties’. (more…)

Last weekend I came across a second-hand vinyl record of Senator Bobby Kennedy interviewed by David Frost. The interview was conducted during RFK’s 1968 Presidential bid which was to end in his assassination in Los Angeles - just hours after winning the California Democratic primary. The record is a fascinating document of a remarkable man at a remarkable moment in American history (audio links below). (more…)