cookin'/relaxin'

How I remember what to watch

2011-02-22T16:15:00.000Z

This is a list of lists. All the places where I keep lists of TV and radio programmes that I want to watch or listen to.

A text file

This text file (well actually a note in Notational Velocity and Simplenote) is a list of TV programme that have been recommended to me; by word-of-mouth, by Twitter friends, by blogs or by newspapers. These are often US dramas and most likely to be things I buy as a DVD boxset. I just note them down when I can (on my phone or laptop) and the “x3” next to Fringe is because it’s been mentioned 3 times. Some of these (e.g. Supernatural) are ones where I want to remember to buy another series when it’s released, some are new.

A Freeview PVR

I use my PVR quite a lot to record broadcast programmes for watching later. Most programmes recorded on there are through a series link (it records all episodes of a series) and I think all are TV despite it being able to record radio. It’s fairly new, I only decommissioned my 10(?)-year old TiVo recently, so there’s plenty of disk space on there. One anomaly is that BBC 4 doesn’t work, something to do with Guildford transmitter, so the PVR records BBC 4 programmes but they are unwatchable. In which case the programmes sit on the list acting as a reminder for me to watch them on iPlayer.

A dog-eared Radio Times

Yes, i buy the Radio Times. I have a ritual where I generally try to skim through it on a Saturday morning and then fold page corners down when I see something interesting. Then later I will go through these marked programmes and set up the PVR to record or maybe check it in an evening if I’m looking for something to watch. At Christmas I might even draw a ring around programmes.

iTunes

Most of my radio listening is Radio 4 and most of it is live and at the weekend - their regular schedules and my memory helping me do that. All my podcast subscriptions are managed through iTunes though I never manage to listen to many, they’re more likely to be saved for a holiday. iTunes does some management by notifying you that you haven’t listened to a podcast for a while and stopping it updating (the little exclamation marks next to subscriptions). I tend to ignore this and just tell it to keep downloading. I also download one-off radio programmes, mainly discovered through the Radio Times, but I can’t tell you how I do that!

So what?

It's somewhat fragmented with different tools and workflows for TV, DVDs and radio, adapted to meet my particular needs and technology. And I'm sure I'm not typical in any of these habits. Also interesting is where these recommendations came from in the first place - word of mouth from friends and Twitter friends) or articles that happen to mention a programme (“...Niall Ferguson’s Civilization begins on 6 March on Channel 4”).

What about you, what do you do?

Garden birds in 2010

2011-01-30T13:08:00.002Z

This is a record of what birds we've seen in our garden during 2010. Last year's report can be found here.

Breeding blue tits (up to ten or so). They used our nestbox.
Coal tits
Great tits
Occasional flocks of long-tailed tits pass through.
Four or five greenfinches visit regularly since I set up a sunflower seed feeder.
A pair of bullfinches
Two chaffinches
A pair of blackcaps
A few dunnocks
Robins
Several blackbirds
Woodpigeons
Collared doves
A single thrush
One regular nuthatch
Two goldcrests
Two wrens
One greater spotted woodpecker, actually on the tree next door.
And a rare redwing, brought by the snow.

And for this weekend's Big Garden Birdwatch I spotted 4 blue tits, 4 green finches, 2 blackbirds, 2 dunnocks, 2 robin, 2 bullfinches, 1 woodpigeon, 1 great tit, 1 wren, 1 nuthatch and 1 magpie. And 2 long-tailed tits flew over.

My 2010

2011-01-07T15:57:00.005Z

Sitting on a rock on the Bjäre peninsula eating lunch in the sunshine, September 2010

It was my first proper year back in R&D and in the Prototyping team and I'm now very definitely a producer and product manager. Certainly more people and less computers. I started writing weeknotes in February, I'm not sure how compelling reading they are but they're a good discipline. And we had a number of interesting projects - an RFID-enabled toy, a trending music site, a Twitter links site, a second screen experiment and lots of storytelling work including the Mythology Engine.

I replaced my old MacBook Air with a very similar looking new Macbook Air, but with less moving parts.

I moved all my note-taking into Notational Velocity (plus SimpleNote for the iPhone).

I didn't blog here very much but I did finally write up some notes on How to build prototypes.

I visited Copenhagen, Southern Sweden, Grenada and Lyon, managing that with two train trips and only one flight.

I took lots of photos with my new Panasonic GF1.

I read lots of books, some on my new Kindle, but listened to less music and sadly played almost none.

Apparently I ran 200-odd miles, including a couple of 10k races.

