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Like most organisations the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ has its own technical ecosystem; the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's is pretty much restricted to Perl and static files. This means that the vast majority of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's website is statically published - in other words HTML is created internally and FTP'ed to the web servers. There are then a range of Perl scripts that are used to provide additional functionality and interactivity.

While there are some advantages to this ecosystem there are also some obvious disadvantages. And a couple of implication, including an effective hard limit on the number of files you can save in a single directory (many older, but still commonly used, filesystems just scan through every file in a directory to find a particular filename so performance rapidly degrades with thousands, or tens of thousands, of files in one directory), the inherent complexity of keeping the links between pages up to date and valid and, the sheer number of static files that would need to be generate to deliver the sort of aggregation pages we wanted to create when we ; let alone our plans for /music and personalisation.

What we wanted was a dynamic publishing solution - in other words the ability to render webpages on the fly, when a user requests them. Now obviously there are already a number of existing frameworks out there that provide the sort of functionality that we needed, however none that provided the functionality and that could be run on the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ servers. So we (the Audio and Music bit of Future Media and Technology - but more specifically Paul, , Michael and Jamie) embarked on building a (MVC) framework in Perl.

For applications that run internally we use . Because we enjoy using it, its fast to develop with, straight forward to use and because we use it (i.e. to reduce knowledge transfer and training requirements) we decided to follow the same design patterns and coding conventions used in Rails when we built our MVC framework. Yes that's right we've built Perl on Rails.

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Some music, radio and technology links from the past week or so. You can find more at my .

Some thoughts on and and how UX needs to engage with making these processes simple and understandable. I think we might need to start down this path sometime.

"Dialup Radio is a tool that distributes human rights and independent media via telephone." Uses interactive voice menus to navigate to content and is based on , an open-source VOIP solution.

Type in a song or band and listen to is stream (no downloads). It seems to grab audio from YouTube videos, based on my test search, as well as the usual suspects I guess. As Matthew says "Just tried it with the song that happened to be playing on my iPod (Fela Kuti's Army Arrangement). Hole in one. I'm impressed."

An RDF ontology for describing TV and radio programmes. It covers brands, series (seasons), episodes, broadcast events, broadcast services, etc. By Yves, Michael and Patrick here.

A simple attention profile generator for music - it takes your last.fm profile, grabs the top artists and creates APML from the most common tags. Nice.

At the Asian Network Mela on August 12th 2007 we launched a bluetooth sharing application for mobiles called Collect and Share, using technology that was created by a company called .

It’s a simple concept, a person is able to download and install the application on their phone and to start with they have this screen with some pieces of content that they can view, things like audio and video:

To unlock more content that person then has to share their unlocked assets with someone else using bluetooth.

Typically an app like this is distributed at an event via a bluetooth hub that searches for phones that have Bluetooth switched on and sends a message asking the owner of the mobile if they want to receive the application. The good thing is that your friend doesn’t need to have the Collect and Share app installed to receive content from your phone.

Three types of content are available, video, for example Dj Kayper scratching, audio such as a 30 second Bobby Friction mix and images of the various Asian Network presenters all of which come embedded within the app. The screenshot on the left is how we originally envisioned the interface to work when viewing video and the one on the right is the final implementation:

To keep the file size down we had to make a few compromises, so no full screen video unfortunately, the bitrate for audio had to be kept to a minimum and technical constraints also resulted in not having prompts like the progress bar. Constraints aside the Collect and Share as a concept has lots of potential. Cost is often an issue that puts people off downloading files onto their phones and so this provides an easy way to distribute content.

In terms of the design we tried to be playful, so instead of the usual system pop-ups you get when searching for devices and sending stuff it all happens in the app with the appropriate look and feel.

To get people started we created a prompt to introduce the idea of view and sending content:

This example is when you search and send content to someone:

We initially had a game like interface in mind, something along the lines of the very addictive game for the DS . However this couldn’t be implemented as Future Platforms gave us a grid structure we had to adhere to (although its still something I’d like to explore at another time). For fans of the Lyriscist Lounge albums it by sheer coincidence that the look and feel bears a small similarity to the album cover of the second volume:

Creating small, simple experiences like this is also a really good complement to an event. It gives you something to do while you’re waiting in a queue, you get something special to keep on your phone and something to share with your friends. The social aspect of collect and share is that bit that excites me the most. There are a few products around such as the that enables you to be alerted of other Sensor users nearby, exchange messages and view user profiles. A recent project from a team of researchers at Bath University have created a facebook tool called . It’s an app that scans for other phones and lets you know if the people you bump into regularly on the street are also using Cityware and if you want to add them to your facebook account. There are lots more projects in this area that I could mention such as and that introduce unique ways to create social networks with other people out on the street but that’s for another post. Although Collect and Share does not enable you to create and track social networks like the projects I’ve just mentioned, the hands on pass it on element is inspiring to see in action. Having observed friends using it, the comment that was mentioned the most was that it takes you back to swapping stickers in the playground. It’s always nice to be transported back to you’re youth I think! Hopefully the Collect and Share application is an experiment we can build on in the future as the technology gets better. I’ve posted links to the application below, so that you can have a play and feel free to leave any thoughts you might have.

