Beer & Cake Club – by Greg Burke

A child’s potty, a blossoming romance, an old-fashioned sing-along and two men slow dancing to Chris de Burgh’s Lady in Red; last Wednesday’s Beer & Cake Club really did have something for everyone.

For those of you not familiar with the Beer & Cake Club concept, it is a chance for the Christian O’Connell Breakfast Show to escape the air-conditioned comfort of Studio A and head to the heart of London’s West End to put on a show at the Leicester Square Theatre. Wednesday night’s performance was a complete sell-out and there are just a handful of tickets left for our next show on August 15 (www.absoluteradio.co.uk/tickets).

Thankfully some of the behind-the-scenes moments were captured on video by Adam Westbrook at Studio.fu along with some of the performance itself so you can re-live the moment The Great Alprendo made Maggie Doyle perfect her aim live on stage.

Beer & Cake 4 will take place at the Leicester Square Theatre on Monday August 15 and will feature a very special guest (and not just Damon Green from the Oval, although he is very special).

Get your tickets at www.absoluteradio.co.uk/tickets

Absolute Radio completes its Windows Phone 7 family!

We love new platforms and we love our apps! This week sees us extend our Windows Phone 7 commitment as we release station apps for Absolute Classic Rock, Absolute Radio 90s and Absolute Radio 00s to complete the family!

Grab them from the Windows Marketplace now!

Aren’t they cute?

Absolute Radio

Absolute Radio

Absolute 80s

Absolute 80s

Absolute Radio 90s

Absolute Radio 90s

Absolute Radio 00s

Absolute Radio 00s

Absolute Classic Rock

Absolute Classic Rock

Evenings and weekends on Absolute Radio by Paul Sylvester


We’re delighted to announce that Mark Crossley will be taking over Absolute Radio’s evening show from the middle of August. Mark has been with us for 2 years and has become an integral part of the One Golden Square team. We’re very pleased to have this former Student Radio Association Presenter of the Year hosting evenings and he’ll also be taking over Saturday mornings as Russ Williams and the Rock N Roll Football team limber up on the touchline.

Mark will continue to present Absolute Radio 90s’ afternoon show and is also returning to Absolute Radio 00s, joining Vicki Blight and Pete Donaldson on our newest station. Pete’s only been with us for a couple of months and we’re delighted to tell you he’s also going to be adding the Friday night late show to his Saturday programme and The Sunday Night Music Club, where he showcases some of the newest music being played on Absolute Radio. We’ve been really impressed by Pete’s talents and he’s already co-anchored our Isle of Wight festival and Glastonbury coverage. Nothing like being thrown in at the deep (and often muddy!) end.

Welsh goddess Polly James is taking over weekday overnights. Nobody can doubt Polly’s energy, effervescence and sense of fun through the early hours and she has kept many a nightshifter entertained through the wee hours of the weekends. We’re delighted to be offering her the chance to showcase her talents on weekday nights now. One of our other new recruits Chris Martin will be taking over weekend overnights when he returns from his honeymoon. Chris has amazing music knowledge and has also been the voice of Absolute Radio Extra at the Isle of Wight festival and the Arcade Fire Hyde Park concert.

One final bit of news is that we properly welcome Sarah Champion back to the One Golden Square family. I couldn’t be more delighted to have the lovely Sarah back in the fold and she’ll be popping up across the weekends at all times of day - you’re going to be hearing a lot of her over the coming weeks as people take some well earned holidays.

I hope you’ll join me in wishing Mark, Pete, Polly, Sarah and Chris the best of luck in their new shows. Oh, and this picture was their idea – not mine.

Social Networking: This Time it’s Personal – by James Wigley

Innovations in social media are a bit like buses right now…You wait months for any significant progressions, then suddenly a stream of them career around the corner at once.

