On Saturday the 21st of Novemeber Forge Radio had to move studios due to the Sheffield Students Union building works.
We moved from our flash studios in the media hub, downstairs to a "back to basics" look studio near Interval café. The video below, outlines the challenge, and the fun we had!

The Forge Radio Alarm Clock

This useful piece of software, admittedly written by myself, was originally designed to boost listenership of the breakfast show on Forge Radio.

The software does a few cool things:

1). It plays the radio stream without needing a web browser open
2). It can wake your computer from sleep or hibernate to play the radio
3). You can tell it to play a song of your choice before playing the radio
4). You can minimise it to the tray to get it out the way
5). Its got a webcam viewer built in to see our studios, and also a direct contact form to get in touch with the studio really easily.

The software is completely free to use, and updates are automatic so you wont ever need to download 'a newer version'.

If your radio station is interested in its own copy of the Alarm Clock, please click here to get in touch.
If you would like a copy of the alarm clock, simply click here to download it!

Latest Radio Show

Listen again to my latest show by clicking on the player below:

My First News Wrap

"Ninety percent of families do not follow basic rules of food safety." - This is the result of a report issued by the Institute of Food Policy today.
It recommends urgent public education about food hygiene, after nearly sixteen hundred deaths from food poisoning last year alone.
Joe Allen has more...

Monckton Rubber Factory

Our coverage of a local story in Sheffield. Monckton Rubber Factory, owned by Hargreaves services burned down on Tuesday evening last week. Filmed by myself and Tom Pickup.

Sheffield Silversmiths

After a further masterclass on video editing today, this video has been revised with adjusted audio levels, shot sequence and also a slightly amusing ending.
Comments are, as always, welcome.

Also - the music at the end was more for the fun of editing, and the experience, rather than a professional opinion that it should be used!

Sheffield Silversmiths

Today was the first editing lesson on the postgraduate course and we were given some "rushes", which is unedited recorded material, to edit into a final piece. The story was of the silversmith industry in Sheffield and the footage contained an interview of one the few remaining silversmiths in the City. The voice over was Marie Kinsey, and the piece was also edited by my coursemates Charlotte and Tom.

Vox Pops around Sheffield

Here is my first piece of work for my course. We are asked to think of a question and ask members of the public, to eventually be mixed down into a 40s package. I then added some backing music to my piece, but both pieces, just voices and backing music also, are available below:

This is voice only


This includes the backing track

Interview with Paul Tobin (Sheffield Union President)

On Thursday I interviewed Paul Tobin about various issues in the student's union, including the student loan delays and his plans for the union this year.

This interview was on behalf of a website called UniPlanet, the best place to go for information about university life and well worth a look! Check it out here!

Blog ReDesign

This blog has until recently been mainly focused on technological content and has been used for my general view on various bits of technology, good or bad!
However, I am now enrolled in Broadcast Journalism MA at The University of Sheffield and so will be using this blog to post my views on current news stories as and when I see fit! I am certain the majority of these stories will have a technological aspect to them, but the blog is no longer explicitly restricted to this field.

Feel free to browse my previous blogs, the content still makes interesting reading!

A Quick Apology

Just a quick note to say I will not be posting any blogs until at least 02/05/2009. I am revising and taking my finals for university.
Many Thanks
More blogs then!

Joe
x

Twitter

Wow, talk about dropping the ball. I signed up to Twitter about two weeks ago, after being persuaded by the promotional video (see below), as I had originally hated the idea. But I now see what all the fuss is about, first of all it fills the gaps between blogs and emails, secondly it brings you closer to celebrities and finally its a good way to get messages and stay in touch with mates!

Twitter was definitely the next big thing a few months ago, and now it seems to have seamlessly slipped into place between emails, blogs, facebook and other social network sites.
Part of the beauty of twitter is its simplicity, perhaps not behind the scenes but certainly the front end, there are few options and its a simple interface of entering text and pressing send. It took me a while to understand about following and being followed, but once you play around with it, its a brilliant way of keeping up to date with people who you may not usually talk to.

One particularly attractive feature of twitter is that you can follow people without them having to follow you (or accept you as a follower), this is unlike both facebook and myspace, with users having to confirm you as a "friend". The obvious result of which is the attraction of celebrity culture, it means that we, as mere mortals, are able to follow Jon Snow, Edith Bowman, Greg James and my personal interest Forge Media.

Two very interesting things have happened on twitter recently, one, involving Johnathan Ross. Yesterday "Wossy", as he is known on the site, was in touch with Eminem and was offered the chance to go to Detroit and attend a CD launch, he couldnt make it, and so gave it away on Twitter! It was actually pretty tense when he was twittering the question, and you knew that his 253919 followers would be keen to reply.

