Part of my team at BBC Audio & Music is a small R&D department. I say small - it’s made up of two people; Chris Bowley and Tristan Ferne.

Tristan, as head of that department, is a clever, bright man who never stops thinking. Recently he posted some really interesting thoughts around The Archers; and this afternoon, he’s put a new website live… Radio Pop, our first public prototype.

Sign up to Radio Pop and we will store your listening to BBC Radio. You can then see graphs, charts and lists of your listening, get recommendations from your friends, share your tastes and browse around to see what other people are hearing right now.

Radio Pop is an experimental prototype - we’re doing this to learn things about radio and social software. We don’t yet know how long it will remain live and we make no guarantees as to its reliability or performance but we will do our best to make it better over time and welcome your feedback.

Of note - it uses OpenID (if you want); and is a Rails app.

Read more on the BBC Radio Labs blog; and the blogs of Tristan Ferne and Chris Bowley.

Note: Radio Pop only supports the following browsers: Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Safari 3, Internet Explorer 7, Opera 9 and (almost) Google Chrome. We can’t guarantee performance, functionality or aesthetics in any other browsers. Its. A. Prototype. (grin)