Perhaps the most significant of these is the launch of Google’s social platform, Google+.  The new “project” (as it’s touted) aims, at its core, to merge search and social together whilst (among other new functions) allowing the user to group their friends into separate “Circles” (Google Circles)

The evolution of Circles is a solution to what has become a fundamental frustration in the way contacts are grouped in many social networks: people don’t have one friendship group, they have many. Rarely would these groups have crossed paths in the off-line world, yet suddenly they were lumped together without a simple mechanism to filter content between them. It is, after all, uncomfortable to think that the same information you share with your old University mates could also be viewed by your discerning mother-in-law (remember that photo!)

Circles addresses this frustration by allowing the user to segment their contacts into relationship clusters; it recognizes that “friends” are not all equal, and when it comes to content sharing, one size does not fit all. The Circles function is even more relevant in light of a recent study by Pew, which claims that the average Facebook user has never even met 7% of their Facebook “friends” in real life, which means that on average about 16 people on a given Facebook friends list are actually more like strangers. Further to that, users on average have only met 3% of their list (around 7 people) once.

Creating relationship clusters is not a new concept; many of the newer social networks have arisen around this framework. Diaspora is a network that lets the user sort their connections into groups called “aspects” whilst also allowing the user to retain the rights to all their content; in other words, a focus on personalisation and privacy.

Another network to follow this trend (and perhaps, I think, the most impressive of the newer social start-ups) is Path. A mobile-only application, it describes itself not as a social network, but as a personal network. This personalisation is epitomised through the limitation of your network to 50 friends (based on “Dunbar’s Number”: a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people a person can maintain stable social relationships with at any one time). As they put it: “Path is a place where you can be yourself.”

There are plenty of others arising all the time, most of which tend to fall between one of two camps:

1) “Boutique” apps (often mobile based) with a focus on niche, common interests (i.e. Color, a mobile app that allows users to connect to anyone within their immediate physical proximity).

2) Personal networks (such as Path), with a focus on user privacy and a controlled, divisible network of contacts.

These two groups indicate that the future of social networking is likely to centre on building bespoke frameworks to accommodate our bespoke relationships, something which Google+ welcomes with Circles.

The search giant’s exploration into social clearly rattled Facebook; the Facebook Friend Exporter function was immediately disabled to prevent any easy migration of a user’s friends from the platform. Right now, it remains essential to have a Facebook strategy, but Google+ is another reminder that, equally, there shouldn’t be an over-reliance on one. For example, for the recent launch of the Absolute Radio Account (as part of a new pioneering Absolute Radio venture – Media Week) OGS labs decided it would be beneficial to use Facebook Register (a lighter Facebook Connect) in order to simplify the sign-up process without alienating those not on the platform, or those leaving it.

But Facebook are far from waving the white flag; it’s already redefined global communication and social culture once and it could well do it again. Enter Zuckerberg and the announcement of Facebook hitting 750 million users worldwide and a long rumoured tie-up with Skype (with Spotify expected to follow). Unlike Google+ Hangout, Facebook’s video chat service connects only two users face-to-face. The integration of a personal Skype service appears to be a return to form for Facebook and back to what made it a phenomenon in the first place, namely relationships and the way we communicate and share information. Zuckerberg himself echoed this when he announced the Skype integration, stating that the total number of active users is no longer a useful measure of the site’s success, but instead the amount of sharing (photos, videos, links etc) is a better indication of how people engage with the site.

Innovation is best served by a competitive market, and the launch of Google into the social space as well as the fast emerging array of social start-ups is likely to lead to a fascinating few months ahead. The gloves are off, and with Facebook’s integration of Skype’s one-to-one video messaging service and Google+ Circles it would appear that the battle for social supremacy is, in more ways than one, about to become personal.

Playlist: 13th July

The playlist is out now.

The Vaccines – Norgaard (22/08/11)
Next single from the band’s debut album ‘What Did You Expect From The Vaccines?’ – at just 1 minute and 35 seconds it’s very tempting to play it twice in a row.

The Horrors – Still Life (01/08/11)
The Southend band have come a long way since their early hype and follow 2009’s Mercury-nominated ‘Primary Colours’ with their strongest radio track yet. 3rd album ‘Skying’ is released this week.