The following java files will only work on the specific Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones I've listed below:

Nokia 6280, 6233 phones: Download file

Nokia N70, N72, N91, 6630, 6680: Download file

Nokia N73 phones: Download file

Sony Ericsson K750i, W800i, W810, K610i: Download file

Sony Ericsson W550, W600, Z550: Download file

Sony Ericsson K800, W850, W880, T650, W900: Download file

The electronic engineering department of Queen Mary, University of London, have what looks like a really interesting about digital music, music discovery and other related research. The next one is tomorrow afternoon (28th November) and features , author of talking about . A few of us are thinking of going along to listen, maybe see you there?

If I'm honest we're a bit obsessed with URLs and what makes a good one. You might think this is a little odd, a bit geeky or simply pointless - but you would be wrong. and are at the heart of Web 2.0.

As two of the key principles of Web 2.0:

- It's the data stupid (Formerly "Data is the Intel Inside")
- Small pieces loosely joined

Much of our current work here, at the Future Media and Technology bit of Audio and Music (where I work), is about trying to make our data available in loosely coupled bite size chunks. We are doing this because we want to build applications, and allow others to build applications, that support collaboration and innovation. We want to make our data accessible and mashable so that we can make it easier for people to find our programmes, discover new music and generally ferret out more information about the subjects that interest them.

So what's this to do with URLs? Loads. URLs are the mechanism we all use to point at stuff on the Internet this means that the URLs need to be persistent - they need to reliably point to the same resource - and ideally that resource is a single thing or concept so that the data can be easily aggregated and combined with other data sources.

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We're now in our second week of rolling out our music based podcasts. This is big news for Audio & Music interactive and we're pretty excited about it.

Why? Well we've been offering radio programmes as podcasts since late 2004 now, but so far we have not included any commercial music for rights reasons. We have included unsigned music from various new/unsigned radio programmes such as Radio Northampton's Weekender and 1Xtra's ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖgrown shows, but up to now we've had to offer speech-only podcasts from radio stations who mainly broadcast music. So for example we have the Chris Moyles podcast, the Radio 1 Entertainment News podcast and the Scott Mill Daily all of which comprise of speech which has been broadcast in those programmes.

The great thing about these is that they allow our radio stations to have a presence on people's MP3 players, and on services like iTunes. They also make some of our radio content not only available on-demand, but also portable. Which is great. But so far no music, which has not been great.

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It’s been nearly a week since we our first iteration of our podcast directory customised for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and the reaction as been great. It’s been picked up by , some industry news sites, and by Apple themselves who made it a staff pick in their webapps directory - as I write, we're up to 2nd most popular in their .

Of course, along with coverage has come comment, and we thought we'd try and answer some of the questions that have been raised in blogs and articles across the web.

Firstly, performance on EDGE. Some people have mentioned that there is no play button sometimes. All our test in the office on an iPod Touch and iPhone over WiFi have been fine. However, when testing on EDGE, we've noticed a number of issues. After a lot of emails and rooting around for info, it seems O2 have a proxy server that replaces content on the fly to speed up web-over-EDGE performance. This includes downgrading images, and removing any references to Mp3's - hence the lack of a play button. In the States, there’s no such proxy, so although its slower, US users get the full playback experience. We trying to see what we can do about this issue in the UK, but for now, we have to consider that our directory is WiFi only.

Some people have also mentioned issues with accessing music podcasts outside the UK. Due to rights restrictions, we have to block some of our content to those outside the UK. At present our technology only allows us to do this on a download attempt, or when you try to view the podcast's feed page. It’s been suggested that it would be more helpful to hide these podcasts from the browse lists for international users. We agree, and we're working to see how feasible this is, but its not something we can do imminently due to other project commitments, and the limitations of our technology infrastructure.

Another thing many people have asked it why we did this for the iPhone when its perfectly capable of displaying the 'normal web'? Well, we thought that although the podcasting user experience was already passable on the iPhone/Touch, a lot of work could be done to improve media integration - particularly embed code for QuickTime. Also, browsing was quite clunky - something we thought we could improve with a native iPhone-style interface, without losing any of the functionality. Chris Johnson came up with a neat hack enable e small embed control to play the mp3 files. This means a very small play button (on the right of the embedded control), but a much slicker transition from web to audio - something the regular directory was poor at.

