Oh the irony !   Helen Bowden,  the BBC manager who decided not to cover the July 7 bombs two years ago, but to keep reporting the official  London Transport’s “delays on the line” message, while Sky was telling the world all about the biggest terrorist attack on London, has redeemed herself somewhat.  She’s on the scene at Glasgow airport where a burning car has just rammed the entrance.

Even so Sky News is still beating the BBC on this breaking news story, with dramatic pictures from phones while the BBC shows library pictures of  the airport on a boring day.

BBC managers are in love with 24 hour news, but I’m still not quite sure that they ‘get it’ - or anything that can’t be planned ahead in a meeting.

I the wake of the attempted mass murder by car-bomb in London yesterday, I thought I could drop a timely reminder that one of our clients is the international security expert (and author) Juval Aviv. Juval has been writing up some of his security tips for Summer Travel.

For what it’s worth, here are my own thoughts on the attack. Bombs aimed at nightclubs aren’t about foreign policy, but about attacking our way of life and “loose Western values”. You just have to look at the comments recorded by investigators who foiled the “fertalizer bomb plot” to attack another club, “The Ministry of Sound”. One of the plotters said: “No one can even turn around and say ‘Oh they were innocent, those slags dancing around.”

Recently so called “honor killings” in this country of young women who “go the wrong way” have been linked to Islamic groups waging war on Western values.

So this is the message from the terrorists: if you go out dancing, you aren’t innocent. It doesn’t have much to do with Iraq. It has everything to do with the clash of cultures.

You can watch Gordon’s first cabinet meeting on No 10 Downing Sreet’s YouTube Channel. (Yawn).

Well it’s interesting that No 10 has a YouTube - but I notice that comments have been disabled. Actually Gordon, that’s not democracy.

A nice line about Storynory in the New York Times Tech Talk podcast:  for 20th June. “Warning, these podcasts can be bewitching.”   Super !

I’m glad to see a new podcast by my friend David Edmunds doing enormously well. Philosophy Bites, in which David and Nigel Warburton speak to leading philosophers about such topics as “The Problem of Evil” and “The Meaning of Life” has shot into the iTunes US top 20. It was aided along the way by being featured in iTunes “new and notable” - but I think it shows that there is a real demand for upmarket and challenging programs in the podcasting field.

David writes books and works part-time for the BBC World Service (as I once did) so he knows how to put a program together. The format is really simple but it works, and it’s edited down to a good length - around 12-13 minutes. It’s a little ironic that his podcast is getting thousands more listeners than many of the BBC’s own shows.

Elsewhere I think podcasters are too often guilty of dumbing down. There’s plenty of “dumb” on TV, and there is a big segment of people, particularly in the States, who are searching for something a bit more stimulating for the brain buds. Naturally upmarket programing will attract quality advertisers (think Classic FM). In my view, this is the way to go.

Storynory hasn’t quite IPO-ed yet, but it is in the Wall Street Journal today.

For bedtime stories, just press play
By YING WU

June 16, 2007; Page P2
For families on long car trips, there’s a new boredom killer: free podcasts of children’s stories.

The tales come from London-based Storynory, which offers them on its Web site and on iTunes. Read by a drama-school graduate and aspiring actress named Natasha Gostwick, the 82 stories available range from classics like “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Alice in Wonderland” to new stories written by the Web site’s founders, who are writers. Through the podcast, they hope to generate a fan base for their unpublished tales like “Bertie the Frog” and “Jack and the Pirate School.” The stories are aimed at children up to age

Nikki Markle, a Montana mother of two, says she enjoys listening to the fairy tales together with her kids — with her eyes shut. “I still read bedtime stories to my kids, but [the podcasts] are a nice bonus to have, especially when we travel,” Mrs. Markle says.

With 140,000 downloads last month, co-founder Hugh Fraser, a former radio journalist with the BBC World Service, says he is thinking about adding advertisements to the podcasts, as long at they are not “loud and obtrusive.” For now, the podcasts are ad-free.

