Links and things
Voting over, Ashley Highfield's successor is chosen
Ian Forrester takes it by a nose. Not that it actually matters (Matt...)
Ian Forrester takes it by a nose. Not that it actually matters (Matt...)
Labels: bbc
fridayforward.com
Weblog by chris bowley. Be gentle, I'm new at this.
Links and things
AS3 coding conventions
Worth a read. Some stuff in there I haven't been doing :/ [via BIT-101]
BBC Sound Index
Marketed under the BBC Switch banner, Sound Index attempts to build charts of the most popular artists using social networking sites. The idea has been kicking around for a while and under the primary-coloured exterior there lies a lot of data which will hopefully be opened up. Its in beta at the moment so will be interesting to see how it develops.
Worth a read. Some stuff in there I haven't been doing :/ [via BIT-101]
BBC Sound Index
Marketed under the BBC Switch banner, Sound Index attempts to build charts of the most popular artists using social networking sites. The idea has been kicking around for a while and under the primary-coloured exterior there lies a lot of data which will hopefully be opened up. Its in beta at the moment so will be interesting to see how it develops.
BBC Innovation Labs
Every time I start to contemplate leaving the BBC (its 5 and a half years and counting) I get the opportunity to participate in something which I I probably wouldn't get the chance to elsewhere. In the past it has been an inspiring conference and last week it was representing BBC Audio & Music Interactive as commissioner at the Innovation Labs in the North West of England.
Having shortlisted 10 proposals pitched across Future Media & Technology and Vision disciplines, the teams of 'professional creative technologists' (as the Labs' about page describe them) spent a week developing their idea and their presentation techniques. Half-way through the week we, the commissioners, joined them and helped them to focus their pitch before presenting them on Friday morning.
While only a few of the proposals were commissioned on Friday, both the independent companies and the BBC gain a great deal from the process. It was a great opportunity to meet people from across BBC Future Media & Technology and Vision (it is a big place after all) and discuss problems and ideas with creative people from the commercial sector. The teams themselves gained as much from each other as they did from the organisers and leave (at the very least) with a small pile of business cards in their back pockets.
Having shortlisted 10 proposals pitched across Future Media & Technology and Vision disciplines, the teams of 'professional creative technologists' (as the Labs' about page describe them) spent a week developing their idea and their presentation techniques. Half-way through the week we, the commissioners, joined them and helped them to focus their pitch before presenting them on Friday morning.While only a few of the proposals were commissioned on Friday, both the independent companies and the BBC gain a great deal from the process. It was a great opportunity to meet people from across BBC Future Media & Technology and Vision (it is a big place after all) and discuss problems and ideas with creative people from the commercial sector. The teams themselves gained as much from each other as they did from the organisers and leave (at the very least) with a small pile of business cards in their back pockets.
Scrobble your BBC Radio listening
Last year I wrote a Yahoo Widget which allows you to listen to BBC Radio and scrobble the tracks to your Last.fm profile.
The Last.fm profiles for Radio 1, Radio 2, 6 Music and 1 Xtra are now public (they were originally created under pseudonyms), so I thought I should update my widget and also write a version for OS X Dashboard. So I did.
You can read more about them on the BBC Radio Labs blog which accompanies our new Radio Labs site.
Or you can download them here:
Download for OS X
Download for Yahoo! Widgets (version 4.5 or higher required)
These are still in beta (and may never be otherwise) so please let me know if/when you find any glaring bugs!
The Last.fm profiles for Radio 1, Radio 2, 6 Music and 1 Xtra are now public (they were originally created under pseudonyms), so I thought I should update my widget and also write a version for OS X Dashboard. So I did.You can read more about them on the BBC Radio Labs blog which accompanies our new Radio Labs site.
Or you can download them here:
Download for OS X
Download for Yahoo! Widgets (version 4.5 or higher required)
These are still in beta (and may never be otherwise) so please let me know if/when you find any glaring bugs!
Labels: bbc, music, prototypes, radio
BBC Web API: Officially the 18th best API in the world
According to the latest issue of .Net magazine at least. That's a whole place higher than Twitter! Naturally Google Maps and Flickr take the top spots, but 18th place for our back-of-an-envelope prototype is something I'm immensely proud of.
Radio Pop, Olinda prototypes... its all connected
A few months ago, BBC Audio & Music interactive commissioned a project investigating future forms of physical radio devices. The successful company was Shulze & Webb and now they have finished the feasibility study of their proposal, Matt has posted some information on the project.
The prototype, codenamed Olinda, is essentially a very simple, very social radio; simple in interaction, modular in design. Through the inclusion of a hardware API and additional module, S&W propose to allow users to connect with their friends as they listen to the radio.
To fully achieve this, Olinda requires a web site to connect friends and devices. This is where a once-separate prototype comes in. Radio Pop.
