A phenomenon goes mainstream when it starts popping up on the radio. I discussed the “serious” BBC treatment here. But now, Dublin-based quasi-national radio station Newstalk 106, seems to be making a habit of it. There’s Karlin Lillington‘s residency (Chips with That!) on Geroge Hook. A few weeks ago, Orla Barry (pictured left) interviewed Kate Silver about her 31 days to find a valentines day date blog-project; Kate blogged about it here; and then even came to Dublin in search of her elusive valentine.

Today, Orla was at it again, with a guest (whose name I didn’t catch at the time; sorry, guest) Cauvery Madhavan (blog | bio) in studio who; Cauvery had spent a week on the blogosphere; and they discussed some of the more interesting blogs the guest she had found. The interview discussed three four in particular: that of a US stormchaser; that of a young gay man in India resisting family pressure to get married; and that of a student in Virginia Tech who blogged live about this week’s terrible events there; and on the radio, she mentioned her favourite Irish blog: Donncha O Caoimh’s Holy Schmoly, but it doesn’t seem to have made it onto her list on the Newstalk website.

It was excellent mid-morning radio, but I was a little disappointed that the discussion was merely mostly focussed on the ‘blog as confessional diary’. There’s an awful lot of that, of course; but there is so much more to the web, and certainly so much more to the blogosphere. But, then again, opinion blogs, business blogs, photoblogs, podcasting blogs, and so on, don’t have the same impact or resonance on the radio. More to the point, I think that Newstalk missed several tricks after the interview. Orla’s guest Cauvery said that her pick of the blogs would be on the newstalk website at some stage, but it’s not there yet, that I can see and it’s here now, but it should have been available much more quickly than this, and it doesn’t contain a link to Donncha even though she talked about his site on the show. Moreover, this segment unfortuntely isn’t included in Newstalk’s podcasts. Perhaps Newstalk might think about increasing the amount of archive they make available on the web? Even if they don’t, the might think about the benefits that might/could/would flow from interaction between broadcast and web; starting with the prompt uploading of a page of Orla’s guest’s Cauvery’s links would have been a good start.

Note: the show was broadcast on the morning of 19 April; this message was written later that evening, and updated (text deleted and added as shown; links to Cauvery’s sites added; etc) the following morning after Cauvery’s list had been posted on the Newstalk website.