HOW TO FIND IT Storynory.com or search for Storynory on iTunes.

I’m glad to say that Storynory has finally made it into the US iTunes top 100 podcasts, in at number 91.

It’s been fairly steady for some time near the top of the Kids and Family Section in the USA, but we are currently receiving a boost at the moment by being featured in the overall Podcast section of iTunes. Thanks Apple !

After Watching last night’s Channel 4 documentary, Diana: the Witnesses in the Tunnel, I was struck by the power of story telling in getting a message, true or otherwise, deeply embedded in the public psyche.

Legend holds that Diana, Princess of Wales, was hounded to death by paparazzi photographers. The car in which she was traveling through Paris almost ten years ago, careered out of control with snappers in close pursuit. The greedy photographers not only failed to help her, but impeded the rescue services while they flashed away at the gruesome crash scene.

The story was put out by the French police almost as soon as the crash had happened, it was repeated in news reports, and wrapped up in bitter accusations by  Mohamed al Fayed and Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer. It has gripped the public imagination ever since.

The plot has the perfect symmetry of a morality tale. The most photographed woman in the world was murdered by photographers. In her brother’s words, a girl named after Diana the huntress became the most hunted woman in the world.

But as it happens, it wasn’t true.

The first photographer (and the first person) on the scene was qualified in First Aid and started to help her. Next on the scene was a doctor. The press pack only arrived minutes later. They snapped away, but did not get in the way. None the less, the police confiscated their pictures and arrested the photographers.

But the power of a perfectly structured narrative is so convincing that it is hard not to believe it. If you want to get a message deep into people’s minds, do it with a story. And blogs and podcasts are the perfect media to unravel that story day by day.

Here’s another example of the way that new technology is merging with pen and paper.  Livescribe is a pen that records audio as you write.  When you touch the notes on your pad, it plays back a recording of what was said that the time that you wrote those particular words.  It’s aimed at students in lecture halls. I think journalists will like it too.   In fact, anyone who has wound backwards and forwards through a recording will see its advantage - providing it works as advertised.

Feedburner has achieved the ultimate web.20 dream of being acquired by Google for a rumored $100m.

It seems that the first fit is between Google’s Analytics Tool - for measuring website visitors (and what they do when they get to your website) - and Feedburner’s charts for measuring the popularity of RSS feeds.  I don’t think anyone doubts that bringing these tools together will produce a wonderful set of  stats all in one place.
We also wonder if Feedburner’s long promised program for adding sponsors to Podcasts will be rolled into Google’s AdSense program… Not to mention RSS Advertising in general.  This has to be where the value is for Google.

Well it looks like Google is going to be even more at the center of my working life from now on…. In fact most things I do online these days are Google… Thank Goodness that WordPress is still independent, so at least I do something that isn’t Google.

Our new story podcast is rather different from Storynory. It’s a political thriller by Juval Aviv, formally of the Mossad. The site and podcast is named after the hero of the novel (whose professional history has a lot in common with Juval). It’s called Sam Woolfman.

The first book in the series (called “Max”) is loosely based on the death of Robert Maxwell and was published last year by Century, a division of Random House. There will be more Sam Woolfman titles, and the plan is that the podcast will seed interest for future books.

Unlike most podcasts by major publishers, this does not involve JUST  background or chats with the author. We will have an interview with Juval at some stage, but the focus of the podcast is a reading of the text by a professional actor. In other words, it’s a quality production that people might spend time with, listen to in the car, on the train, and get to know and like. And it’s free.

What it does have in common with Storynory is a brand-building strategy.  The idea is that a really strong online presence - one that has valuable content and can travel with you on your iPod - will create an appetite for more books and spin-offs.

When I met Juval earlier this year, I found he was a fascinating character, and a gold-mine of conspiracy theories. Steven Spielberg based the central character of his movie, Munich, on him. One thing I can assure about Juval’s future as a thriller writer - he’s never going to run out of plots.

If you aren’t sure what MP3 player to buy you could try listening to some podcasts.