³ÉÈËÂÛ̳

As I mentioned yesterday, this week we will be publishing a series of short posts from researchers who have been studying the online behaviours of listeners and fans of ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ radio. The first post comes from Bethany Klein, now of the University of Leeds, who has been researching behaviour on the messageboards of Radio 1 and Radio 2...

Contrasting Interactivities: ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radio Message Boards as an Extension of and Break from Radio's History of Listener Participation

A case study of ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ radio message boards was conducted in order to explore the relationship between 'new' interactivity, like online fora, and radio's long history of encouraging listener feedback and participation. This section of the project investigated the unresolved definition of interactivity as it relates to traditional and new media, and suggests that provision of an environment that encourages deliberation is important not only for politically-oriented radio, but also for entertainment radio. Message board user perspectives were gathered through open-ended survey responses from 76 users of the Radio 1 and Radio 2 message boards. User experiences with contacting the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳, user understanding of the purpose of the boards and user frustration around the terms of board communication were among the topics considered.

This analysis revealed a correlation between message board use and other forms of contact with the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳; 50% of Radio 1 respondents, and 57.4% of Radio 2 respondents confirmed that they have contacted the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ previously through other means of communication. Radio 1 listeners (younger listeners) were less likely to differentiate message board uses from other forms of contact, and there was no clear agreement among users regarding the primary 'interactive' role of boards, with some viewing them as a way to interact with the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ and others viewing them as a way to interact with other users. Thus, one message board user's request of 'much more input from R1 DJs and presenters and people who have guest mixes/sets on shows' contrasts with another's claim to 'use the Message Board to communicate with the other Board users, not the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳. If I wanted to contact the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ directly, I would do so via e-mail to the producer or broadcaster concerned'.

Users can be understood as interactive experts and it was obvious in the responses that users know how boards should operate and what features are useful. Many requested features common to other boards and many were especially critical of moderator roles on the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ boards. The pressure to stay 'on-topic' was viewed as constraining, feedback was understood as prevented and the concern that posts are not read by moderators in context was voiced.

Ultimately, users described a communication breakdown: getting their views across was considered important to viewers as licence payers and for shaping programming, but there was significant pessimism about the effectiveness of contacting the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳, not only on the message boards but in all forms available. One Radio 1 message board user explained, 'It would be nice if the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ could pay more attention to some of the things that are said on the message boards'.

Taken as a whole, responses demonstrated a perception of the boards as a site for communicating with the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ as well as with other listeners, with features and tools not always successfully facilitating both roles. Specifically, minimal participation of ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ staff does not counterbalance what are viewed as non-standard features and rules. The research suggests that the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ needs to clarify the interactive goals of the message boards, so that activities and tools may be refined accordingly.

Dr Bethany Klein is Lecturer in Media Industries at the University of Leeds

, , , , fan-tagonism, , and . Do these mean anything to you? Sound interesting?

This week the Radio Labs blog is going to be leaving the world of technology we normally write about and will look at another side of the internet. For the past year or so I have been working with three universities on a study of the online behaviours of listeners and fans of ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ radio and over the rest of this week we're going to be publishing guest posts from each of the researchers on their case studies; interactivity on the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radio messageboards, the off-³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ activity of fans of Terry Wogan, fan cultures around the Archers and how the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ serves specialist music fans.

The project has been jointly funded by the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ and the in an aiming to enable collaborative arts and humanities research between the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ and universities in the UK. At the beginning of 2007 the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s Innovation Culture team sent out a Call for Proposals. I had just read and I was interested in how fans of TV and radio programmes (but ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radio in particular) use the internet to interact around programmes and potentially extend the experience of the programme. Things like discussion forums speculating about the plot, fan fiction or user-generated videos based in the fictional world. I was hoping to answer questions like what benefit and value do the fans derive from this behaviour? Does it make them love the programme more? How can fans affect what programmes are made or how the story goes? What benefits are there for the programme makers? And what happens when programme makers try to stop fans making this kind of material?