Also commonly asked was "why this device, and only this device"? We've always said, this was a first step. We hope to bring our podcast catalogue to multiple platforms (including other mobile devices), and we've begun work on that already, but we had to start somewhere. The iPhone/iPod Touch were some of the first WiFi enabled mobile devices to be launched since we built our xml-based podcast directory - and we thought that made it a good target to tackle first. In addition, we did this as part of our 10% time allocation - the idea being we can work on things outside the usual constraints. We could have kept it internal and admired our own handy work - or we could release it to the public so they could share in the fruits of our labour.

Lastly, the ability to download, ...or not. This is a limitation of the iPhone and iPod Touch - they haven't got an accessible filesystem, so it's impossible to save web-based files of any kind. We're a bit powerless to do anything about this, but when Apple release the iPhone SDK in March, we may be able to do something more with the device's filesystem.

There are of course other issues ongoing: improving the browse functionally and the left/right page slide, making it lighter and more AJAX-heavy, working with Apple/O2 to improve EDGE performance, getting Apple to massively improve their support for embedded audio etc. But please be patient, we've got loads of other projects on the go, not least to bring this very service to the other platforms you've been asking for.

Right better go. Lots of typing to do and code to write...

Myself and Tristan make up the full-time R&D team for ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Audio & Music interactive. We try to organise our work so that we can concentrate on a single rapid prototyping project for around 4-6 weeks with input from other members of A&Mi. These projects can range in scope but generally result in an internal or public prototype.

The latest R&D project focussed on live events (i.e. festivals and concerts) and coincided with the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Electric Proms. The project team was made up of myself, Yasser Rashid and Sarah Challis but we also consulted with various members of the department who develop and maintain sites for our live events. We decided to develop a site for the Electric Proms which was made up of content sourced entirely from outside bbc.co.uk, aggregating information and media held on other sites. Our event sites are often heavy in the resources they require to design, build and maintain but most of the work is editorial, producing the site content. Our approach was to explore how much of this we could automate, even if the result was not a fully practical solution.

The basic constraint was imposed that we held as little information as we could, storing only links to resources for each individual gig held and venue used during the Electric Proms. The resources chosen to provide content for the site were , , and . Andrew Barron (senior producer for music events sites across bbc.co.uk) created events on Last.fm and Upcoming for each gig so it was simply a job of matching these up to the list of events. As both sites provide similar sets of information regarding events, we decided to use Upcoming to provide event information and Last.fm for attendance information. We also brought the Last.fm social network into our site to incorporate an important feature of an event: participation.

Yasser and Sarah spent time looking at the event timeline and how both those attending the event and those not attending interact with each other and the event site. We felt it was important to bring this participation into our site and using Last.fm's social network provided a quick way to prototype this.

Our constraints resulted in a design made up of four templates: gigs, venues, users and a landing page. The Electric Proms branding was incorporated along with a simple and bold style, assigning a colour to each template. A column-based layout provided a flexible way of displaying the content when we didn't know its length.

Here's some shots of the resulting site:

The QuickTime movie below shows the slides from the presentation we gave to wrap up the project

This project did not result in a public prototype because of the way in which we used data from Last.fm and Upcoming to build the site. Also, the simple prototype aggregates the page content each time it is accessed which is clearly completely impractical for any site which expects a large number of users.

We have begun to use third party content across bbc.co.uk from sites including , and . Our project was an exploration of how we might use third party content in the future as it is undoubtedly something that will become more prevalent.

There's a new comedy on Radio 4 tonight - Listen Against. As the programme's website puts it...

With the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's Listen Again facility there is just too much radio to listen to again. So Listen Against listens again to Listen Again on your behalf and then puts it all back on the radio. Only quicker.

I'm sure it will be available to Listen Again later this evening.

So last Friday, Apple launched the iPhone in the UK. A few months before, the iPod Touch launched here too. A few weeks before that, the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ turned its Download and Podcast trial into a full-blown service. This means loads more podcasts (including the seminal Archers podcast), a new Podcast directory, and loads of publicity.

Here at ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Audio & Music, we like to try new things - so we thought we'd see what we could do with Apple's new devices as a first step for optimising our formidable Podcast catalogue for lots of different platforms.

The idea was to make our content playable on the iPhone and iPod Touch in an easier way that navigating through the normal web-based directory. Hopefully this would allow people to a) more easily discover our content and b) be able to catch up on their favourite podcasts if they had been unable to sync their device to iTunes. The motivation behind this was that Apple's WiFi iTunes store was not supporting podcast subscriptions or downloads - a service we thought we could try and help with.

