Rock show with Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson goes from 6 Music while Radio 2's Radcliffe and Maconie cut to three nights

Steve Lamacq: Stop 'public flogging' of 6 Music

Bruce Dickinson's BBC 6 Music rock show is to be axed and Mark Radcliffe and Stuart Maconie's Radio 2 show cut to three nights a week in the latest changes to the two stations.

Dickinson, the lead singer of Iron Maiden, has presented a rock show on the digital station since it launched in 2002. It is the first 6 Music show to be axed since the BBC announced plans to close the station at the end of next year.

Radcliffe and Maconie's award-winning weeknight show, which has been running on Radio 2 since 2007, will be cut from four to three nights a week.

Their Thursday night outing will be replaced with a new live music strand, In Concert, which previously aired on Radio 1.

The Radcliffe and Maconie Show will switch to three nights a week from 12 April. Dickinson's 6 Music show, which currently airs on a Friday evening, will finish at the end of April.

6 Music is one of two BBC digital stations, along with the Asian Network, which will be closed following BBC director general Mark Thompson's strategy review last week.

Radio 2 is also undergoing a transformation, having been instructed by the BBC Trust to put more speech content and social action programming in its daytime schedule and to reverse a drop among its older listeners.

Breakfast show host Chris Evans has been the target of listeners' ire since he replaced Sir Terry Wogan. The first official Rajar figures for Evans's new slot will not be released until May.

But the Radcliffe and Maconie Show and Dickinson's 6 Music show are made by the Manchester-based independent production company Smooth Operations, which is run by John Leonard. Part of UBC Media, it also makes Radio 2's Mike Harding Folk Show and long-running comedy Count Arthur Strong's Radio Show on BBC Radio 4.

"I'm hugely disappointed but we are looking forward to other opportunities when the BBC moves [BBC Radio 5 Live] to Salford," said Leonard.

Radcliffe was named music broadcaster of the year at last year's Sony Radio Academy Awards.

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There are just two weeks to go until Ada Lovelace Day 2010, and we still have a fair few bloggers, Twitterers, podcasters, web comic artists, and videocasters to recruit. We have 1114 pledgers and need 1958 more people to sign up. That’s a challenge with only 14 days to go, but if everyone recruits just two more people, we’ll still make it!

There’s loads of stuff going on around Ada Lovelace Day this year. We have events in London and worldwide (Copenhagen, Dresden and Montreal, with the promise of others to come). The London Potluck Unconference, to be held at the Centre for Creative Collaboration in Kings Cross, 6.00pm onwards, still has some places left, so please nab yours now, whilst you can.

We have T-shirts on their way – we’re just polishing off the design and hope to get them up and ready for you to buy very soon. We also now have an Offers page which currently carries a 10% discount from the lovely people at AdaFruit Industries. Again, we hope to have more there for you soon!

If you’d like to get involved, then our main need at the moment is promotion. We need to get more people signed up, and here’s how you can help:

• Send a Tweet, update your Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn status
• Write a blog post about Ada Lovelace Day
• Email your friends and/or relevant mailing lists
• Post an item on LinkedIn or Facebook Groups
• Encourage other people to do something to promote Ada Lovelace Day!

There’s more info on how to help, including a Tweet you can just cut and paste, on the blog!

We do have more goodies in the pipeline, so stay tuned for more news!

Caroline Thomson, the BBC chief operating officer, defends 'tough' decision to close digital radio station 6 Music

Caroline Thomson, the BBC's chief operating officer, has defended the decision unveiled in the corporation's strategy review last week to close BBC 6 Music.

Thomson told an audience of media executives in London that the digital radio station, which is now the subject of a high-profile public campaign to save it, competed directly with commercial radio.

"The average age of its listeners – 37 – is at the heart of the demographic targeted by commercial radio", she told delegates at a Westminster Media Forum event.

There were also questions, she said, about whether the BBC should run three popular music stations – Radio 1, Radio 2 and 6 Music.

Thomson described the recommendation to axe 6 Music, which will now be considered by the BBC Trust following public consultation, as "tough". But she added: "There just isn't the luxury of closing something that no one cares about ... all the BBC services are loved by some."

She added that the money saved by the closure would be reinvested in radio, with a particular focus on digital services. Digital station BBC Radio 7 will "move towards [becoming] Radio 4 extra... with all the extra investment that implies".