I was then lucky enough to get into contact with a number of leading researchers in the fields of radio, music and fan studies and we were successful in our bid for funding. Many rail journeys between London, Birmingham and Cardiff ensued and we've ended up with four linked case studies - linked but running fairly independently and using different methods. The culmination of the project happened last week when we had a day presenting the findings to my ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ colleagues and now, over the course of this week, there will be four Radio Labs posts, one from each of the case studies...

"Contrasting Interactivities: ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radio Message Boards as an Extension of and Break from Radio's History of Listener Participation"
Bethany Klein, University of Leeds

"TOGs - 'This Ordinary Group'" - Official and Unofficial Listener Activities around Wake Up to Wogan
Matt Hills and Amy Luther, Cardiff University

"Online fan cultures around The Archers"
Lyn Thomas, London Metropolitan University

"Specialist Music and Public Service Media"
Tim Wall and Andrew Dubber, Birmingham City University

I hope you enjoy them.

I've been bravely promising a change of audio quality for the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s (UK national) radio online streams; and I'm very aware I owe you an update. It's a peculiar thing, writing a blog post that I know will be read by thousands of people who have part-funded the work I do. So, where we have problems, I want you to know about them - as well as our successes.

First, a recap. Project Coyopa, as you're aware from previous postings, is designed to give better audio quality for ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ radio. It, variously, takes audio from the broadcast chain rather than re-encoding our satellite feeds; it enables many more formats and bitrates; and it completely re-engineers the system to be much more reliable - both for live and on-demand. Above is a big fan thing from the "P" chain of Coyopa installed in Broadcasting House. (In ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ engineering there are two sets of equipment like this: the "P" chain and the "Q" chain. There's an interesting history in why we use P and Q, but the point of mentioning that there's a P chain is that there'll also be a Q chain - so we've one set of machines we can use while the others are undergoing upgrades or testing).

We've hit a few bumps along the road, but we're nearly there. Over the next few weeks, you'll spot one or two of our radio stations' live online feeds suddenly leaping in audio quality, as we test out Coyopa and our distribution chain. The tests will be brief but carefully worked out to avoid any reliability issues - we're starting testing with Windows Media, which silently skips any feeds that don't work, meaning we can simply add the new Coyopa feeds to the 'playlist' of live streams that is available. One of the things we're testing is whether the increase in bitrate has a negative effect on our users.

Now, a little has been written about our apparent reluctance to "up the bitrate" of our live streams, and I wanted to debunk a few theories.

First, we're not deliberately keeping online bitrates low to sell a few more DAB sets: we don't care how people listen to the radio, as long as they listen (though if you're on analogue still, you're not getting all the new stations the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ is broadcasting, so choose digital where you can).

Second, the bitrate really does matter - many online radio listeners are using congested corporate networks, and working while they listen (where 'working' also means browsing Facebook, downloading lolcats, etc). This is rather different from TV, which it would appear mainly uses home networks which are much less congested; our peak periods for radio have historically been daytimes (9.30am and 3.00pm are fairly standard peaks for all live online radio providers in the UK). And we really do need to get this right - our research points to a very low threshold for rebuffering. Generally, it would seem (looking at figures for listen-again) that almost everyone will tune out of a station, or a piece of listen-again content, that rebuffers more than once or twice. "Hai, plz cn I has no rebuffrn k thnx bye" would seem to be what our listeners are asking for, albeit most of our listeners don't speak . And while our new infrastructure will shortly allow automatic bandwidth detection (so you'll get a high bitrate if your system is capable of it), that's not available yet for our radio streams, and we want to ensure that we choose the right default for the highest amount of users - to give tons of different bitrates would be poor value, and it's you that's paying for all of this, after all.

On rebuffering, you might be interested to know that the current Flash player monitors how many times it rebuffers, so we've got useful data to watch. Irrespective of Coyopa, we're spotting that for some listeners the current amount of rebuffering is unacceptable, and we're trying to understand why this might be. I'd love to give you good news on this, and hopefully will be able to report back shortly.

