One of the impressive things about working here is the confidence you have to ask for something which makes us better, even if you know it’s going to dump a load of work on someone and cause the boss to open his wallet.

Which is exactly what happened late last year and, after an incredibly short gestation period, our baby is finally born.

The feeling on the breakfast show was that we hadn’t loved our website enough. It wasn’t for the lack of content – the four of us (OC plus three producers) cough up daily and weekly podcasts, each with custom content alongside ‘best of’ audio, a weekly vodcast of content exclusive for online (the stuff we can’t format into breakfast friendly portions really), along with extended videos of every interview we do via custom branded iTunes and YouTube channels.

Add to that daily blogs with pictures, audio and video of memorable stuff from each show, and that we tailor that to relevant social media rather than lazily shoving it out from ping.fm

No, the problem was that all of this grew over time and sprawled across the web with little reason to visit our ‘official’ page. Listeners were increasingly interacting with us and we’d spend all day checking the various platforms.

We wanted a way to bring all that content together to have a conversation with our listeners 24/7 from one point.

We wanted to combine both updates from the show along with listener messages, comments and tweets, both in response to Christian but also each other.

And we wanted to emphasise the sense of community that being a fan brings, rather than just being a radio show that you could interact with for four hours a day.

Which is exactly what the online team have created with the new breakfast show website. It has met all our dreams and much more.  They’ve even given it a name that sounds like we knew what we were doing all along…’The Lifestream‘.