Twitter has been widely accepted into the social private domain, but in my opinion it potential is much larger than is realised, or rather, than is being implemented. Twitter has enormous potential for the public domain, large corporations can issues updates quickly and easily, announce new products, recall faulty ones, run competitions etc. In its simplest form, Twitter is as exciting as email was when it arrived, except Twitter is a lot less forceful and intrusive, you cannot get Spam on twitter, as you choose who you follow!

Audio Boo

Following my recent attendance of the Student Radio Conference 2009, I was made aware of an online service named Audio Boo by the BBC's Head of Future Technology - James Cridland, (view his blog here. Audio Boo is an online blogging application with a difference, that difference being that we are talking about audio blogging.

To use audio boo you need to have a second generation iPod or iPhone with a microphone which you can plug in (if you are using the iPod). I use the microphone on Apple's new in-ear headphones. With this set up you download the application for free from the app store and open it up! Its so easy to use, at the bottom there are three buttons, one for listening to other peoples boos, one for recording your own boo, and one to link it with your Audio Boo account online.

Its brilliant to get your thoughts onto the internet quickly. You can follow people on audio boo as well similar to twitter, and of course you can be followed. My only grievance with it is that you cannot search for people and add them from your iPod, you need to go to the Audio Boo website.

If you want to check out some audio boos visit my website here, and you can see my current boos! To do this you can login to the website using your account details, and click on the RSS feed option. You can either feed all boos to your site, or just your own.

Update:

Claireatwaves has commented that a similar applications to Audio Boo is called ipadio, available from Ipadio.com, but this has a clear advantage over Audio Boo, in that you can broadcast from any phone! Having tried it, it does work very well but there are a few issues that lead me to stick with Audio Boo. One, that the quality is obviously that of a normal phone call, yet with the iPod application the quality is far superior. Secondly, the RSS feed I use to embed my Boos into my website cannot be replicated with ipadio, while they do offer an RSS feed for your phlogs (phone logs), it does not contain links to the audio files themselves, view an example at www.jsjallen.co.uk

Spotify!

Hello again! It's been a while since my last post, but I have been exploring the virtual world for technological gems to bring back to you and I am pleased to say I have found plenty on my travels! Articles soon to appear here consist of....

AudioBoo
Twitter
Tr.Im
Phorm - revisted
Google Street View
The LHC
OLEDs
The Sun Getting Dimmer
Visual Basic

and any more interesting bits I come across!


For today though, I will be looking at the musical revolution that is Spotify. Spotify is almost an entirely new tool for use online, in its simplest form, it is a standalone program which allows you to listen to a very large quantity of songs, for free, from your PC.
At this point I should enter a few qualifications to the previous paragraph, firstly, the "revolution" is not entirely unknown, many of us will be aware of Last.FM which provides a similar service, but within your web browser and by no means with the variety (or style) that Spotify provides. Secondly, while the service is free, as is the program to download, there are the occasional adverts which get played between entire songs. Note the word entire, if you are searching for songs and listening to little bits of many at a time, you will experience no advertisements.

I would just like to mention here a very interesting discussion I have come across concerning internet advertising, and more specifically, is it theft of the service if you turn the adverts off? Click here to view James Cridland's Blog

Spotify runs as a program from your desktop and is able to minimise to the system tray so as to stay out of the way, it has a very useful playlist function which allows you to save all your favourite songs in the appropriate playlist and listen to it at you leisure. (Incidentally, you can listen to my playlist of favourite songs by downloading and installing Spotify, then clicking here).

Spotify solves the major problem of wanting a song but not knowing what it is, you can simply search the lyrics on google, and then get the song on Spotify, it has undoubtedly quenched a vast musical thirst of my own!

However, as with all new toys, there are of course limitations and improvements that could be made. For one, I would love to see and option saying "Buy this song"*, or even better once you have made a playlist "Buy this playlist". By clicking this you would purchase the song (via paypal for example), and be permitted to download a DRM free file (like iTunes now does) to listen to and more importantly, put onto mobile devices such as an iPod.
Speaking of iPod brings me to my next improvement, a Spotify app in the app store, this truley would be an astounding app (assuming similar functionality), the ability to have all the music you could desire literally at the touch of your finger.

In summary, Spotify has truly given me a (so far) brief musical education and I have no doubt I am going to learn a great deal from it. I highly recommend the program and am certain you will not regret giving it a go. Download Spotify from Spotify dot com here.

***Update***
As per the comments on this blog, you can actually right click on a song and buy it from 7digital.com! Great news, but it doesn't work on every song, or playlists. Still good for the odd song though! Thanks for letting me know Afront.