Thomson conceded that some of the BBC's critics "have a point" when they complain that it was encroaching on markets that were previously off limits. "We must be prepared to define the boundaries of our public service. We must be prepared to know our limits," she said.

Some competitors had legitimate concerns about the corporation's "existing boundaries and its future ambition", Thomson added. "We are in a world where we can't do everything. We need to move to the world of 'either/or'."

In a thinly disguised attack on Rupert Murdoch's media empire, she also said there was a "small but influential group of critics with vested interests" who want to see a smaller BBC.

"Their underlying objective is death by a thousand cuts," Thomson added, and the BBC "ought to stand up to" them.

Echoing the words of the BBC director general, Mark Thompson, who some believe she may eventually replace, Thomson said that the corporation exists in a "public space" alongside libraries, museums galleries and other public institutions, "without which Britain would just not be Britain".

The BBC "has remained remarkably relevant, perhaps even more relevant", she added. "[The idea that] it would lose relevance amongst a ubiquity of content has proved false."

Thomson repeated the BBC's pledge to cut back on overseas acquisitions, but made clear that did not mean that popular US imports would be banned altogether.

BBC2 recently screened all five series of US drama The Wire and BBC4 shows Mad Men, another series that has won critical acclaim, but relatively small audiences.

She also said the BBC reserved the right to screen big Hollywood films at Christmas, because licence-fee payers demand it.

She praised "marvellous American series" and said: "We do need to be able to keep that as well as the capacity to have the central film on Christmas Day, like Harry Potter."

Thomson confirmed that the cap on the money spent on sports rights, which was also announced in the strategy review, commits the corporation to spend at "roughly the same level as we are now" and does not reduce it.

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Get Satisfaction, the popular online customer service company, just announced that it is bringing its service to Facebook fan pages. This new service, the Facebook Social Engagement Hub, will allow companies that have a presence on Facebook to easily answer questions from their customers on Facebook. The Social Engagement Hub recreates the Get Satisfaction experience on Facebook and allows users to ask questions about products or make suggestion for new features. One key feature here is that the discussion on Facebook and the Get Satisfaction topic pages are synchronized, so that questions that get answered on a company's topic page on Get Satisfaction also appear on Facebook and vice versa.

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The new Social Engagement Hub on Facebook will cost Get Satisfaction customers an additional $99 per month. As Get Satisfaction's co-founder Lane Becker told us yesterday, however, this expense could easily be worth it for these companies, as users on Facebook tend to be very active on these fan pages and really want to interact with these companies and brands on the social networking service.

As Lane also noted, conversations that happen around a brand in Facebook tend to be trapped in this silo. Thanks to the synchronization between the two platforms, however, brands can now take this content and make it useful outside of Facebook as well. Another problem for brands that Get Satisfaction is trying to solve here is the simple fact that conversations on Facebook only have a very short lifespan. Get Satsifaction now allows companies to capture these conversations.

Overall, this looks like a very smart way for brands to interact with their customers on Facebook and to streamline their social media customer service efforts.

Digital spin-offs and extensions to shows on other BBC radio networks will follow closure of 6 Music and the Asian Network

The BBC is to reinvent its digital radio offering around brand extensions of its main five radio networks following the proposed closure of BBC 6 Music and the Asian Network.

It is understood that the BBC plans to spend some of the money saved by closing the two stations on digital spin-offs and extensions to programmes already being broadcast on BBC Radio 1, Radio 2, Radio 3, Radio 4 and Radio 5 Live. The BBC spent £16m on content for 6 Music and the Asian Network in the year to the end of March 2009.

A similar tactic has proved successful on the BBC's TV channels, with spin-offs such as BBC3's Doctor Who Confidential and BBC2's Strictly Come Dancing: It Takes Two and The Apprentice: You're Fired.

ITV has also enjoyed success in using spin-offs to drive viewers to its digital TV station ITV2, with Britain's Got Talent and The X-Factor spawning Britain's Got More Talent and The Xtra Factor.

The mooted new services would be developed along the lines of BBC Radio 5 Live's digital sibling, 5 Live Sports Extra, a non-linear service which unlike 6 Music and the Asian Network does not broadcast around the clock and is relatively cheap to run. The extra digital radio content would also be available online for listening on demand.

