To our friends in the west
Posted on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 9:26pm. #
This week, the part of the BBC that I work in (Future Media & Technology) have been running a series of talks: designed to share information on what each team is doing. And today, it was the turn of Audio & Music Interactive, the part of the BBC that I work in (I know, this split personality is dreadful) to come and show some of the things we’ve been working on.
So, we came to Ada Lovelace, which, is a room in the BBC’s Broadcast Centre in White City (which is in the west of London).
Now, a slight diversion. I’m not allowed to take photographs in BBC buildings. I did fill in a photo permit form, which I sent to our local facilities manager in January, but until it’s processed, that’s all I can really do. Instead, the photo above is the closest photo that I can legally use of Ada Lovelace - the person, not the room: that’s her, in Lego format, thanks to Flickr user Andrew Becraft, who’s graciously licensed his photographs as creative-commons.
Right. Anyway, I first introduced my colleague Tom Scott, who eloquently described the hard work we’ve put into /programmes, which is a much more complicated and complex project than its simple design might communicate. Tom then discussed the work going on to replace the backend for the BBC’s music site, and the growth we’ll be able to achieve once we’ve stopped producing that site by hand-cranking a ton of static HTML pages, and using the power of the Musicbrainz database, the output from our playout system, and other feeds to beef up that website. Tom does a good talk, and he was virtually mobbed after the event by eager developers wishing to learn more about the internal and external feeds that both products expose of data, and much of the thought that’s gone behind their design.
I then filled manfully as Macs were unplugged and replugged, and then Yasser Rashid spoke about visualising radio. Adding visual content to radio is an important part of our work this year, and Yasser’s clear enthusiasm for this was evident. Some of the work, especially the mockups of visualisations, is quite stunning, and again got a lot of questions.
What’s evident is that we’re doing a lot of groundbreaking work in “FM&T for A&Mi”, as I’ve quietly rechristened our department. But what’s also evident is that, with the exception of the BBC Radio Labs blog, we’re being particularly expert in keeping it quiet; so I look forward to making a little more of a noise about us.
Perhaps now might be a sensible time to point to my unnaturally quiet speaking engagements (there’s some tbc to go in there in Scandinavia and Amsterdam, incidentally). If you’re internal to the BBC, we’re happy to pop along to your team meetings, and if you’re external, then do get in touch.
