Interesting reports from ETech 2005 about the BBC team's presentation on Reinventing Radio. Robert Kaye no longer listens to radio in the US, but 'I am pleased to report that radio is not dead and that radio may still have a chance -- at least in the UK':
I'm pleased to see that the BBC is thinking about approaches to reinvigorating radio. The team laid out their principles as follows:
- An individual should be rewarded for participating
- Contributions should provide value to others
- The BBC should get value from the service and expose that value back to the contributors
When comparing these principles to the principles in use by US broadcasters (read: increase shareholder value, regardless of what our customers think) they are simply revolutionary. I do hope that these principles are not a fluke at the BBC and that the results that came from them will be broadly applied at the BBC.
The remainder of the presentation covered two other projects at the BBC: Phonetags, which applies the principles from above using a del.ico.us tagging folksonomy to provide music bookmarking, tagging, organizing and sharing. The presentation also covered group listening which aims to apply the above principles to collaborative listening to gather more relevant data about people listening to music. In a lot of ways it sound similar to what last.fm is doing with their Audioscrobbler and personal music channel projects.
Tom Coates reflects on his part in ETech here. I can well imagine that not everyone, even at ETech, would "get it". Programme Information Pages is surely also a very exciting development — and reemer.com was switched on by it:
I attended a fantastic presentation by a bunch of folks from the BBC. They created a system for assigning unique identifiers, and adding metadata, to every BBC television and radio program. This data can then be used to generate a web page for a given show based on the unique identifier, which would serve as sort of a "permalink" for a given BBC TV show. This type of system could be very useful to any major media organization, and the BBC folks have developed the SMEF, or Standard Media Exchange Framework for providing a method for media orgs to start developing such a system. Once this kind of system is in place, and there are relatable relationships between content entities, there are many applications that could live on top of such a data repository. …You can check out this page on the BBC Radio 3 site as an example of how the BBC is innovating through the development of a system architecture that is more suited to an atomic interweb world.
David Weinberger has a summary of both presentations, here (Reinventing Radio)and here (Programme Information Pages).
Update (20.3.2005): two interesting postings at The Long Tail — Exploding Radio and Exploding Radio II.
