Radio 4 has a new programme about blogs and other internets stuff running for the next couple of months. Despite the fact that it has that horrible ‘i’ prefix which really ought to be banned, iPM is actually an interesting radio experiment.

I’m still not fully sure what iPM is. A spin-off of PM, certainly. This is good news because it means it’s presented by Eddie Mair, who surely has the best comic timing of any newsreader in the country.

Perhaps it is a quasi open source-style version of PM. Although the programme goes out on Saturday afternoon, the iPM blog is in action all week asking listeners about ideas. Early in the week rough notes and a draft running order are published, with what members of the production team are thinking about. Further thoughts are posted all week, with listeners engaging in a discussion with the producers.

Maybe iPM is also a bit like Pods and Blogs, but on Radio 4 and at a more sociable hour. Or maybe it isn’t — perhaps I am just keen on making the comparison because Chris Vallance is involved.

You will notice that Chris Vallance is ‘Mr Blog’ according to Eddie Mair. Apparently he was originally going to be Dr Blog. This would have made Chris Vallance a more legitimate Dr V than I am. He might not be a doctor, but at least he is a real V — I’m neither!

Anyway, bloggers may be familiar with Pods and Blogs partly because it is the home of the audio version of the Britblog Roundup. iPM has a neat feature where smart blogger types talk about their favourite bookmarks. And you can embed them as well. Apparently the BBC is beginning to do more of this sort of thing which is encouraging.

I was asked to give my feedback on the iPM blog a month or so back when it was soft-launched. I’m not exactly sure if I offered much useful help, but I’m happy to have seen that they have implemented a few of my suggestions on the blog.

Best of all, iPM is available in podcast form.

So there I was on Monday night, lying in bed listening to Up All Night as I normally do. Then all of a sudden they began talking about me.

Once again it was the Pods and Blogs segment, and once again it was in the Britblog Roundup slot. The very same slot where I farted through my mouth precisely seven days earlier.

I was surprised by the attention that was attracted by my post about whether or not I should put my blogs on my CV. It was really intended as a warm-up post to the long list of skills that I have acquired as a blogger which was posted the following day. Compared to the “warm-up” post, the list bombed.

It just goes to show once again that I am terrible at working out which of my posts are better than others.

I have to admit, it was quite a strange experience lying in bed listening to Rhod Sharp mulling over my career prospects!

One thing though. I didn’t say that I was worried about my Facebook and MySpace accounts. My Facebook and MySpace accounts are impeccable (I hope)!

I don’t know if Matt Wardman will be providing the audio this week, but it is still available on the podcast — the relevant bit is around 27 minutes in.

Update: Matt Wardman has uploaded the audio here.

It was quite appropriate that when I was invited to appear on Radio 5 Live’s excellent Pods and Blogs segment it would be along with Mr Eugenides. Pods and Blogs is part of Up All Night, a radio programme that both Mr Eugenides and I are big fans of.

That’s not the only thing we have in common. It’s probably fair to say that neither of our pseudonyms lend themselves nicely to radio. At one point it was suggested that we could be referred to as Mr E and Dr V, but we wisely settled on using our real names.

I was on to talk about this week’s Scottish Blogging Roundup, and Mr Eugenides was this week’s editor of the Britblog Roundup, which has become a regular feature of Pods and Blogs in the past couple of months. If you’re interested in listening to it, the podcast is here (the relevant bit is around 27 minutes in, but I recommend listening to the whole thing) and show notes are here.

(Update: Matt Wardman has now uploaded the relevant bit on its own.)

Unfortunately, I was not on very good form, so I’m not sure if I did the Scottish Roundup justice. I had literally just got in from a tiring day at work and I didn’t have a lot of time to prepare (excuses, excuses! I know). Then I couldn’t work out how to use Skype, so that was even more last-minute rushing around. So I wasn’t very relaxed and to be honest I wasn’t really in the mood to talk much (which is why you hear a lot more of Mr Eugenides than you hear of me in the interview!).

When I did talk it was pretty nervy and rambling. I had to keep in mind that I was supposed to be brief and concise. At one point I was asked if I had an opinion on the story about the BBC, the media and bias. This is a bit like asking a fat drunkard to be sick, but just a little bit, and try to aim it in this cup. The result was a mess.