"Just like the Xtra Factor goes backstage and tells you what happened at the X Factor, so Radio 2 could have spin-off digital shows with extra coverage from Glastonbury of the Electric Proms," said one industry executive.

One possibility, highlighted by 6 Music DJ Steve Lamacq, was an evening-only digital service comprising the best shows currently on 6 Music and called "Radio 2 Extra". Lamacq said it would be "a bit like having your four-bedroom house compulsorily purchased and replaced with a bedsit on the edge of Heathrow".

BBC director general Mark Thompson's strategy review, published last week, had already indicated that BBC Radio 7, the corporation's most successful digital-only network, will be rebranded Radio 4 Extra with closer ties to its parent speech station.

Industry sources suggested that the BBC would be looking to develop similar digital spin-off programming across its main radio networks, including BBC Radio 2, which was instructed by the BBC Trust last month to do more to encourage digital take-up among its listeners.

5 Live Sports Extra was praised in Thompson's review as providing a "very good model for how digital-only services can naturally complement their analogue sister stations".

The BBC has a third "extra" branded digital radio station, BBC Radio 1Xtra, which will be revamped over the next 18 months to strengthen its editorial ties with its parent station, Radio 1.

Radio 1Xtra already shares one of the BBC's best-known DJs, Tim Westwood, who recently complained on-air that the station's audience was so low that he had been broadcasting "to absolutely nobody for the last three hours ... It's soul-destroying."

So-called "pop-up" radio stations are already a feature of ABC Radio in Australia, which broadcasts on digital for a limited amount of time to cover big events such as the Melbourne arts and culture festival and the 40th anniversary of the moon landings.

A BBC spokesman said: "It's too early to speculate on how we might use the funds from the proposed closure of 6 Music, other than to reiterate our commitment to invest it in digital radio content."

A substantial digital radio offering from the BBC will be crucial if the industry is ever to achieve its goal of digital switchover.

Digital across all three platforms – digital audio broadcasting (DAB) radio, digital TV and online – must account for at least 50% of all radio listening before a two-year switchover plan can kick in. It currently accounts for 20.9%.

The digital economy bill currently going through parliament included a target date of 2015 for switchover. Industry executives now say it may not happen until 2020.

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As many in the Twitterverse have dubbed this week, the battle of location based apps continues, as both Gowalla and Foursquare release yet another update to their iPhone apps today. And these are some big guns coming out to accompany the various real-life incentives, contests and whatever else these the two companies can do to take the focus at this year's SXSW.

Both apps are will showcase new design features the companies are calling "fresh" and other such things, and while they surely are, some of these other features are what really stand out.

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Foursquare is surely the less notable in this release, in our opinion, as it's list of new features is shorter and less impressive. It's boasting a faster, more efficient check-in and shout flow, a "Places" view that supports categories, a history view of places you've been and a "pull-to-refresh" feature. These are nothing to sneeze at, but we think Gowalla is releasing some functions that blow these away.

First of all, Gowalla is bringing photos to the location based game, allowing users to upload a photo after checking in. Users can also browse their friends' photos and look at any that have been taken at that specific location.

Next, it's bringing some interactivity to the game, with check-in commenting. When a friend checks in at a place down the street, you don't need to change over to your Twitter client and send them a DM, you can just comment on their check-in. And if you forgot to type a check-in message when you checked in to a spot, you can go back and add it.

In addition to these, Gowalla is bringing out new friend browsing features, enabling you to look through friends, friends of friends, and even their bookmarked spots and trips. With "spot details", including address, phone, Twitter name, Facebook page and website, Gowalla is adding that Yelp (or should I say Foursquare) aspect that was really missing - real world connection information.

And one more feature that may be overloaded next week or may be the talk of the town, "Hot Spots", tells you what the most popular spots near your location are. We haven't had time to really play with it yet, but it sure sounds interesting.

The updates just popped up in the App Store right now so go get updated and let us know what you think - who is going to win the location based battle of SXSW 2010? As far as this round goes, we're calling it for Gowalla.

The rise of social media has brought journalists some powerful new storytelling and information-gathering tools. However, with these new opportunities have come some new risks.

At Reuters, we have just published some social media guidelines that lay out some basic principles and offer recommendations that should prove useful as journalists navigate what can sometimes seem a chaotic landscape.