The third thing to mention is that we are looking at live radio differently than on-demand not because of some hidden agenda, but simply because of these reliability issues and recognising that there are a lot of choices of delivery of live radio - FM, DAB, Freesat or Sky, Freeview, cable, etc. It's entirely possible that, following our tests, we'll plump for the same bandwidth for both on-demand and live; but we're keeping our options open.

So, that's live radio. Better sounding listen-again is already here thanks to iPlayer, but Coyopa will be ready to deliver this in mid-October. This is not particularly a technical piece of work - Coyopa's actually delivering these files already as part of our testing; instead, it's ensuring that the right people have been trained and that we have as short a time as possible maintaining two systems (the previous one is called 'Bob', incidentally, for reasons unknown to me).

Now, on to current iPlayer issues. iPlayer's teething problems have got substantially better since my last report, but here are a few open issues we're aware of:

• A problem with the satellite receivers we use meant that some programmes had gaps in them recently. We switched to an alternative feed for a bit, which had the effect of putting ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳7 in mono among other things, but the satellite receivers now seem happy. We're sorry about that. Coyopa will fix that.
• Generation of Real Audio files for a small amount of programmes has sometimes failed. We think we've got to the bottom of why this happens, and issues are rather fewer of late. Again, apologies to you - particularly PM fans - if this has spoilt your enjoyment. In the majority of cases, Coyopa will fix that too.
• Listeners in live Windows Media format within iPlayer might notice, in a minority of cases, that they get kicked off at precisely 15 minutes after they start listening. A fix is on the way shortly; it would appear from preliminary tests that it might be related to Internet Explorer, and that it's potentially related to the recent Windows XP SP3 update, or similar for Vista. It's early days, so we might be wrong here - but we're working on it; latest information I have is that we might have a fix next week. Coyopa will, eventually, fix that as we add AAC-family flash streaming.

I hope that this blog posting, lengthy though it is, sheds some light on what we're doing. The ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s a complicated beast, and it's taking its time to achieve the things I wanted to. I'm sorry things are slower than you might expect - but just as it's important to do things quickly, it's important to do them right, too.

When was the last time you used Internet Explorer 5?

It would seem that, for most people, it's almost never. My own personal site (I'll not link to it here, it'll be embarrassing) has had precisely one visit using Internet Explorer 5 in the last three months - and they only looked at one page.

That's a good thing - it shows that people are upgrading their browsers to newer, safer ones. Whether you're a person or an person, you're using the latest, safest versions of those browsers. Do it now if you haven't already. ( and are available, of course, to quote from the olden days when the got promoted on the telly).

So, it was quite a surprise, when I chomped through some server logs for the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s podcasting service recently, to see a rather unexpected entrant in the list.

I used to chomp through a random day of download logs, with the main objective of seeing how many downloads we get through the iPhone/iPod Touch interface that you'll see at www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts on one of those devices. It turns out that it's rather more popular than we thought - 7% of all podcast downloads are wirelessly to one of those two devices. Wow. For a piece of 10% time hackery, we've done well. (Well done, SimonC and ChrisJ).

The other obvious podcast catchers appeared in the list - Juice, iTunes, the PSP, Nokia phones, etc; but the second most popular piece of software to download our podcasts was... Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.

Tens of thousands of downloads every day. All apparently from a browser which nobody's using any more.

Of course, it's perfectly possible to 'spoof' a user-agent in this way - it's one line of PHP, for example. Older versions of Opera used to pretend they were Internet Explorer to get past bad coders who insisted on having sites that "must use Internet Explorer". And I'm sure that this is the case here.

So: a quick question, and a quick plea.

Does anyone know what popular piece of podcast software spoofs its user-agent as a vanilla copy of MSIE5? I'm sure the hive mind of the Radio Labs subscriber base has the answer.

And please, if you write software (whether it's a canny bit of PHP, Python, or Java), at least add something in the user-agent string that says what your software really is. Ta.

After three days of physical prototyping we made it! Behold Dog Vader...

