I love this thing you've made. I've been exploring the world with radio since long before the WWW was invented. I used to carry a shortwave radio with me wherever I traveled back in the 1970s and 80s. I would lie there in the dark in Japan listening to the broadcasts out of North Korean screeching about the "Great Leader" (Kim Il-sung) or in Thailand listening to the Khmer Rouge (whom I couldn't understand, but I knew who controlled Cambodian broadcasts) or in the UK listening to Africans (not putting on a show for Americans but putting on a show for their own people) or on the East Coast of the US listening to callers to talk shows in the UK arguing about local issues. What do people there talk about amongst themselves? What do they like to listen to? What does such-and-such language sound like? I loved exploring the world this way.
My kids don't understand how magical the world is today--how they can do what cost me so much money and time and effort by doing nothing more than poking a few icons on their phones. These things don't mean much to them; they were born into a world where magic was just daily life.
But, things like this are still magical to me, even though I've been a developer for decades. Somehow, even knowing how the "tricks" are done, I still think it's magic. Just tonight, I fed YouTube into my HD TV and watched as someone walked around my old neighborhood in Tokyo with a 4K camera. Then again where I used to live in Seoul. And a couple of days ago, I found something for my father out in the desert a thousand miles from here by using Google Street View to "drive" down a remote highway, looking around until I found it. And now I can just spin the globe and point at a dot to hear a broadcast coming from that location. I've been listening to online broadcasts for 20 years using lists of online radio stations, but this is so much nicer.
I sometimes wonder if I'm the only one who sees all of this as real-world magic.
You are not alone. I've been online for over 30 years now, since the mid-1980s, and deeply involved in Internet technology. And yet I still find applications of that technology that are wonderfully magical. (This radio.garden is one of them!)
I'm with you - I can remember copying a tape of french punk music from my high school language teacher and how I found it so fascinating that there was this whole other music and cultural thing happening that I'd probably never have access to and now I click on this globe and it pops right up.
I also want to add what a terrific user experience this site provides. It's "technically" no different than a list of radio stations from around the world, but the presentation definitely makes it seem magical.
The next step will be AR/VR where I can hold a globe in the palm of my hand and spin and poke at it to get radio stations.
Not the only one - I agree. Actually I think Clarke's third law is wrong (Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic):
Technology is magic. The reason why many people get uncomfortable when speaking of magic is that they think it's something otherworldly, and thus non-existent.
But magic is what we do, it's just a mystery for those who don't know the incantations and methods. That goes for technology as well as rhetoric, or medicine, or politics or what have you.
We even call it magical but it's somehow OK only if we don't really mean it. :-D
Not alone! I'm more into TV though. I have international free streaming TV channels as bookmarks. Starting from DW to NHK World. These international TV channels give a glimpse into the culture, viewpoint of a country IMO.
It would be very nice to have similar interface for TV channels instead of sites like filmon.
- Let the radio keep playing while the user scrolls the map and until they click on a different spot.
- Run a kickstarter for creating a mobile app for this and getting a paid key to the Bing maps. Having the MVP already running I think it'll sell like candy!
- Labels for the stations, cities, etc. The UI should be great on this, so the user feels like traveling across the world! Maybe even include Google Street View? Not sure, just a thought..
How did you populate this map? I looked at the Transnational Radio Encounters dataset and didn't find a list of stations, let alone a link to their stream.
I love this!
There are some missing stations in Norfolk, UK, Suffolk, UK and London, can I submit these?
You are missing:
Future Radio (107.8fm)(Norwich, Norfolk)
Radio Caroline (DAB)(Norwich, Norfolk)
North Norfolk Radio (96.2fm, 103.2fm)(Norwich, Norfolk)
Norwich 99.9FM (99.9fm)(Norwich, Norfolk)
Kiss 105-108 (Norfolk 106.1, Suffolk 106.4)
TheBeach (103.4fm, 97.4fm)(Lowestoft, Suffolk & Gt. Yarmouth, Norfolk)
Town 102 (102.0fm)(Ipswich, Suffolk)
ICR FM (105.7fm)(Ipswich, Suffolk)
Dream 100 (100.2fm)(Colchester/Clacton On-Sea, Essex)
Magic (105.4fm, DAB)(London)
Kiss100 (100.0fm, DAB)(London)
Radio Garden has been stuck on "Planting Radio Garden" (http://i.imgur.com/ncmxjrm.png) for a while now. Is this because of poor connection on my part, or is it le Reddit Hug of Death?
Amazing website, though.
edit: Apparently it's a Chrome problem. Works fine in Firefox. Cheers!
Hey, amazing project! Surfed over Eastern world radio stations for about an hour. Didn't found any convenient way to report bug, but currently Georgia (country, not state) is shown as "Tbilisi, United States".
I actually like the Arcgis imagery better. It's easier to tell at a glance where I am in the world. Then again, I don't know if it was fully functioning when I saw the Bing imagery.
I'm not seeing any volume control on the page, weird.
To be clear, of course my macbook volume control works, but even with that set at the minimum, the radio volume is punishingly loud (to these ears at least)
It seems our non-profit Bing maps key was revoked.. Switched to Arcgis imagery instead for now. Too bad, the Bing imagery was really great.