I even forgot to mention the name of the important blog that had the video of Brian Ashcroft! So many apologies to Pat Kane and Scottish Futures.

Also, in hindsight it might have been interesting to mention the time that I was kind of shot at by a kid with an airgun. I spent so long talking about airguns without remembering how close I was to the story in a way. But there you go.

As usual for a Sunday, I woke up this morning listening to Julian Worricker’s programme on Radio Five Live. Today, in place of the Five Live Report, was a one-off programme about “Blogging in the UK”.

“Oh, that’ll be interesting,” I thought, so I stayed in bed and waited for it to come on. I was to discover that the programme wasn’t about blogging at all.

Blogging in the UK was originally part of ‘Your Five Live’, which I mentioned in my post about user generated content. Specifically, it was a feature of Five Live’s Breakfast programme.

The idea was to take a day during ‘Your Five Live’ week — the 22^nd of January — and encourage as many first time bloggers to write about their day. The results are predictably awful, reinforcing the stereotypes about how bloggers are just people who write about what they had for breakfast.

And it shows just how little whoever came up with the idea actually knows about what blogging is about. For a start, the entries were posted by users in the comments of the Breakfast programme’s blog. This isn’t blogging. This is just a list of people’s mundane day to day activities.

Of course, there are plenty of bloggers out there who write about their day to day life (to good effect or otherwise). The fact that blogging can provide people with such an easy way to express themselves and write down their thoughts is one of blogging’s greatest strengths. But this Five Live stunt is not blogging, and it shouldn’t pretend otherwise.

Blogging is a commitment. You put yourself out there and write posts on something resembling a regular basis and try to find like-minded people to share your experiences with. The people who appeared on the radio this morning were not bloggers doing it for the love of blogging. I get the impression that most of them were just looking for the chance to say how much they love their baby boy on the radio.

In fairness, there were a few interesting soliloquies in this half-hour extravaganza of first-time non-blogging. For instance, I was interested in the post describing a woman’s attempts to cope with her partner’s constant heavy drinking. That was a real window into a world I had never really experienced before.

Also, there did seem to be a few people who had a way with words. But for every one of these interesting posts there were at least three banal entries by people about dropping off their kids at school and breastfeeding the baby — and these were the ones that were selected to appear on the radio!

Furthermore, it completely lacks the interaction of blogging. Blogs are discovered, as I said, by like-minded people. Talented bloggers who put in the effort find themselves with a big audience, and many bloggers receive the odd comment and communities are built. The people who participated in this experiment got none of that. They were hand-picked by an editor to appear on the radio for a one-off.

This is not a celebration of British blogging, and I seriously doubt if anybody who wasn’t interested in blogging before would have been swayed by this morning’s lamentable programme.

I wouldn’t have minded this at all if the programme wasn’t billed as being about “Blogging in the UK”. If they had called it “Bores ranting away about mundane subjects” it would have been a more accurate description. But then Five Live’s Breakfast programme wouldn’t have been able to hop onto the blogging bandwagon.

To add insult to injury, because it was done by Five Live Breakfast, this project involved Nicky Campbell. I could have just deleted this entire post and replaced it with the words “Nicky Campbell” and it would have been just as valid. I’ve never listened to Radio Five Live that early in the morning ever since he started presenting the Breakfast programme. I can hardly think of a less pleasant way to spend the morning.

Radio Five Live can and does understand blogging. In fact, I seem to remember Julian Worricker’s programme profiled a few prominent bloggers a year or two ago. But best of all is the weekly Pods and Blogs segment on the wonderful Up All Night programme. Pods and Blogs is made by people who really get what it’s all about, and their segment serves as a reminder of just how much wonderful stuff is going on in the blogosphere (putting the musings of someone like me somewhat into perspective).

As an aside, am I the only person who gets a bit annoyed whenever somebody (almost always a non-blogger) calls a post a “blog”? (See how many people talk about “writing their first blog” in the Breakfast comments.) The blog is the whole thing, surely? People must think it is like “Captain’s Log” or something. (”Captain’s Log, Date 11/03/2007. Today I had four Weetabix for breakfast.”)

But back in the old days when people had to do truly awful things like write stuff down with a pen and paper, I seriously don’t think that anybody in their right mind said, “I am just writing a log now,” or, “It took me fifteen minutes to write that diary!” Diary entries have their modern equivalents: blog posts.