In building the new guidelines, we’ve embraced some basic principles:

• We encourage the use of social media approaches in Reuters journalism.
• Accuracy, freedom from bias and independence are fundamental to our reputation. These values and the Trust Principles apply to journalism produced using social media just as they have to all other journalism produced by Reuters.
• A distinguishing feature of Reuters is the trust invested in its journalists to rise above personal biases in their work and to apply common sense in dealing with the challenges offered by social media.

This last point is particularly important to me.

I’ve written in the past about how we depend on our journalists to rise above their biases to cover stories in an independent way, whether they’re in Gaza or Washington–or anywhere else.

As comments have shown–and will no doubt show again–there are those who will never believe this is possible. And there are those who would actually prefer to read, listen to or view only those information sources that confirm their own worldview.

Some news organizations have been more proscriptive with their rules or guidelines for journalists using social media–and it’s tempting to provide the rule-hungry with specific latitudes and longitudes of what’s acceptable.

But I think that approach sells short the ability of journalists to use their brains and to see–and report on–a world that’s changing every day.

That’s why I think of the Reuters Handbook of Journalism as a living document, one that helps us navigate that changing world with an eye on the future while being grounded in the ethical behavior and high standards that have brought us so far.

BBC presenter says axing 6 Music would be a 'disaster for the British music scene'

Steve Lamacq, the BBC 6 Music DJ, has claimed the threatened digital station is being sacrificed in a "public flogging" to satisfy the corporation's critics.

Lamacq, one of the digital service's best-known names, broke his silence to say he is still none the wiser over the reason 6 Music is facing closure. The former BBC Radio 1 DJ said the axing would be "disastrous for the British music scene".

He is the latest 6 Music presenter to speak out against the station's proposed closure, following comments made by Richard Bacon, who also presents the afternoon show on BBC Radio 5 Live, and Adam Buxton.

Lamacq claimed the arguments for closure "don't all stack up". "One argument is that the BBC should be allowing space in the 'market' for commercial stations to operate. But what commercial outfit is ever going to replicate 6 Music?" he wrote on his blog.

He said BBC audio and music director, Tim Davie, had said nine standalone stations was too many, but Lamacq said he was convinced this was "sleight of hand".

"I think what he means is there's 'too many brands' and losing a couple will make it easier to market what they have left – while also putting on a show for people who are demanding the BBC's blood. We are a radio station up for a public flogging," he added.

Lamacq said: "It's clear that the BBC – after revelations about presenter salaries and post-Sachsgate – has been on the defensive. And that it's been worried by criticism from both the Conservative party and the commercial sector who claim the BBC – like Jamie Oliver's school kids – has become obese. What's less clear is how sacrificing 6 Music will help.

"The inference from Davie is that they are considering moving some 6 Music shows, possibly to Radio 2, to give them "a bigger audience". But given that Radio 2 has recently been told to become 'more distinctive' and create more programmes for the over-60s, that doesn't look particularly practical.

"On a personal level, I believe that shutting 6 Music would be disastrous for the British music scene – and alternative music from further afield too. There is so much music being played every week on 6 that simply doesn't get played anywhere else, that losing it would be unthinkable."

The DJ's claims come as former operations director of GCap Media – now part of Global Radio – Steve Orchard said the commercial radio world would "gain nothing" from 6 Music's closure.

"Commercial radio can never replicate 6 Music's cultural value – it's not viable for us to do so," said Orchard, who now heads local radio group Quidem. "We will gain nothing from this closure yet the music industry will lose much."

Radiohead, Keane and Jarvis Cocker are among the music acts to have voiced their concerns about the proposed closure.

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Investors are pumping more and more money into web services that are heavily reliant on Facebook. So how big is the economy around the world's most popular social network?

An email came through to me last night that, in many respects, is the stock-and-trade of the startup world: a team of entrepreneurs company has received some funding.

In this case, the site in question is the Paris-based Smartdate, and its received $2.2m from investors to try and build its idea of using Facebook data as the basis of a matchmaking service.

So far, so normal. We've heard a great deal of this over the years; venture capitalists and investment funds putting money into companies that are building web services.

But there's something else going on here. From the swathes of press releases and funding announcements I trawl through each day, it feels to me like we're hearing much more recently about sites specifically and publicly built using Facebook as a platform. In many cases, they are almost entirely reliant on Facebook to provide their link to users.

