I was very happily involved in the Bangladesh River Journey project, being responsible for the Twitter/ Flickr/ BBC entries mashup site, and I’m stoked that the project won this award.

Actually, there a number of ‘hidden’ features that made it even more multiplatform than I think the Sony Radio Awards folk might have appreciated. I’ve written about some of these on the Dharmafly blog.

The mashup site was written - choc full to the brim - with HTML microformats. This would enable a savvy user to utilise all the semantic data associated with the posts, such as their locations and tags, in any way they wish. For example, one might use one of the entries to find other interesting posts nearby that location, or search for similar photos on Flickr, or related web documents…

We also built a full-blown API for accessing all the data in the system. Somewhat overkill for a month-long project, methinks, but interesting nonetheless. For starters, you might use the KML feed from the API to view the whole trip in Google Earth. Or grab the GeoRSS feed and pass it through an appropriate feed reader, web map or mashup tool.

Because the API also exported microformatted HTML, you could do interesting stuff like pass it through an hCalendar to iCal converter and view the iCal feed in Google Calendar or other calendar software.

By harnessing these developing standards for semantic data, it became quite an experiment in letting social media overflow onto any of the multitude of platforms that people may want to use.

BBC Worldservice won Sony’s first Multiplatform award just recently. The project was the Bangladesh Boat Trip which involved a team of people from across the new media space. Ben Sutherland along with many others internally and backstage’s own Prema…

James wandered up to the 8th floor of Bush House, knocked on the commissioning office door and, well, you know the rest. It’s great to win awards but it’s also very exciting to work somewhere where the best ideas can attract support no matter where they come from.