And I played rather too much Wesnoth on my iPhone on the train home.

Skyr

2010-12-15T15:02:00.003Z

Skyr is a traditional Icelandic yoghurt, made from sheep’s milk. I’ve finally found a source in the UK, the excellent Scandinavian Kitchen on Great Titchfield Street, just around the corner from my work. they occasionally stock skyr and they apparently have a skyr email list if you want to be notified.

The original, traditional skyr is really thick and is prepared by mixing it with milk to the desired consistency. The version shown here is ready-mixed, but not flavoured or sweetened. And actually comes from Denmark. But I’m assured it tastes right. So, if you want to prepare some skyr…

1) Put the appropriate amount into a mixing bowl.

2) Add sugar to taste and mix thoroughly.

3) Serve in individual bowls, top with a little soft brown sugar and a dash of milk, or even cream, around the edge.

(or serve with bláber compote)

Technologies for creating online relationships from real-world actions

2010-07-02T14:42:00.004+01:00

Some recent research into technologies that create online friendships or links using real-world interactions, typically proximity. Any more in the comments please.

Poken

Poken is a physical USB key-like object where you touch other Pokens to share a business card or contact details then sync it over USB To your computer. It seems to use a proprietary wireless technology. If you want to know what’s inside, take a look at Hacking the Poken.

Bump

Bump is an iPhone and Android app that lets you exchange information by “bumping” your phones together. But what’s notable is how it works. From their FAQ…

“Q: How does Bump work?
There are two parts to BumpTM: the app running on your device and a smart matching algorithm running on our servers in the cloud. The app on your phone uses the phone’s sensors to literally “feel” the bump, and it sends that info up to the cloud. The matching algorithm listens to the bumps from phones around the world and pairs up phones that felt the same bump. Then we just route information between the two phones in each pair.”
“Q: No way. What if somebody else bumps at the same time?
Way. We use various techniques to limit the pool of potential matches, including location information and characteristics of the bump event. If you are bumping in a particularly dense area (ex, at a conference), and we cannot resolve a unique match after a single bump, we’ll just ask you to bump again. Our CTO has a PhD in Quantum Mechanics and can show the math behind that, but we suggest downloading Bump and trying it yourself!”

Disney Fairies

Bracelets from Disney that allow kids to become online friends by touching the objects together then returning home and docking them over USB.

“Tink Friendship eBracelets bring girls and Disney Fairies characters together with the mere touch of a band powered by Clickables™ technology. The magic begins with the creation of a Fairy Friendship Kit online at www.PixieHollow.com where a girl can select her fairy avatar, a special message and a gift, then save it onto her Tink Friendship eBracelet to be shared offline with friends. When a girl touches her band to her friend’s and presses a button, her band will glow to confirm that a Fairy Friendship has been made no cords, no computer, just a touch of Pixie Dust! Just like the girls, their online fairies are friends too and can easily find each other in Pixie Hollow.”

Petimo

A research prototype from Keio University where children are only able to accept online friends in a proprietary online social network by bringing their Petimo toys into physical contact. The toys also feature a screen and a wireless connection to allow other interactions and features.

Cuddly robots aim to make social networks child-safe - tech - 07 May 2010 - New Scientist

Petimo: Safe Social Networking Robot for children (PDF)

Facechipz

Facechipz is a proprietary social network that uses the distribution of physical tokens with unique codes to create online friendships.

“The way it works is: parents register their child on the site for a one-time fee of USD 1. Kids purchase packs of five collectible FaceChipz tokens from select retailers and then register each token online by entering the unique code printed on the chip. Once the FaceChipz are registered, kids hand them out to friends. A receiver goes online and they also enter the chip’s code. The FaceChipz database then confirms the friendship, and the two people are linked.”

Online network for tweens requires offline introductions

A guide to building prototypes

2010-04-16T16:08:00.003+01:00

I’ve been trying to express some of the principles and ideas that I use in my day-to-day work in the R&D Prototyping team and this post has been sitting on my desktop for far too long. Think of it as a first draft and let me know if it’s useful or what’s missing or even what’s plain wrong about it. I’m not going to go into why you would or should prototype, and some of these things obviously apply to all kinds of projects. It is inspired by countless things including 37signals “Getting Real” (if you follow this, you’ll be fine), 43folders, Diego Rodriguez’s Innovation Principles, lots of people I’ve worked with, and more. I’m not sure any of what follows is original, and it’s not comprehensive, but this is my list and I find it useful.

