New stuff from the BBC
Posted on Thursday, October 18th, 2007 at 10:31pm. #
I’m away from the office at the moment, so they’re getting on with some neat things, and getting on with launching them. Which is rather good.
last.fm
They’ve official-ized their last.fm feeds (no more ‘sekrit’ fooling about):
BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 2, BBC 6 music, BBC 1Xtra
That puts them more official that Virgin Radio’s rather unofficial last.fm feeds: (edited off for now) and also on last.fm, I’ve also discovered Q Radio. Does anyone know any more feeds from radio stations?
Programme pages
Tom Scott has blogged about this rather more comprehensively than I ever will, but the “/programmes/” site, mostly the brain-child of my department, BBC Audio & Music Interactive, has gone live (in beta) at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/. While the data’s not quite ready, it’s quite a nice start (and hellishly complicated behind the scenes). There’s been a ton of clever fixes to make this work, not least hosting this in a different place to the rest of the BBC’s website (not that you’d spot that), and I’m quite proud that my team delivered this on time.
Podcasts
I note that my recommended small tweaks to the UI have gone live at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/podcasts/directory/ which is good. (You’ll not notice them, but they’ll result in, for me at least, rather less irritating clicking at something that you’d have thought was a link but wasn’t). As part of the continued growth of the podcast section, you’ll also notice The Archers is now finally available as a podcast, which is excellent news; I know that the team worked long and hard at getting this live, so that’s excellent news.
iPM
Interestingly, this project changed name while I was on holiday, but it’s quite an interesting idea: taking the best stories on the ‘net, and making a radio programme about them. Eddie Mair hosts it, and it’ll be covering “some of the best blogs on the ‘net”, so this one won’t get listed at all then. Some of the other people working on it include Chris Vallance, who does a rather excellent podcast at http://pocketplanetradio.typepad.com/, as well as stuff on BBC Radio 5 live, and occasional appearances on BBC Radio Kent. He needs a better photo on that last website, but I’ll not be too rude about him, since he got away lots of plugs for my previous employer on 5live once.
I should go on holiday more often, people do things when I’m away.
Wiliam T
Does that mean the Yahoo! BBC/last.fm widget will be officialised any time soon (or maybe better still, a separate executable developed?) I always thought that was the most obvious use of the feeds.
Also, are people inside the BBC aware of that wretched site-wide 403 error? (I’m hoping you know the one I mean – specifically random ‘bbc.co.uk/foo’-style shortcuts which should redirect to programme homepages (usually news/sport) but produce an error 403 every now and again, I presume due to a faulty server amongst a cluster – but its been going on so long now I’m no longer sure.)
I’m convinced the Archers podcast will be absurdly popular – especially with ex-pats. Plus, if you think about it, how many other long-running soap operas can you download? You’ll get stories from people who’ve stowed them away then listened to 100 episodes in a row… (although I do wonder if it means the production team will now be more restricted in their use of background music and so on – and if the podcast will ever omit elements of the show as transmitted on Radio 4.)
/programmes is very nice – speaking as a fan of the (very) old Whats On listings plain HTML listings that used to be archived by day.
Welcome back by the way – perhaps a post on how you fill a 21 hour flight with audio/video entertainment at some point? – it may come in handy in the future…