johnbowman.net

Listening to Barbara Budd explain how to get to the As It Happens Web site doesn’t make for great radio. In fact, it’s pretty painful.

And that’s too bad, because they’ve really been putting their site to good use, posting audio archives of their shows and letting their listeners vote on-line on the show’s content, for instance.

The writers on As It Happens have tried several ways of instructing their listeners on the series of clicks needed to get there. There was the “drop-them-in-at-the-deep-end-and-hope-they-can-swim” approach, that went something like this:

“Go to C-B-C dot C-A and follow the links.”

Not terribly instructive, but it’s the script most of the CBC radio shows have gone with, including Quarks and Quirks and, for a while, As It Happens. Ms. Budd experimented with alternatives to “links,” such as “prompts” and even “clues,” the latter being most appropriate considering that the series of links leading to any of the shows’ Web sites is a bit of a mystery.

Eventually, someone at As It Happens decided that people need a little more guidance than that. I imagine that someone phoned their Talkback and complained. The instructions for getting to their site are now more like this:

“Go to C-B-C dot C-A, click on Program Websites, then click on Radio Shows, and then click on As It Happens.”

A little better, but it’s still four steps you have to remember. And even if you do remember them, it’s not all that easy to find the links you’re looking for. “Program Websites,” for example, is one of 17 links down the left hand side of the CBC home page, which also includes lots of distracting news and sports and such.

I will admit that it’s better than how I’ve heard Rex Murphy do it:

“Go to our web site at double-u double-u double-u dot radio dot C-B-C dot C-A slash programs slash checkup.”

Ack. How often do you type slashes to get to a Web site? The whole point of hyperlinks is to avoid all that directory structure nonsense.

What’s needed is a really simple Web address for every CBC show, like the ones that Basic Black (www.basicblack.com) and Radio Sonic (www.radiosonic.com) have.

But, unfortunately, the jerks at GreatDomainNames.com are squatting on asithappens.com and asithappens.net is taken, too. And, although it’s available, asithappens.org just seems inappropriate, not to mention ugly to pronounce.

There are a couple more options for getting an easy-to-remember Web address. The folks at Definitely Not The Opera managed to get a subdomain within the cbc.ca domain (opera.cbc.ca). That’s pretty easy to remember and retains the CBC branding. Would aih.cbc.ca or quirks.cbc.ca be all that difficult to set up?

The other solution is to get a .ca address. In just a little over a week, it’s going to get a whole lot easier to get a .ca domain name, and there are lots available.

And, as it happens, both asithappens.ca and quirks.ca are still available.

If these CBC radio shows really want to get people to their Web sites, to make the Web a part of the show, it only makes sense to make it as easy as possible.

Well, I had to learn a whole new scripting language to do it, but I’ve finally redesigned my Web site. Welcome to johnbowman.net.

Now, it may not look like much of a change. A bit of paint here, some new fixtures there. But this site is structurally a lot different from the old Bowman Webspace. It’ll be a lot easier for me to update this site. And hopefully, it’ll be a lot easier to get around, too, once I’m done with it.

Now, I’m going to get some much-needed sleep

I don’t listen to classical music much. And I don’t tend to read arts columns in the Globe and Mail. But one piece by Russell Smith did catch my eye.

In the column, Smith bemoans the lack of “serious” classical music on CBC Radio Two’s line-up, dismissing the current play list as “a vast desert of middlebrow Mozart and marching bands.”

Now, like I said, I don’t know from classical music. He might be right, and DiscDrive and its kin are classical “Lite FM.” But I’ve also heard Metro Morning host Andy Barrie praise Jurgen Gothe, the host of DiscDrive, for finally putting a classical music show on the air that doesn’t take itself so seriously.

Making a topic accessible to your audience is not a bad thing. It’s what science journalists do all the time, and Smith uses the same phrase to criticize Radio Two that is sometimes used against science journalism: “dumbing-down.”

I hate those words.They imply that anyone who doesn’t speak the same jargon the experts do is stupid.

Smith holds up shows like Brave New Waves as examples of “challenging and intellectual” radio. But a lot of the between-music chatter on Brave New Waves is pretentious on the order of wine tasting notes. “Ruined Placenta’s meaty sound combines goth-tronica and grunge-core with punk and pop sensibilities.” It’s meaningless to anyone who doesn’t know the code.

If Smith thinks the CBC can attract a new generation to Radio Two by putting a musty old music prof on the radio to educate us all in the subtleties of “serious” classical music, he’s wrong.

But then, what can you expect from someone who would use the gradspeak words “prescient modernism” in a newspaper article?

(I do agree with him on reference books, though. I can get lost for hours in a good dictionary.)