Last week I got a nice surprise in the mail. It's a very small piece of plastic with a tiny logo on it. The cardboard it's attached to says that it's a webcam cover, and it appeared as if by magic the week after the big Facebook furor about privacy.

(As an aside: Mark Zuckerberg might have a strange attitude towards privacy, but even HE covers his webcam. So should you. And so should I, for that matter.)

Anyway, the logo on this webcam cover was that of NPR, the U.S. public radio network. And that got me thinking about radio station swag.

Ben Hammersley is a very clever man. He's a "futurist," and sports a very fine Victorian bushy moustache and some fancy arm tattoos. He writes for Wired magazine and The Guardian. The word "hipster" might have been coined for him; but then, he coined the word ...

This week, I'm in the cold and snowy environment of Vienna in Austria, at the world's largest radio conference, Radiodays Europe. 1,600 delegates (according to a pull-up poster and they never lie) are here. Last Sunday I moderated a special workshop on the Norwegian ...

In a few weeks, I'll be at Radiodays Europe, the meeting-place for radio. It'll be happening in Vienna in Austria, home of lots of beautiful old buildings and some quite forward-thinking radio stations, including the excellent Kronehit. Last year, I saw a lot of ...

Occasionally, this column goes deep into tech, and this is one of those weeks. Apologies in advance, but I think it's worth it. Sitting in a coffee shop a few years ago, I was working on a website of mine. Looking at the website, I saw the ads looked a little ...

Absolute Radio in the UK is one of the three "Independent National Radio" stations that were launched in the early 1990s. It's a national radio station, as you'd guess from the name: but it's national on AM. AM Radio in Europe is different from the US: not least, ...

Across Europe, they've been busy switching off AM, and the switchoff of FM is getting closer for one of the largest European countries. New figures from RAJAR, the UK's radio research company, came out last week. They revealed that 49.9% of all radio listening is to ...

Back in the mid 1990s, I was doing the afternoon drive shift on a radio station. The only computer in the studio was my little personal organizer, which I used to tap notes out on; otherwise, the songs were played off CD and vinyl, jingles and ads were played using ...

Young people are falling out of love with radio. How do you know? You just have to ask a random guy you meet in the bar. He'll tell you that his friend's son doesn't listen to the radio, and, by extrapolation, no young people in the entire world listen to the radio. ...

Since June, I've been writing a daily email newsletter about podcasting and on-demand - called, unimaginatively, podnews. Podcasting itself is growing quite rapidly, and it's been interesting to - over the last six months - see the industry itself grow older and ...