³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ

Hi all! I work in ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Audio & Music's Distribution Technologies team, where we look after lots of things relating to how our output is delivered via the different technologies. I look after the IP delivery area which includes streaming strategy, capacity and infrastructure and looking after IP device manufacturers (eg. WiFi Radios). One of the things we have for these manufacturers is an aggregation feed of all our podcasts. I thought it would be good, now that it's automated, to talk about this on the Radio Labs blog.

[Oh, and if you are a device manufacturer who is looking to have a chat about our IP delivered content - don't hesitate to email me direct on the usual bbc email style - firstname.lastname@bbc.co.uk]

It's in a generic OPML, and I don't think I need to go through this with you as I think it's relatively self-explanatory (shout if you need me to).

/radio/opml/bbc_podcast_opml.xml

Or (as someone needed on the Backstage list) one with an .opml extension:

/radio/opml/bbc_podcast_opml.opml

Slight caveat - dateModified doesn't currently represent the correct date (it's stuck sometime in the past) - so ignore! We're working on that.

The OPML only lists all of the RSS feeds available, with links to them, and not the actual content of the RSS. This is the way this is supposed to work, and it means that it isn't tied to update every time a new episode appears. It will only update when an entire podcast is taken off, or added.

Also - you might find this node useful. It's not part of the OPML spec but, hey, it's XML so no worries:

<bbcstats genres="Urban|Music|Sport|News & Current
Affairs|Factual|Comedy & Quizzes|Entertainment|Religion & Ethics|Arts &
Drama|Classical|World|Pop & Chart|Rock &
Indie|Science|Childrens|History|Folk & Country|Jazz|Classic Pop &
Rock|Music Documentaries|Blues Soul & Reggae|Dance|Soap|Experimental"
language="en-gb|cy|es|ar|zh|ga|gd|fa|pt"
networks="1xtra|fivelive|wales|6music|worldservice|radio4|cymru|radio3|a
siannetwork|northernireland|radio1|tees|bbc7|radio2|scotland|manchester|
coventry|radio|oxford|lancashire|london|northamptonshire"
rssencs="mp3|m4a" rsstype="audio-download"/>

Which lists all of the podcast genres used, languages, networks available. It also lists rssencs which is simply a unique lists of the formats used, and the type that the podcast payloads are - in this case, these podcasts are always a download. This is for future purposes.

Since it's automated it reflects changes to the podcast offering (presented visually in the ), and we aim to keep this at the same location.

I'd like to hear any feedback you might have about this.

Update - 2008-06-17:

• addition of the 'allow' attribute in the 'outline' nodes - can be set to 'all' to signify no geographical restriction, or 'uk' to signify that the podcast is restricted to the UK (which would mean that the servers won't allow IP addresses not located in the UK to download the podcast)
• correction of the dateModified node to correctly represent the last time the OPML was updated.

"Enter your last.fm username to create a feed of new and upcoming music releases from the artists you scrobble." Or, indeed, enter the username of a ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Radio station.

A generation may be ignoring spelling and grammar but it is also "creating an artistic culture more vibrant and imaginative than arguably any that has preceded it".

Is music discovery the next big thing? Or is everyone happy with ad-supported music radio?

Some interesting talks:

Some good principles and justification for APIs (featuring Twitter and Digg). "There's a universe of cool stuff that you can't predict. An open interface signals readiness for whatever may come."

A recent presentation from the IA Summit conference, learn about how Information Architecture is about connections and contexts

And some upcoming events:

The 2nd ACM International Conference on Recommender Systems.

A free conference on innovation at the South Bank in London.

More at

Taking place in Manchester between the 1st and 5th of May is , a festival consisting of art, music and a conference. A group of us from Audio & Music Interactive will be attending and Tristan and I will be talking about how we have been experimenting in mixing radio with social networks, games and new hardware. The conference runs over two days (1st and 2nd) and during that time we will also be basing ourselves somewhere within the Contact Theatre and building some radio related prototypes in full public view. It sounds a bit crazy but hopefully this open format will enable us to collaborate with the conference attendees by trying out ideas in the space and also inviting anyone to come and join us if they fancy getting hands on. I'm a big fan of using boards and for trying out new ideas so expect some simple but fun interactive stuff to play with. It's the first time we have ever done anything like this and I'm personally really excited about how it will turn out. One of the important aspects of being at a conference is engaging with other people and I'm hoping that this kind of open format will provide a good environment to talk, discuss and share ideas.

