Living in the Cloud - My New Year's Resolution from 2011

Good point. I have the fantastic Pure One Flow[1], a radio which looks like any other old-fashioned set, but which picks up local stations on FM, the national and regional stuff over DAB digital, and then connects to wi-fi to receive internet streams from all over the world.

It's a brilliant device, and so seamless. Switching from the FM community station two streets away to a broadcast from Seattle takes seconds. It'll also connect to a uPnP server and play your own music collection over the LAN.

I prefer a converged solution like this, rather than just picking up live radio online all the time. Listening on FM and DAB saves bandwidth, and a lot of local stations are broadcast in better quality than they're streamed. FM is, to all intents and purposes, lossless.

This is the kind of thing 'everything-in-the-cloud' advocates forget. Broadcasting is just so efficient for sending one programme service out to millions of people. It'll never go away.

[1]: http://www.pure.com/products/product.asp?Product=VL-61558...

Yeap. I listen to KRTU all the time, since there aren't any decent Jazz radios around here.

Community radio stations like ALL FM (allfm.org), Sheffield Live! (sheffieldlive.org), and Resonance FM (resonancefm.com) to name just a few I'm familiar with are great for discovering music, let local people passionate about music showcase their skills and their passion, and don't have commercials.

I think the days of generic local and national radio services, which play a mix of popular music carefully chosen to be as inoffensive as possible, and provide a diet of celeb gossip, political squabbles and local roadworks, are numbered. The era when half of, say, London listened to Capital Radio every day is long gone (and Capital itself now resembles an iPod on shuffle with the hits of Rihanna, Adele and Katy Perry all day and night with almost no speech). If being bland enough that no one switched me off was my business model, I'd be filling out my application for unemployment right now.

Where radio still has a significant role to play is in the discovery of new content, new information, things you might not already know you're interested in, and that might be so far outside your sphere of influence that the computer hasn't been able to guess you'd like them yet.

I work in the community radio sector these days; small, non-profit local stations staffed by volunteer presenters passionate about what they play. In my own opinion, all the algorithms in the world can't replace someone who knows their specific style of music and has the enthusiasm to present it to the world. This, I believe, still has a bright future.

I guess we're looking at two different approaches to the same problem of discovering new information and content. There are those who advocate an automated approach--you like X, lots of people who like X also like Y, try Y, here's an automated feed of Y--and there are those, like me, who prefer the more curated experience of broadcast radio, from a studio, with a presenter.

I don't sit still, sticking my head in the sand and pretending everything will be the same forever, with people gathering around the wireless to listen to the latest Bob's Country Music Hour on 1170AM. It's my job to reconcile this stuff, and make sure we move with the times, give people what they want, and leverage this new technology to benefit communities for years to come.

In the UK (as in South Africa incidentally), the public broadcaster (BBC) gets its money via a license fee that tv owners pay rather than out of the government budget as happens in Canada (CBC).

Same in Italy, for 2012 is 112 Euro for a year (145$). According to this chart http://www.abbonamenti.rai.it/immagini/grafico2011.gif this kind of fee is quite common for public tv in Europe.

That's why you use a 3rd party cloud backup service like backupify.

I had never given it much though, but Tuesday my primary gmail account went down. This (http://douglassims.org/gmaildown.png) is all I've seen of it since then. My contacts, calendar, lunch plans, flight reservations, all are unavailable to me. It's made this week rather a catastrophe. It's also made me reconsider my dependence on the cloud and I'm going to start the new year off trying to take back control.

I've had no indication from Google as to when it might be back, but I see in some forum postings that at least one person with the same error message had 84 days of downtime. It's sort of a black swan thing - very unlikely, but with such great consequences that it's worth avoiding.