KNX 1070, a Southern California news radio station, recently made its program available over the Internet, with streaming content in March and podcasting in late August.

Howard Freshman, director of marketing and promotions at KNX, said that the station is in an exploratory phase, learning more about the possibilities of both fairly new technologies.

Site visitors must register to begin streaming, a process that allows the radio station to gather some valuable statistical data about its general audience. According to Freshman, the tabulated information shows that listeners who access the streaming online at KNX1070.com “are not demographically much different from those who listen to the AM station.”

“Most of the online listening occurs Monday through Friday between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.,” Freshman said, noting that their listeners often use the Internet because they cannot get an AM signal in their office.

As for podcasts, KNX1070.com offers KNX 1070 News On Demand, which Freshman calls “a 5-minute recap of the headlines” that “allows the users to get a grip on what is happening.”

The station podcasts other shows such as “Eyes on Computers with Jeff Levy,” and it makes available several special series including interviews with commentator Michael Jackson.

Freshman told OJR that the station plans to prepare a special online-only program available through podcasting. The station is also is debating whether to offer archives of old podcasts and just how long the podcasts should be available online for downloading.

Freshman acknowledged that both technologies are still developing and said that in the near future, it is possible that there will be one or more full-time employees who will be responsible solely for these Internet broadcasts.

Well over a million people tune to 1070 AM every week, and KNX.com’s podcast audience is steadily growing, Freshman explained. Around 3,000 subscribers utilized this feature on the site after three weeks without any promotion, while online streaming averaged 50,000 sessions a month.

Sony’s popular electronic dog Aibo has turned “newshound” (as Wireless Watch Japan’s Gail Nakada amusingly put it.) In the latest iteration announced Thursday, Sony has given the 6-year-old electronic pet (model ERS-7M3) the ability to read news headlines and even to write its own blog.

Loaded with a version of an RSS newsreader, Aibo’s owner can select his or her own Web sites or blogs – so long as they are written in RSS – for the Aibo to read aloud.

“With one simple voice command Aibo can read the morning’s headline news while its owner folds the laundry,” noted Toshi Kawai, senior manager of Entertainment Robot America (ERA), a division of Sony Electronics, in a press release.

As for blogging, Sony has equipped the new Aibo with a “diary” feature that enables the robot dog to take photos and record short comments about the day’s activities. These can then be uploaded to a blog site on the Internet.

The new model Aibo can also say more than 1,000 English words, and in a nod to multi-culturalism, about 30 Spanish words and phrases such as sientate (sit down), ven aqui (come here), and buen perro (good dog).

The new Aibo will list for $1999. For the most complete third-party review, see PC Magazine’s “The New Aibo Converses.”

Japan is gearing up for the roll out of digital cellphone TV. A consortium of major public and private broadcasters announced Tuesday that service over much of the country would start April 1 and would be called “One Seg(u).”

The Tuesday event, which included presentations delivered by female anchors from each of the major broadcasters, marked the start of a publicity campaign introducing “One Seg(u).”

“One Seg(u)” gets its name from the fact that one of the 13 segments of the 6 Megahertz of spectrum allocated to terrestrial broadcasting of digital television in Japan will be directed to cellular telephones.

The service will be offered without charge to anyone with a special tuner-equipped cell phone, personal computer or car navigation system. Programming will match what is offered on the other 12 digital TV stations.

Along with the announcement, NTT Docomo and KDDI also demonstrated prototypes of handsets that can be used to receive One Seg(u) Tuesday. Docomo’s P901iTV, for instance, will come with a rectangular screen that can be turned horizontally so that one can view the screen as a normal TV screen, while allowing simultaneous access to the keyboard to change channels or use the Internet. A special feature of One Seg(u) is that it allows users to view receive video and audio in the upper part of the screen, while receiving data in the lower half.

As digital TV does not consume much power, viewers can use the Docomo handset for two and a half hours continuously. However, those who wish to view analog stations instead will only be able to watch for an hour and a half.

According to a report in Forbes, the Docomo model is expected to cost some 10,000 yen ($89) more than a standard cell phone.

Terrestrial broadcasting of digital TV began in December 2003. By the end of this year, 90 percent of the Tokyo metropolitan region – which is home to nearly a third of Japan’s total population – will be able to receive the broadcasts, according to TV Asahi’s Tamayo Marukawa, as quoted in the trade publication Keitai Watch.