The theme of Futuresonic this year focuses on social futures and it brings together a range of people that are developing the next generation of social media. Facebook, Last.fm Myspace, Meebo etc have all taken the limelight in the last few years having had an impact on the way in which people use the internet. However artists and academics have also been experimenting and developing work in this area offering a different perspective on how we can use social media that goes beyond friend lists. In my view mobile tech plays a large role in the next generation of social networking apps particulary in the music space. Ethnographic research we have recently commissioned shows how the mobile phone plays a key role in how 13-18 year olds discover and share music primarily using Bluetooth. The session 'Musical Interfaces' explores the concept of the 'mobile user as a micro-DJ' and it will be interesting to hear what is discussed and shown as this concept is particulary relevant to what we are finding from our research. Such as, the rather obvious, kids playing loud music from their mobile phones on buses and even in some instances taking speakers out with them to amplify the sound even further! What is evident is that music is a social activity and personalisation happens in non-digital ways, so rather than use services like last.fm to recommend music, the recommendations are done by key influencers in social groups.

Gaming and social networking is another perspective that is being explored at the conference and from the Guardian will be talking about how 'gaming can transform social networking' so it will be interesting to hear her views on the subject and hopefully gain lots of inspiration. The session 'Urban and Social Media' also looks really promising. Over the last few years there been several projects that have explored the concept of how locative media can change the way in which we experience the city, examples include - a project that makes it easy to create location based experiences such as games and tours, - a game that is played both in a virtual city and the streets of an actual city and - a project exploring public authoring and mapping. These projects illustrate positive uses of locative technology for education and entertainment for example, and it will be interesting to see how in the future, as the technology gets cheaper and better these experiences will start to become more mainstream. This is one question that the Participatory Media session will be exploring.
, there are lots of great sessions and some fantastic speakers so there's lots to look forward to. And the talks are just one strand of the whole Futuresonic event, and also form a large part of it and I'm going to try and attend as much as I can and being a fan Wu-Tang Clan I cant wait to see the RZA in action!

Possibly not a post of interest to many but we thought we'd share our /programmes schema with you. It's just going through a major rewrite, the results of which should be live on the site soon-ish. In the meantime we hope you think it's as pretty as we do.

It's probably best to note that whilst /programmes and iPlayer take their data from a common pot (PIPs) this is not the schema of either PIPs or iPlayer but has been reshaped slightly for our publishing platform.

If this is of interest you might also like to compare and contrast with the .

Updates

1. 01-06-2008 uploaded schema 1.38

We've just moved to a new blogging platform which should be much better for everyone. The main change is that you have to register before you can leave a comment on this blog, read more about this from Jem on the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Internet blog.

A couple of weeks back I came across a copy of . It passed me by first time around but for a bargain 50p from the local charity shop I couldn't say no.

It's a fine read and it's aged rather well. One section in particular deals with the need for TV producers to provide data about their programmes in order to make them findable by machines. It struck many chords with the work we're doing here and even managed to mention content annotation by viewers / users several years before the words "social software" made their way onto every whiteboard in the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ. Even better it doesn't use the word metadata once.

Anyway, it forced me towards the photocopier (he'd never approve) and the results are here:

13 years later the conversations continue. But hopefully we're getting there.

ps the above was a little long for an alt attribute so it's here again as text:

Being Digital - Nicholas Negroponte

The best way to deal with a massive amount of television is not to deal with it at all. Let an agent do that. Although future computing machines will be as capable of understanding video narrative as you or me, for the next thirty years or so, machine understanding of video content will be limited to very specific domains, like face recognition at ATM machines. This is a far cry from having a computer understand from the video that Seinfeld has just lost another girlfriend. Therefore, we need those bits that describe the narrative with key words, data about the content, and forward and backward references. These will be inserted by humans aided by machines, at the time of release (like closed captions today) or later (by viewers and commentators). The result will be a bit stream with so much header information that your computer really can help you deal with the massive amount of content. My VCR of the future will say to me when I come home, "Nicholas, I looked at five thousand hours of television while you were out and recorded six segments for you which total forty minutes. Your high school classmate was on the 'Today' show, there was a documentary on the Dodecanese Islands, etc..." It will do this by looking at the headers. The bits about the bits change broadcasting totally. They give you a handle by which to grab what interests you and provide the network with a means to ship them into any nook or cranny that wants them. The networks will finally learn what networking is about. First published in Great Britain 1995

"Create beat-matched micro-mixes of your favorite songs to share on blogs and social networks."

A dedicated listener shows how to stream ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ radio on a Chumby, a kind of internet appliance. Unfortunately you can't get Chumbys in the UK yet.

Lovely music visualisation for the Goldfrapp song. Built in Processing with manually annotated sections, beats and lyrics.

Matt talks about Radio 1's use of Facebook for Zane Lowe's Masterpieces. Apparently even Chuck D joined in.

More at