Elsewhere: People Power Makes it Happen

I wish the world was looking in a different direction. In fact, I wish it was looking towards South West London. Tonight, AFC Wimbledon played their first league game at their new ground – albeit longtime spiritual home – of Plough Lane.

I just posted something to Facebook.

AFC Wibbledon Logo

The world appears very divided right now. A lot of the world’s attention is on the US. That’s understandable.

But, I wish the world was looking in a different direction. In fact, I wish it was looking towards South West London. Tonight, AFC Wimbledon played their first league game at their new ground – albeit longtime spiritual home – of Plough Lane.

After a controversial FA decision in 2002 to permit Wimbledon FC to move to Milton Keynes there was a groundswell of people power and Wimbledon supporters – grounded by a community that the FA commission somewhat dismissed in 2002 – founded their own club. The new club was supporter owned and supporter run (The Dons Trust is the not-for-profit, democratic organisation that owns AFC Wimbledon football club) .

I’m just an observer – but I have seen AFC Wimbledon play on several occasions and I have been lucky enough to watch supporters put their heart and soul into founding a new club, financing and keeping it running, securing Kingsmeadow and, finally, acquiring the old Greyhound Stadium land that’s just 200 yards from where the original Wimbledon side played for 80 years. Every donation and every raffle ticket mattered.

It’s an amazing story of what people can do when they come together and share both a passion and a dream. When people work together amazing things can happen. In a little corner of South West London, people power meant that amazing happened tonight.

Really, if the world had a few more Wimbledon supporters there might be a a little less division

Elsewhere: New Apple Patent Could Kill Commercial Radio

Over at Media UK’s radio discussions section there’s a thread about a new patent issued to Apple that allows for “seamlessly switching media playback between a media broadcast, such as a radio broadcast, and media from a local media library”. It reminds me that I have some thoughts brewing on this (update: my thoughts are now written-up here) but this is what I added to the thread (with the typo seen at Media UK cleaned up).

An obvious use of this tech would not just be for targeted ad insertion but also for some kind of content switching when a user’s streaming connectivity drops. Using Apple’s Genius functionality & a station’s playlist, an app could store a list of station-appropriate tracks that are already on my device and seamlessly switch to them. Let the station cache a few idents in the app and I may never notice I’d lost connectivity driving through the tunnel again.

Take it a stage further; could a station save on music royalties (and the listener on bandwidth costs) if it only provided the links and all music tracks were sourced from the user’s local music library (of tracks they own)?

The future of radio is at an interesting point. Even as a self-confessed radio geek I am finding that I spend more time listening to music and entertainment services that could not traditionally be called radio. More to come on this.