[Scan-DC] http://radio.garden

[Alan Henney]

http://radio.garden

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

BUSINESS; Pg. D-1

GET LOST IN NEW RADIO WEBSITE

  January 10, 2017 Tuesday 
   SOONER EDITION

In my youth, my uncle was a radio newsman and lived in the other side of our double house. As a result, I had numerous radios.

I had one of the first transistor radios, a radio in the shape of a pistol, a radio with a speaker to put under your pillow for late-night listening, a tabletop radio, an old furniture radio, walkie talkies, a police scanner and a shortwave radio. I was tuned in.

With the advent of the Internet, radio from anywhere became easily available, but that killed much of the romance of it. No more staying up late to listen to the night skip of WLS in Chicago when I was in junior high, tuning to Radio Moscow as the Soviet Union was falling apart, listening to Vatican Radio on Christmas Eve.

Recently I discovered a radio website that is a window on the world. It is called radio.garden (.garden being one of the new domain names offered recently).

The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision asked Jonathan Puckey to come up with an installation for its museum. The result is a site that is a eeeeeeeeeeeeetopographical globe without state or national borders but with blue dots to mark cities. When you click on a dot, the screen tells you what city it represents and gives you a list of radio stations. By clicking on a station, you will hear what is streaming from the station's website. The bigger blue dots are the bigger cities.

The site, which launched last month, has thousands of stations and is adding hundreds a day. Mr. Puckey said the globe was designed without names and borders to encourage users to "get lost" and discover places they may not know about. And he was right. You can get lost exploring this world.

Alexa in Vegas. Virtual assistants pervaded the giant Consumer Electronics Show that finished up Sunday in Las Vegas. And the winner was Amazon Echo's Alexa, integrated into a bewildering list of devices including fridges, cars, robots and home appliances.

She's listening. A San Diego TV station aired a report about a 6-year-old girl who ordered a dollhouse via her parents' Amazon Echo. One of the on-air personalities said of the report, "I love the little girl saying 'Alexa ordered me a dollhouse.'"

That, apparently, was enough to set off Alexa-powered Echo boxes around San Diego. The station admitted on its website cw6sandiego.com that many viewers complained that the broadcast caused their voice-controlled personal assistants to try to place orders for dollhouses on Amazon.

IE takes the fall. At the start of 2016, Microsoft's Internet Explorer was the most commonly used browser, used by about 46 percent of Web users, with 32 percent preferring Chrome, and 12 percent using Firefox. By the end of the year, IE usage had dropped to 21 percent, a victim of Microsoft turning all its attention to its new Edge Browser, at 5.3 percent at the end of the year. Chrome surged to 56 percent of the market and Firefox stayed at 12 percent. Opera was at 1 percent through 2016 and was sold to a Chinese consortium, reports arstechnica.com.

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