Radio Garden - World Wide Radio

Last week I discovered the best thing I’ve seen on the internet for years.

Based on nothing more robust than the first result returned by Google, there are apparently over a billion websites out there. Putting aside how accurate that number is and how you might want to define ‘website’, I’m sure we can agree that there are loads of them.

People with more insight than me have no doubt studied what types of websites make up that number. My daily online interactions are probably fairly typical: dominated by Google, social media, news sites, and then a long tail made up of train enquiries, checks on local café opening times, and argument-ending verifications of actors’ ages (although google.com is increasingly removing the need to click past it for those last few things).

So it’s rare to discover something truly new and brilliant on the web. When I came across Radio Garden last week, thanks to an old friend on Facebook, it blew my socks off.

Radio Garden

The concept is a simple one: take all the internet radio stations you can find, add a geolocation, and plot them on a map.

The resulting Radio Garden is not only beautiful, but inescapably compelling. I defy you to not get immediately drawn into it.

Internet radio stations aren’t particularly new, and it naturally follows that there arewebsites which list them.

But by adding a map layer with which to browse the content, the team behind Radio Garden have turned something rather soulless, albeit fundamentally interesting, into something wonderful. If you think visual and interaction design don’t matter, then just observe someone using the two different sites above.

In addition to the clean and simple design, there are delightful little touches: the way the earth rotates into position and the live radio streams ‘sprout’ from its surface, and the static as you move between channels (an anachronism younger visitors may not even appreciate).

You could argue that simplicity comes at a cost - that some desired functionality has been lost - such as being able to search by genre, or even knowing which country you’re browsing in. But then I feel that would be missing the point.

Where will you go?

It’s very interesting to see where someone goes first when they arrive at the site. No one I’ve shown it to hasn’t immediately zoomed in somewhere and been immediately captivated.

By default your journey starts wherever you happen to be, which for me is London. In large cities like London there are plenty of stations to choose from and in this case they reflect the eclectic, global melting pot that is our capital.

In addition to the many BBC stations, there are other national, even international, ones such as Virgin Radio and BFBS, but most fascinating to me are the niche music stations and the community stations which reflect the city’s diverse diaspora –Punjabi, Greek, Polish to pick out just a few.

Thankfully, The Christmas Station now seems to have gone off air.

After London I took a quick trip up the M11 to my hometown of Cambridge where I found and old favourite, Cam FM: great music, occasional awkward gaps between songs.

Then I was drawn to Africa. Via Casablanca, I headed south to the lone green dot that turned out to be MaliJet in Bamako (which sadly seems to have disappeared subsequently).

The lack of political boundaries and labels does add to the serendipity of it all, and as I headed east I found myself in Aleppo. So close, yet so far. It’s surreal to hear something as normal as a radio broadcast coming from somewhere so troubled.

Heading further afield was my next inclination. I discovered soft rock in Siberia,national radio in the Pacific island nation of Kiribati, and a station in Alaska who proclaimed the bold mission: “Spreading the Gospel to Western Alaska and the Russian Far East.”

Most radio stations on the map have a link through to the broadcaster’s own website. Staying in Alaska, the northernmost point in the USA provided a distant taste of the kind of parochial news you’ll find in newspapers everywhere.

 As I write the local headlines are as follows:

“Freezing temps mean it’s time to clean the legacy wells on the North Slope; Melting permafrost changes Yukon River; Bogoslof spews lava in fourth eruption;Green Lake dam awaits replacement part to get back up and running; Ground squirrel: Invasive species or native to island?; Prince of Wales deer season extended, wolf season ended…

Searching for the Blues

With my appetite for novelty satiated, I wanted to find some decent music.

I have fond memories of listening to the radio while travelling through the Deep South on a road trip a few years ago, so I went in search of some blues.

My quest was quickly stymied however by the Christian stations flooding the http waves. In parts of Alabama and Georgia it was hard to find a broadcast that wasn’treligious.

It made me realise that for any liberal European who’s only been to New York and California, there are vast swathes of the country that are either completely ignored or at least misunderstood. If you’re dumbfounded by Donald Trump’s popularity and political success, take yourself on a radiophonic journey from New Orleans toVirginia.

I still haven’t found my blues on Radio Garden, despite the promising-sounding American Blues Network in Gulfport Mississippi. If anyone finds a good station, please let me know!

I had more luck across the Florida Straits in Havana though, and have regularly been enjoying the music on Radio Cubana.

I could go on - and indeed I did - but with Radio Garden as your guide, I’ll leave you to make your own way around the world’s radio stations.

Embrace the lack of a search bar, the lack of borders and recognizable place names, and enjoy the almost analog, organic experience of flying around the world tuning into distant sounds.

I can’t speak for Tim Berners Lee, but if I’d invented the World Wide Web I’d be thrilled to see it sprout a gem like Radio Garden.

[Originally posted here: https://robhallifax.tumblr.com/post/155033508074/radio-garden-world-wide-radio]