You might be wondering what it does? Incoming SMS to Radio 1 affect the mood of the dog; when it sits up the dog is happy and when it's sad it lowers its head. Someone touching its paw causes it to read out the latest SMS that matches its current mood.

This diagram explains some of how it works.

Some Ruby code reads all the incoming SMS and matches each message against two lists, one of 'happy' positive words and the other of 'sad' or negative words. This is averaged over a number of messages to give a regularly updating mood score between one (sad) and nine (happy). Nic also managed to write code that reconstructs an average SMS based on words from all the messages queued up. Hopefully he will be able to explain more very soon.

This code then sends the messages and the mood score to a sketch which interacts with the board to raise and lower the dog's head (using a servo motor) and read from the sensor in the dog's paw. Whenever this is activated we use Apple text-to-speech to read out the SMS.

The team was fantastic and worked really hard to get everything up and running by 4pm today when they presented Dog Vader to the rest of the department. It went down really well with everyone. Finally, well done to the team:

Pete Warren - Kennel builder and mechanical genius.
Nat Gochin - LED and sensor maestro.
Conor Curran - Ruby master
Nic Ford - Super sub and SMS manipulator
David Cooper - Scavenger of materials
Chris Thorne - the Dog Father

We've made loads of progress on day 2 of the prototyping workshop! Tristan and Chris managed to get a motor working without too many problems early on in the day. They then used the motor to get the alien you see in the photo below to move up and down.

Nat and I tinkered about with an infrared sensor. The idea we had at the time was that the creature would suddenly come to life when you approached it. It would then move and start speak (reading out incoming SMS text messages sent into ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radio). For a moment we managed to get the sensors working however this was short lived as we tried moving the phototransitor to another bread board and everything then stopped working - no meaningful values could be received from the arduino, no lights, nothing. The infrared sensors proved to be really frustrating so we moved onto experimenting with a bendy sensor, a light sensor and a touch sensor. In the end we settled for the touch sensor with idea being you touch the paw of the 'creature' and it then reads out the SMS.

While this was happening Pete was busy working on the look and feel of the 'creature'.

Made out of an old desk lamp and bits of found plastic its starting to take shape. With the motor attached it also 'comes to life' as it jigs up and down (it was something that was slightly unexpected as the motor is schizophrenic and erratically moves).

We've also got a prototype of the text to speech code working, so when the dog bows its head it says something negative (unfortunately I can't repeat what it currently says because it might offend Coldplay fans) and when it raises its head it says something positive. Conor has been busy working on the SMS feed so hopefully at some point tomorrow it will shout out the various SMS we have coming into our radio stations.

Tomorrow is the final day and we have some big plans, including a kennel and flashing led's!

This week we are running a physical prototyping workshop for the team; the aim being that we build something with electronics and computers that has a physical presence, something that connects with our work, and something that will sit in the office. We've run them before and got interesting results and it's a good hands-on, team-building, out-of-your-comfort-zone, lateral-thinking experience. This is the first of three days and three blog posts - the prototype must be finished by Wednesday afternoon when we have a show & tell session scheduled for the rest of the team (and a final blog post).

The morning was spent brainstorming ideas around the theme of "Something for the Office" and then getting to grips with the . Two LEDs were soon flashing away...

First thing after lunch we reconvened to compare notes and decide on the plan of action. Ideas converged on an installation that would show the general mood of the incoming SMS text messages to ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radio and, in fact, read some of them out with text-to-speech software whenever someone approached the device.

Some time was then spent browsing the local Maplins for components before starting to ponder how to use motors to raise a monster out of a box. However, just before we were about to start protoptying this, the day was cut short by our offices being evacuated. Apparently due to a gas leak in Starbucks below.

More to come tomorrow in Day 2.

And back. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Unfortunately the Radio Pop site has gone down. Because it's a prototype and not fully supported like other ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ sites it is unlikely that we will be able to fix it until Monday. Sorry about that. In some small compensation we do have a bunch of updates that we are going to apply to the site on Monday as well.

