We are happy today to introduce a new way for the CelticsBlog community to listen to great, live broadcasting events such as those produced by Celticsstuff Live and our friends at ESPN Boston...CelticsBlog Web Radio. The radio itself is a program that you can now see running at the top of the left column in many of our pages here at CB. It allows you to easily choose a "station" for listening.
When you "tune in" to a broadcast via the radio, a small popup window will open that contains an embedded media player that will detect whether there is any live broadcasting available and if so, begin streaming it to you automatically. The technologies used are pretty universal. All that is required to run the radio are things you already need in order to use CelticsBlog.
Aside from ease of use, one of the nicest things about the radio is that by opening up a station in a small, separate window from the main site, you are not "pinned" to pages in the main site as you are when players are embedded directly into articles. Instead, you are free to go about your business here reading articles, making comments, engaging in forum discussions, chatting with others and so on.
Ending a broadcast is as easy as either clicking the "Stop" button in the player window, or closing the window itself. The popup player is also nice in that, at least for the vast majority of folks, no third party media player will have to be opened in order for them to able to enjoy the shows we bring your way. You can listen all you wish and never leave CelticsBlog.
The current version of CelticsBlog radio is a simplified version of a larger one I have in the works. We expect we will be expanding our broadcast programming in the future and as we do, we will no doubt be providing the radio with new features as well. For now, we mostly just going to use this feature for live shows provided to us by our partners. After everyone is familiar with using CBWR, we'll probably relocate it a little lower in our left column so that our Members Login/Menu is still our most prominent item there.
We hope you enjoy this new site feature. In time we think it will become a true asset for us as we our "realtime" approach to blogging into the world of live broadcasting.