What we’ve built is a version of our normal podcast directory, but optimised for the iPhone’s user interface. It allows you to browse all the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ’s Mp3 podcasts by radio station, genre, or in an A-Z list. You can then stream and listen to all the available episodes directly on the device. Limitations with the iPhone / iPod Touch prevent you from downloading the podcasts and listening to them outside of a WiFi or EDGE connection area, but for sitting in a café and catching up on the latest Moyles or NewsPod, its just great.

Chris Johnson (also from Audio & Music), and I thought we'd try and tackle this duing "10% Time" - basically, we get a couple of days a month to try out crazy ideas, and see if we can make anything of them.

To get us started we took Joe Hewitt's excellent and the data from our podcasting directory and began to optimise the off-the-shelf code. This included more AJAX-like loading, image placement (including some nifty reflection stuff courtesy of ), and a bit of serious back-end work to enable it to run on the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's web infrastructure.

Well, our first crack as it is here… /radio/podcasts/directory/ip/ or you can just go to bbc.co.uk/podcasts from your iPhone or iPod Touch browser. Remember, to see this on a PC you Safari 3 Beta - as it doesn't work in any other browser. You can also read more about it through Apple's . We're also chuffed to bits that today, they've chosen it as a Staff Pick. Cheers guys!

There’s still lots to do though. We're working on an even better version which should be faster, cleaner and will work on the EDGE network (although you'd be brave to download a Chris Moyles Enhanced podcast over EDGE!). This next version also uses the new IUI release which offers loads of more enhancements, and looks even more like the native iPhone interface.

Of course, we're open to suggestions for improvements, and even code itself if you want to get really stuck in.

And this isn't the end. Although we like the iPhone and iPod Touch, they’re only one platform. We'd like to bring the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's Podcast directory to more devices - perhaps PSP, Windows Mobile, IPTV - who knows. Now we just have to find the time……

Thanks to Chris Johnson for being an awesome working partner on this project.

This is the new ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Radio Labs blog - a place where we, ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Audio & Music Interactive, write about what we're working on, look at developments in music and radio in the digital world and show some of our prototypes for new sites and services. Prototypes and betas are really important to us and we want to get them out there for you to see and tell us what you think. They are all at an early stage of development and some of them might not work quite right, some might look a bit sketchy, some may never be taken any further, and some may simply disappear without warning. We'll write about every new beta we release so please play with them and come back here to let us know what you think. Also let us know if there's anything in particular you'd like us to write about.

I'm Tristan Ferne and I work in the Future Media & Technology team at ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Audio & Music Interactive, the people that bring you /radio/ and /music/, the Radio Player, podcasts, digital radio, our interactive TV services, our mobile sites and more. I do R&D within our team, working on innovative ideas and building prototypes and I thought you might like to know about some of the cool things we do. I also blog at . But it's not just me, other team members will be posting here as well...

Chris Bowley - "I am a software engineer in the R&D team. I build working prototypes around new ideas we have and to investigate technologies we are interested in. Recent projects have centered on , and gaming, my specialist subject." Chris also blogs at .

James Cridland, Head of Future Media & Technology, ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Audio & Music Interactive - "I've worked in radio since 1989; mainly in commercial radio (Emap and most recently Virgin Radio). I've done quite a few jobs, and I have a dubious claim of being the first local radio presenter to read out an email address on-air. (I didn't get very many)." James also blogs at , and elsewhere at the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ.

Simon Cross, Senior Client-Side Developer - "I spend my days trying to stretch the limits of where content can be consumed. This might be mobile devices, on-demand audio and video, socal networking apps, mashups or new-age web apps. I'm particularly passionate about JS, PHP and audio."

Chris Kimber, Managing Editor - Chris runs the music side of Audio & Music Interactive, including the music radio networks. I'm hoping he's going to bring an editorial and content perspective to the blog.

Yasser Rashid - "I'm a senior interaction designer at Audio & Music Interactive and this involves being across a diverse range of projects such as the various websites we do for radio networks, prototypes for mobile, DAB and IPTV applications and R&D projects. I'm going to be posting here about work in progress and interesting projects that are emerging from the arts community and universities that are relevant to the work we do here."

Tom Scott - "I'm a Technical Projects Team Leader which basically means I manage a team of Technical Project Managers and help work out how we are going to deliver some of our interactive audio and music stuff. I'm interested in technology and design and how to combine them to create useful interactive products." Tom also blogs at .

So there you have it, a fine line-up. We've got a number of prototypes completed and ready to write about and a few in the pipeline, so why not subscribe to the blog?