A concept radio where tuning is done by twisting the lid of the radio and the volume is controlled by lifting it up and down.

A game where you get a set of speech fragments that you have to transcribe and then fit together in order, resulting in transcribed or subtitled video.

A new beta from Amazon combining data from IMDB, Amazon and Musicbrainz.

Flash-built particle-physics visualisation showing current about the most played artists on last.fm

A startup looking at extending the live music experience "before the soundcheck, after the encore"

What's behind the new Genius music recommendation feature in iTunes 8?

And lots of

More at

If you've been reading RadioLabs for a while you'll know that we go on about how we've tried to design bbc.co.uk/programmes for machines as well as for people.

What we mean is that we've tried to make it easy for machines to get at the programme information behind the site, so that it can be re-presented in useful and novel ways.

Here's an example from a hack I've been working on:

You're looking at a screenshot of iTunes running on my laptop. I've poked information from /programmes in there so that genres show up as playlists, and episodes show up as songs. It's as if ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radio were an iTunes shared library located somewhere on my local network. You can also see the hack in .

Here's what I was thinking: all my music is in iTunes. iTunes, via an Airport Express, plays out through my Big Speakers. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to use it to find out what this week's Thinking Allowed is about, or to enjoy some rough dubplate pressure from 1Xtra?

So how does it work?

Simply, the app grabs programme information from /programmes and re-presents it to iTunes in its native tongue: .

We've tried to design /programmes to make this kind of thing easy.

For example: the app needs the following information:

• which genres have radio programmes in them?


• for a specific genre, which programmes are currently available on-demand?

/programmes answers the first question at /radio/programmes/genres/, and the second at /radio/programmes/genres/drama/relationshipsandromance/player and its cousins.

Only interested in Radio 4? Hack that url to /radio4/programmes/genres/drama/relationshipsandromance/player. Or TV? Try /tv/programmes/genres/drama/relationshipsandromance/player.

Just add XPath!

If you'd like to try this for yourself I've made the code available for your . It's My First Erlang, be gentle :-)

And if I've inspired you to try and build your own hack on top of /programmes, here's the way in - let us know how you get on!

Listening

When using Radio Pop you have to actually listen to live radio through the Radio Pop player in order for it to track your listening. But this might not be convenient because I'm sure you listen to the radio in other ways; Listen Again, your bathroom radio, podcasts etc. We initially made a decision that you wouldn't be able to add listening after the fact, partly because this is designed to be a prototype of what an actual service integrated into the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s offerings would be like. At the last minute, however, we added a sneaky feature that lets you add programmes that you heard on the radio when you weren't using Radio Pop. But we have deliberately made it a bit convoluted - first, go to your Radio Pop Listen page and click on the "Add your listening »" link. Then go over to our /programmes site, find the episode of the programme you listened to, copy the URL and paste it into the box on that page. Voila! The programme will be added to your listening profile.

Unfortunately Radio Pop doesn't yet support Listen Again, but it has been built to support on-demand listening and we hope to include this in a later release.

Radio Pop uses RealPlayer for the live streams so you must have RealPlayer correctly installed - so if you've got the player up, it seems to be working but you can't hear anything then check RealPlayer. You can find out more about how to install RealPlayer in this (though note that we are not currently supporting Windows Media Player). There have been reports that the player and the don't work correctly on OS X. Luckily over on The Unnofficial Apple Weblog , Christian, says...

"The problem of the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ radio widget(s) (there are several of them) not continuing to play after Dashboard is closed on Leopard is a problem with RealPlayer 11. If you downgrade RealPlayer to version 10, the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ radio widgets work fine."

Data

All the data from Radio Pop is open and anyone can see what you're listening to. We've done this because we think that makes the service more powerful. The internet works best when it connects people and data, and by making all of your listening data available openly this allows others to remix, re-use and aggregate the listening into more and more sites and products - hopefully into things which we haven't even imagined. See Chris's post yesterday for more information on the APIs available.

