New stuff from the BBC

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.