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It's about that time for an end of year review, so here's how 2008 went for Radio Labs.

I started off in January writing about our 10 percent time scheme which allows our team use 10% of their time to do their own work-related projects. This has resulted in a large number of prototypes from a ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Podcast browser to hacking historical data from the Proms, showing patterns in radio listening and playing on-demand ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radio programmes through iTunes. The team have certainly impressed me with how many ideas they have and how many of them they actually build as well.

We were also starting up on a long collaborative university project to study fans of radio that resulted in a whole week of posts in the Autumn featuring studies of the radio messageboards, TOGs, fans of the Archers and even the role of public service media.

Also at the start of the year Yasser wrote about Visualising Radio and the design challenges involved and in February Simon talked about his related prototype. This work has now become part of our department's core strategy and is leading up to an exciting trial in the new year - more to come.

We released many things during the year. Amongst those featured on Radio Labs included Olinda - a prototype radio featuring modularity and social networking in a physical device, Radio Pop - a social listening site for ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ radio and Band In Your Hand, an augmented reality application from Radio 1 for those that missed out on tickets for the Big Weekend. In July the music beta launched, implementing some of our plans for linked open data across the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ and beyond. Later developments saw it linking artists to and from the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News site. And working with the rest of the UK radio industry we created RadioDNS, a specification that we hope will help your radio connect to the internet and encourage exciting new services. We also made many improvements to a range of our sites - including making them wider.

What else? We explored attention data for ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ music radio programmes, eventually generating APML data for listeners in Radio Pop. We prototyped some thoughts on segmentation, tagging and storylines around The Archers. Matt, our Software Engineering team leader, started his epic experiments with XMPP (and Erlang) to provide now playing information for tracks and programmes before going on to add live text and even personal notifications. Michael, our crack Information Architect, working with the /programmes and /music teams was developing a model of a connected ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ - starting with a pentagram and some /programmes schemas then moving towards linked data on the web using web-scale identifiers.

Also over the year, Coyopa took shape. This is the project that is designed to give better audio quality for ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ radio on the internet. James covered it from the testing stage to the start of the roll-out and on to it's full use in the iPlayer. In related news we also released OPML feeds of all our podcasts and
XML feeds for Listen Again content.

And finally, we went to some conferences - Futuresonic, Thinking Digital and Mashed - and we hacked some hardware; building the DABagotchi, Dog Vader and the Rockterscale.

Phew, quite a lot then. Onwards and upwards to 2009. Thanks for reading.