Social networking and radio

Radio Pop is a niche social networking site built around the of the radio programme. At the moment it's aimed at early adopters and alpha geeks who love radio. In the future it should be for anyone who loves radio. Radio Pop is ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ radio only at the moment, but we are working with the radio industry on how we could build similar services in the future. And, obviously I guess, it should work with TV as well. Maybe this is what's to come - different social networking sites for different niches. But ideally they should be interoperable - you don't have to have to enter all your friends again every time you sign up for a new one. That's a challenge for the web and the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳.

Your feedback

We've had loads of , most of it good, and thanks to all of you who've emailed us or commented. Here are some answers to some common questions...

Can Radio Pop be integrated into last.fm so it scrobbles tracks you hear on the radio?
If you follow Radio Labs you'll know that Chris built a widget that scrobbles to last.fm so it's certainly possible. This would be a perfect place to use btw.

Can you link the Pop button to the current song?
Yes, that's our intention - your Pops will link to the songs that were playing. We're looking at how we can implement that but it might be a little while.

How do I find my friends on Radio Pop?
It's not completely obvious at the moment - sorry! There are two ways - first, on your friends page you can enter an email address of a friend to see if they're signed up, if not then it will send them an invite email and automatically connect you. Secondly, just send them your profile URL (https://www.radiopop.co.uk/users/<your_username>) and they'll be able to add you from there.

A few weeks back I had the good fortune to be handed a dump of a mysql database stuffed to the gills with historical Proms data. It's got every Prom from to (and (you'd hope) 2008 at some point).

I've started to wrap a app around it and the results can be seen . For now it's pretty basic with lots of gaps left to fill but the intention is to link it to / and publish the results into the .

In the meantime I thought it might be interesting to develop the site in public so you can see all my mistakes in real time. So I'll be posting progress reports and updating this post as things get added.

What's happened so far

I wrapped a very basic rails app over the data just to peek inside and check the relationships. The result was a of people and works and events and etc.

The next step was to create a new rails app and begin to build the site one table at a time. The beginnings of the schema are .

What happens next

The next step is to continue on, through parts and events and performance and etc to fill out the site. And when that's done the interesting work of linking to external data sources can begin. At which point I'll probably be for and .

With the data published and linked I'll hopefully manage to persuade boss type people to open it under a . Add some RDF and the Proms can join and on the LOD cloud. Well that's the plan.

A beta (of a beta (of a beta...))

This is very much work in progress. Eventually the data should make it's way into /music (via the ) and the upcoming /events. If we can match events to broadcasts some of it should also make it into /programmes.

Updates

1. 05/09/2008

   Added works by genre: https://bbc-hackday.dyndns.org:2840/genres/8/works.

   Added genre for work: https://bbc-hackday.dyndns.org:2840/works/6196

2. 06/09/2008

   Added works by commisssioners - https://bbc-hackday.dyndns.org:2840/commissioners/25/works

   Added commissioners of works - https://bbc-hackday.dyndns.org:2840/works/32204/commissioners

   Added works by composer - https://bbc-hackday.dyndns.org:2840/people/16/compositions

   Added composers by work - https://bbc-hackday.dyndns.org:2840/works/183/composers

3. 09/09/2008

   Compositions by composer now only list compositions, not arrangements etc - https://localhost:3005/people/135/compositions

   Work lists now include composer - https://bbc-hackday.dyndns.org:2840/works/a-z/a

Yesterday, Tristan introduced Radio Pop, our social radio listening prototype. For those of you who would like to know a bit more about its architecture, how it works and how you can use your data, this post is for you.

Technology

is a application. Why? Because that's where the R&D team's experience lies. Rails for a real-time web application meant to support a large number of users, but I'm not about to get anywhere near the debate as to what should be. In order to give our application a fighting chance of serving a (potentially) large number of concurrent listeners, it runs on the super-lightweight and super-fast web server . The availability of each instance is further enhanced using the . And of course we are using to avoid hitting the database where possible.