Now, in part, that's no surprise: building up an ecosystem around Facebook is something that the company has tried very hard to do with F8 and Facebook Connect - and it's a smart move, because they know that when lots of people are invested in your success, you are less vulnerable to competitors.

But if so many people are pumping into companies that are almost entirely reliant on the world's largest social networking site, exactly how big is the economy around Facebook?

Let's see if we can work it out.

We know from a number of reports and internal estimates that Facebook itself is due to post somewhere upwards of $1bn in revenue for 2010, but I'm more interested in what the other companies are doing.

What levels of investment are going? How many companies rely on Facebook to keep themselves going? The conservative estimate must stretch into several billions of dollars worth of business at least.

After all, the headline sites who make the most from this business are worth hundreds of millions - and some are even looking to launch on the stock market. Even if they don't entirely base their business on Facebook (in many cases, they are available on - or partner with - other social networks too) the spread of users suggests that they're heavily invested in it.

• Back in November, Electronic Arts bought social gaming site Playfish, in a deal we are now told was worth around $275m.

• Meanwhile Zynga, another developer of popular games (like ) has already taken more than $200m of venture capital.

• Other companies making applications include Slide (also closely linked with MySpace but funded to the tune of $78m); Mindjolt (recently bought by MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe, funding not public); and of course FriendFeed (bought by Facebook for around $50m).

• On top of that, there's a huge number of companies like the aforementioned Smartdate, Plancast ($800,000); and a whole bunch of companies pushed forward by Facebook's own $10m fbFund.

That's just the start.

What other companies do you know that are reliant on Facebook? How big do you think the Facebook economy really is? Stick any information you know in the comments - once we've got an idea how big this is, we can start thinking about whether it's a viable ecosystem, a bubble or a house of cards.

I want to make good with my unused mobile minutes. It's been on my mind ever since I went contract for iPhone, and AT&T has fired me up to believe I can make it happen.

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Forbes has announced its annual list of the world's richest people and Mexico's Carlos Slim has beaten Microsoft's Bill Gates to top spot

Think the semantic web is all hype with no bite? Paul Allen backed semantic startup Evri will announce tomorrow that it has been acquired, we've learned from a reliable source. The service specializes in extracting the names of people, places and things from raw streams of text in order to facilitate smart user navigation and related content recommendation. The company launched a striking new version of its website earlier today.

Evri launched just short of two years ago and raised $8 million from Vulcan, the fund of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. More interesting than the business side of this story, though, is the technology. Evri brings the semantic and the real-time web together in some very interesting ways.

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We profiled Evri as one of 10 intriguing companies in the real-time web space in our recent research report The Real-Time Web and Its Future. Also included was the now Google-acquired Aardvark. (See our coverage: How I Loved and Lost an Aardvark)

Here's how we described the real time part of what Evri does in that report:

Evri is a semantic Web recommendation service for online publishers. The company tracks the real-time Web to know when it needs to create or update a topic page for one of its emerging news topics.

Evri watches news sources to see when a news topic is trending, including articles on Wikipedia that publicly available data shows have leaped in page views. Then it visits structured databases like Wikipedia and FreeBase to check for updates to entries about related entities. It then creates or updates a topic page with news links, photos and Twitter search results. The language used in those Twitter posts is analyzed and the names of news entities in the posts are linked to other Evri topic pages, like pivots.

Evri has done lots of other things as well, including a blog widget, an iPhone app, automated content portals for publishers and a sentiment analysis product. The company didn't see a particularly large amount of hype but was closely watched. Robert Scoble, for example, named Evri one of his top startups to watch for 2010, even a year and a half after it launched.

We haven't been able to identify the company that has acquired Evri yet but the most obvious candidate would be its neighbor and kin Microsoft, where the service would compliment the Powerset team nicely and change the Bing user experience in news search dramatically. Now that we know that Google is working on building a real-time index of the web (our coverage) the prospect of a competitor upping the ante with near real-time semantic parsing, riding on top of real-time indexing, sounds like a hot move.

A number of people have raised the possibility of an Amazon acquisition as well. Evri was also tested out by Yahoo! starting last Fall as a way to facilitate navigation throughout its Sports content pages.

Take that, semantic web doubters.

We'll update this post when the acquiring party is identified. Geeky types interested in an in-depth explanation of Evri's work would be well served by checking out a 6 part video series on YouTube wherein Deep Dhillon, CTO of Evri, discusses the company's technology with students at the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering.