Interesting Stuff 2008-08-04
New York, London, Paris, Munich - everyone's talking about...
...the BBC Music artist pages beta. [If you're not already up to speed, you can start with Matthew Shorter's post below, Tom Scott's post on his personal blog and more hardcore detail at Radio Labs from Guy Strelitz.]
In a rare instance of a critic of the BBC assuming an excess of agility in the Corporation, "I have no idea," writes TechCrunch UK's Mike Butcher, "if my campaign to try and get the BBC to open up more of its data to outside developers" influenced the beta, and offers congratulations either way. Matt Cox has some suggestions (which those of you without a blog could also stick up on Get Satisfaction - see below):
it would be nice to see Last.fm incorporated in future - and obviously a method of searching artists wouldn't go amiss (also, would a BBC radio data open API be viable?)
"Semantic Web evangelist" Juan Sequeda yelps: BBC Music Just Got On The Semantic Web Boat! and Shane Richmond of The Telegraph notes on his personal blog that "I'm now able to see that they don't actually play any of the music I listen to."
The Beeb's Patrick Sinclair offers "a little something to make [it] a touch easier: a BBC Music/MusicBrainz bookmarklet":
Drag this BBC Music/MusicBrainz link to your bookmarks bar in your browser. Now, when you're on an artist page (e.g. Coldplay) click on the bookmarklet to switch between BBC Music and MusicBrainz artist page.
Enjoy!
Patrick's bookmarklet is also available from the BBC Radio Labs blog.
And a satirical image at Flickr wonders What bbc.co.uk/music/beta would look like if Virgin Radio was doing it.
On another topic, Audio & Music honcho James Cridland tells the Backstage mailing list:
So, I did a BBC Weather iGoogle gadget last year. It was kind of nice, but sadly people are actually, um, using it - with over 20,000 impressions a day. Yikes. Think of the bandwidth and hassle that's causing my little server.
Poor little server. Happily, Google's kit has a tad more capacity than James', so his freshly-rewritten weather gadget now sits, as it were, in the cloud [click here or here for explanation of weak pun] over here [Update 2008-08-05: now over here - see James' latest post]. James would appreciate your feedback:
(add this to your iGoogle by hitting "add gadgets" (top right), then "Add feed or gadget" at the bottom of the left-hand menu, and finally pasting that in). Use the change settings button to choose a town near you.
If people don't see any hideous bugs (I can't test this in MSIE yet), then I'll do some redirection shortly to the many users of my current gadget. And add a BBC News one. And possibly even a BBC Music one! ;)
Come on, what are you waiting for? Encourage the man!
BBC is here!
12 employees are listening and participating
reads the top of the Get Satisfaction page for the product BBC /programmes, part of a network which purports to "provide help for products and services from thousands of companies". Some BBC employees who work on that project are listening to the suggestions for improvements, and BBC Internet Blog is eagerly signing up for RSS feeds for other services within our wide purview, including BBC blogs, BBC national radio websites and the aforementioned BBC music pages. If you have other accountability feeds you think we should be adding to our Mission Control Pageflake and personal RSS clients, let us know in the comments. We can handle it!
BBC's Mobile TV trial doesn't win public support writes Katie Scott at Pocket-lint; BBC: mobile viewing figures are fine reports Gareth Beavis at techradar.
Leigh Holmwood writes in Media Guardian about BBC3's first multiplatform comedy drama, Mouth To Mouth, about a girl pop group:
Mouth to Mouth is be made available first through web 2.0 communities, mobile phones, and the show's own BBC website before airing on BBC3.
--which means that, according to another Guardian article, it won't be viewable in Beijing.
Finally, at the BBCi Labs blog, Rob Hardy explains burndown charts and shares some of the Beeb's:
Burndown charts are one of the artefacts used in agile software development; we've been doing agile development since at least before I joined, and we've found it works tremendously well.
Alan Connor is co-editor, BBC Internet Blog.
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