Listening and popping

Radio Pop tracks what you listen to through an HTTP POST 'pulse event' sent by the client radio player (either on the Radio Pop site, a or other) every 60 seconds. This pulse simply tells Radio Pop who you are and what network you are currently listening to. Radio Pop then retrieves the programme, series and brand information for that network - all of which comes from /programmes - and stores it. When you start listening to a different network or listen over a programme boundary, these pulse events are combined into a single 'listen event' for that programme. When you stop listening, a sweeper processes your recent listening after about 5 minutes of inactivity. Pop events work in the same way as pulse events.

This process works for both live and on-demand listening, but we are yet to implement an on-demand Radio Pop player. (And if RealPlayer is not your favourite audio player, we are looking at building a player which utilises .)

Open standards and data portability

We have attempted to support open standards which are applicable to a social listening application. We've tried to make the barrier to entry as low as possible and ask for as little information about you as we can so you can sign up using your alongside standard username and password entry. You can actually link a number of OpenIDs to your account should you wish and remove them at any time - its pretty flexible.

Radio Pop supports authentication for client applications which need to be able to update your listening profile, so you don't have to enter your username and password into third-party applications (should there ever be any). This is also how the desktop widget works.

We are currently not doing a great deal with your listening and popping data. We have plans to introduce recommendations and personalisation but that is some way off. In the mean time I recommend you have a look at the feeds and formats in which you can get your data (and your friends' data and everyone's data). Here's just a selection:

• My profile, including what I'm listening to:
  
• My friends list:
  
• My recent listening RSS feed:
  
• My Radio 1 listening history:
  
• My recent friends' pops RSS feed:
  
• My pops history:
  

You can also get your listening habits in APML (an open format for attention data), here's mine:

As a starter, I built the below using user profile XML data. Check out the full for more information and if you build an interesting visualisation or mashup please let us know.

³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radio supports multi-platforms, so we also have multi-formats to support that. How do we make sure we are providing this in a machine readable way that helps people expose our content more?

If you've been following , you'll have noticed that we are now happily creating feeds of data that provide availability information about all our Listen Again (Audio-On-Demand / AOD) content.

I've put together from our internal tests and subsequent wider 'beta' tests with some of the aggregators and device manufacturers.

"Every 3 hours, it contains everything that is available now (as per update). It also contains everything that will become available in the next 48 hours." excerpt from docs

I'm presenting this documentation as I think we are ready to find out how it works for others. You can feedback on aodfeed at bbc dot co dot uk (yes - this email now works for anyone who has tried it previously) or to myself - firstname.lastname@bbc.co.uk. Or indeed, feel free to comment here and I will attempt to collate.

Today we are launching - social radio listening from ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radio Labs.

and we will store your listening to ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ 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 built by the Radio Labs team - 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 either in the comments or by email.

Whenever you listen to live ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ radio through Radio Pop (either within the site or with a widget) it will store what and when you listened. We can then use this data in a number of ways. Firstly, you can see a history of what you listened to - maybe you'd like to go back to last week or even last year and see what you heard. Secondly, there are at-a-glance statistics and graphs on your Radio Pop profile page showing your favourite radio networks and programmes. Have a look at the profile pages for and to get an idea of what you will get. You can also share your data - show off your stats, watch your friends' RSS feeds for recommended radio shows or add a badge to your blog that shows the world when you're listening.

Radio Pop is social software. Just like the many social networking sites out there you can add your friends to Radio Pop - then you can see their listening, subscribe to their latest programmes feed or even see the aggregated favourite networks of all your friends. Finally, you can check to see the aggregated listening of everyone who is using Radio Pop.

As well as listening to the radio you can Pop the radio! Hit the Pop button in the Radio Pop player when you hear something you like or just want to remember it. We'll remember that and it to your list of Pops. It's a bit like bookmarks for radio.

Finally a bit of development history - we built the initial prototype about a . Since then we have been developing it further so it's ready for launch. were brought in to rebuild the server-side architecture and code to make sure it would be robust and scalable. Then we took their code on and Chris has made a number of feature improvements while Tom has given it a lick of design-paint to make it into something a bit more usable. We hope you like it.

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.