Radio Pop is the result of our latest six week semi-rapid prototyping project in the R&D team. At its core is a database which stores radio listening, upon which we can build various views. By introducing friends lists, schedule information and the ability to simply bookmark, or 'pop', a particular point in time, Radio Pop generates a great deal of information about listening habits. We purposefully kept the database very simple and specified an input and output API so that the repository could be accessed using web and desktop widgets as well as through the Radio Pop web site.
This is only my second Ruby on Rails application (my first will be going live in a couple of weeks for a trial, more on that very soon) and as such it is a little slow. However, the flash graphs we created demonstrate the sort of information a service like this could provide, both historical and live, as demonstrated by my Radio Pop live blog badge:
It is this ability to get live listening information which makes Radio Pop a perfect extension of the Olinda prototype (and vice versa). Olinda will provide a very simple way of listening to what your friends are listening to using Radio Pop as the method of communication. While you listen (using Olinda, through a desktop widgets or through Radio Player), a pulse event is sent to Radio Pop every minute, discretely tracking your activity.
Tristan has much more about the background to Radio Pop and our thinking around it.
The prototype, codenamed Olinda, is essentially a very simple, very social radio; simple in interaction, modular in design. Through the inclusion of a hardware API and additional module, S&W propose to allow users to connect with their friends as they listen to the radio.
To fully achieve this, Olinda requires a web site to connect friends and devices. This is where a once-separate prototype comes in. Radio Pop.
Radio Pop is the result of our latest six week semi-rapid prototyping project in the R&D team. At its core is a database which stores radio listening, upon which we can build various views. By introducing friends lists, schedule information and the ability to simply bookmark, or 'pop', a particular point in time, Radio Pop generates a great deal of information about listening habits. We purposefully kept the database very simple and specified an input and output API so that the repository could be accessed using web and desktop widgets as well as through the Radio Pop web site.
This is only my second Ruby on Rails application (my first will be going live in a couple of weeks for a trial, more on that very soon) and as such it is a little slow. However, the flash graphs we created demonstrate the sort of information a service like this could provide, both historical and live, as demonstrated by my Radio Pop live blog badge:
It is this ability to get live listening information which makes Radio Pop a perfect extension of the Olinda prototype (and vice versa). Olinda will provide a very simple way of listening to what your friends are listening to using Radio Pop as the method of communication. While you listen (using Olinda, through a desktop widgets or through Radio Player), a pulse event is sent to Radio Pop every minute, discretely tracking your activity.
Tristan has much more about the background to Radio Pop and our thinking around it.
Labels: bbc, prototypes, radio
Links and things
Paul Sandoz from Sun writes an interesting post about the RESTful-ness of our BBC Schedule API
I've never claimed to understand all the ins and outs of REST, perhaps now is the time to try..?
iTunes is offering Global Underground's Afterhours Ibiza for £7.99
Not only is that a tenner cheaper than on the high street but you also get an extra 15 tracks... bargain. I've got about half way and its pretty awesome so far.
I've never claimed to understand all the ins and outs of REST, perhaps now is the time to try..?
iTunes is offering Global Underground's Afterhours Ibiza for £7.99
Not only is that a tenner cheaper than on the high street but you also get an extra 15 tracks... bargain. I've got about half way and its pretty awesome so far.
Find Listen Label at Zeitgeist Europe 2007
Mark Thomson talked about the BBC unlocking user creativity during his speech at the Zeitgeist Europe conference earlier this month. To illustrate this he used Find Listen Label as an example. Skip to about 7m 50s in the video:
Short and sweet :-)
Short and sweet :-)
Radio 1 wins Webby
In much-belated news, Radio 1 won the Webby award for radio. This is a great achievement and I'm really proud because the homepage contains a couple of flash apps written by your truly :-)
Hack Day London
Tom has just announced the first Hack Day to be held in Europe. The event is a partnership between Yahoo! and BBC Backstage and will be held at Alexandra Palace over the weekend of June 16th and 17th.
The two day event will see hundreds of creatives, designers and developers come together and attempt to build some fun, cool and interesting stuff. To get everyone in the right mood for rapid prototyping, there will be a number of speaker sessions from Yahoo! and the BBC. Tristan and I will be presenting one of the sessions so you don't need any more reason to sign up for a place! If that's not enough for you, Tom has promised that there will be beer, pizza and a band. And all for free.
This is all really exciting. I'm proud to be a part of what is sure to be a fun and rewarding weekend! Hope to see you there.
The two day event will see hundreds of creatives, designers and developers come together and attempt to build some fun, cool and interesting stuff. To get everyone in the right mood for rapid prototyping, there will be a number of speaker sessions from Yahoo! and the BBC. Tristan and I will be presenting one of the sessions so you don't need any more reason to sign up for a place! If that's not enough for you, Tom has promised that there will be beer, pizza and a band. And all for free.
This is all really exciting. I'm proud to be a part of what is sure to be a fun and rewarding weekend! Hope to see you there.
Labels: bbc, events, hackdaylondon, web
Find Listen Label
After months of internal development, we have today launched a public beta of our Annotatable Audio tool. Titled Find Listen Label, the trial will be available for the current series of the Radio 4 science programme All in the Mind which runs for 4 more weeks.
If you're new to Annotatable Audio, here's a brief summary of what its all about. The project is an exploration of collaborative segmentation of radio programmes. By allowing users to annotate our programmes, we are hoping to make them more navigable using simple factual descriptions and keywords. Interaction is in the form of a wiki, so anyone can create, edit and delete annotations and we hope the community will be self-moderating. Applying a wiki metaphor to time-based media has not been easy and we have had to restrict interaction to non-overlapping annotations, to simplify both the code and the user interface. At the end of this trial we hope to gain information about how people use such a tool, both through simple interaction (listening to discreet programme segments) and more advanced interaction (creating and editing aegments).
On visiting the page, you are in playback mode. You can listen to the programme by moving the playhead, clicking on segments in the timeline or by clicking the various play buttons. Editing a segment or creating a new segment requires you to be logged in (sorry, BBC policy I'm afraid) and selecting either of these actions presents you with the edit page. Here you can alter the start and end times of your segment and edit its title, description and keyword tags. As is the modern way (and so that the audio stays loaded) all of this happens in the same page.
Consuming media on-demand is becoming more prevalent and expectations are rising. Podcasts are not simply recorded radio programmes, they are a new form of content. With the volume of content available to us and information discovered through search rather than browsing, segments of programmes become more valuable but harder to find. Collecting and presenting information about programmes is vital in order for the information they hold to be more visible.
The first Annotatable Audio prototype was developed back in October 2005 and led by Tom Coates (here's his write up of our month's work). When I joined BBC Radio & Music interactive (cough... Audio & Music) we began working on the second phase of development which resulted in an internal wireframe trial last summer. A year after Tristan and I began on the project, we were joined by technical project manager Joti Brar and designer Sarah Challis, who is responsible for the look, interaction and even the name Find Listen Label. Without Sarah we would still be playing with wireframes.
I began working on the project as a Flash developer but during the course of development have become responsible for the entire client application. The basic architecture of which has not changed. I have tried to use Flash only where necessary which has resulted in heavy use of JavaScript to build the interface. One significant change has seen communication with the server move from within Flash to JavaScript which has its drawbacks but results in a single point of entry. I would like to go into more detail about the code, but I'll save that for another day.
I'm really proud of what we have done and I really hope the trial is a success both technically and in terms of user experience. Those of us who have worked on it believe this is a significant step forward in on-demand listening and hope you do too.
If you're new to Annotatable Audio, here's a brief summary of what its all about. The project is an exploration of collaborative segmentation of radio programmes. By allowing users to annotate our programmes, we are hoping to make them more navigable using simple factual descriptions and keywords. Interaction is in the form of a wiki, so anyone can create, edit and delete annotations and we hope the community will be self-moderating. Applying a wiki metaphor to time-based media has not been easy and we have had to restrict interaction to non-overlapping annotations, to simplify both the code and the user interface. At the end of this trial we hope to gain information about how people use such a tool, both through simple interaction (listening to discreet programme segments) and more advanced interaction (creating and editing aegments).
On visiting the page, you are in playback mode. You can listen to the programme by moving the playhead, clicking on segments in the timeline or by clicking the various play buttons. Editing a segment or creating a new segment requires you to be logged in (sorry, BBC policy I'm afraid) and selecting either of these actions presents you with the edit page. Here you can alter the start and end times of your segment and edit its title, description and keyword tags. As is the modern way (and so that the audio stays loaded) all of this happens in the same page.
Consuming media on-demand is becoming more prevalent and expectations are rising. Podcasts are not simply recorded radio programmes, they are a new form of content. With the volume of content available to us and information discovered through search rather than browsing, segments of programmes become more valuable but harder to find. Collecting and presenting information about programmes is vital in order for the information they hold to be more visible.
The first Annotatable Audio prototype was developed back in October 2005 and led by Tom Coates (here's his write up of our month's work). When I joined BBC Radio & Music interactive (cough... Audio & Music) we began working on the second phase of development which resulted in an internal wireframe trial last summer. A year after Tristan and I began on the project, we were joined by technical project manager Joti Brar and designer Sarah Challis, who is responsible for the look, interaction and even the name Find Listen Label. Without Sarah we would still be playing with wireframes.
I began working on the project as a Flash developer but during the course of development have become responsible for the entire client application. The basic architecture of which has not changed. I have tried to use Flash only where necessary which has resulted in heavy use of JavaScript to build the interface. One significant change has seen communication with the server move from within Flash to JavaScript which has its drawbacks but results in a single point of entry. I would like to go into more detail about the code, but I'll save that for another day.
I'm really proud of what we have done and I really hope the trial is a success both technically and in terms of user experience. Those of us who have worked on it believe this is a significant step forward in on-demand listening and hope you do too.
Radio 1 nominated for 2 Webbys
BBC Radio 1 has been nominated for 2 Webbys. Some might say its all down to the SMS tag cloud on the homepage... Don't know who though.