Ideas are easy, building things well is hard.

Build things to surface problems and understand things. Until you build it you won’t truly understand the opportunities or challenges.

Read in and around the problem area. A lot. There aren’t many new ideas and lots of things already exist. This should be obvious but it will stop you wasting time.

Make it simple, then simpler still if you can.

Embrace constraints, they are there to help you and make you more creative.

Define the approximate scope of what you’re going to do, you can always change it later but you’ll have something to work to.

Know when to stop. Make up a deadline if you don’t have one. And reduce scope if you’re not going to make it.

Work in an agile manner, but I don’t really care if you have a methodology or not.

Get T-shaped people, or at least have T-shaped multi-disciplinary teams.

Work together all the time. Try to get your engineers and designers working and thinking together and exploring problems from both perspectives simultaneously. This can be hard.

Talk a lot within your team. Make sure you know what everyone else is doing.

Support team-members’ passions but be pragmatic.

Sketch. On envelopes or napkins or with code. This helps communicate the problem, get a shared understanding of things and get further support for the work.

Make it just good enough to work and look good enough to attract people. But not too polished; the lowest resolution you can get away with.

Tell people about it. Write about it. Communication helps form your ideas and develop your prototype further.

Don’t chase shiny things.

Don’t get hung up on a particular technology. Build it with anything that works, you can refine it later.

Try to make it fun but not frivolous.

Just start, I know it’s hard, but once you’re going it will get easier. And even if your first attempt fails you’ll have learned something.

Update: Having just presented this as a lightning talk, there is now a set of slides up on Slideshare.

The Nature of Technology

2010-03-12T17:05:00.003Z

I’ve just got round to writing up my notes on The Nature of Technology: What it is and How it Evolves by W. Brian Arthur. The overall theme of the book is along these lines…

p.2 “Technologies in other words consisted of other technologies, they arose as combinations of other technologies…But it meant, I realized, that if new technologies were constructed from existing ones, then considered collectively technology created itself.”

p.3 “Technologies consisted of parts - assemblies and subassemblies - that were themselves technologies. So technologies had a recursive structure.”
“And every technology, I realized, was based upon a phenomenen, some effect it exploited, usually several.”

On how technologies are combinations of other technologies…

p.21 “If we put these two pieces together, that novel technologies arise by combination of existing technologies and that (therefore) existing technologies beget future technologies, can we arrive at a mechanism for the evolution of technology?”

p.25 “Slowly, at a pace measured in decades, we are shifting from technologies that produced fixed physical outputs to technologies whose main character is that they can be combined and configured endlessly for fresh purposes.”

Talking about domains of technology and Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon he says…

p.74 “You recognize them as mid-1800s because of the component sets they draw from: the iron-place cladding of the craft; the artillery cannon that hurls it into space; the brick-and-wrought-iron structures that house the venture. Such component sets and the way they are used do not just reflect the style of the times, the define the style of the times.”

On insight and the origins of technologies:

p.116 “It comes as a moment of connection, always a connection, because it connects a problem with a principle that can handle it…And it not in the midst of activities or in frenzied thoughts, but in moments of stillness.”

p.128 “Origination in scientific theorizing, as in technology, is at bottom a linking - a linking of the observational givens of a problem with a principle (a conceptual insight) that roughly suggests these, and eventually with a complete set of principles that reproduces these.”

And concludes with…
p.209 “The economy, in a word, is becoming generative. Its focus is shifting from optimising fixed operations into creating new combinations, new configurable offerings.”

p.213 “It is reinforced nonetheless by the qualities of modern technology: its connectedness, its adaptiveness, its tendency to evolve its organic quality. Its messy vitality.”

There’s also a lovely little sketch of how technology has evolved in human history, but you”ll have to buy the book for that. Fairly interesting overall but not as compelling as I had hoped.

Garden birds in 2009

2010-03-07T19:36:00.002Z

A little late but here is the list of birds seen in our garden during 2009. Last year's results are here.

A goldcrest
A wren
Long-tailed tits
Blue tits
Great tits
Coal tits
Dunnocks (breeding I think)
The occasional sparrow
Robins
Chaffinches
Greenfinches
Blackbirds
Thrushes
Starlings
Woodpigeons
Collared doves
A pair of greater spotted woodpeckers

And a male and female blackcap have recently taken up residence in the garden over the winter.

Some visualisations of stories and narratives

2010-01-13T15:57:00.011Z

Timelines are pretty common visualisations, there’s a lovely history of them here from Cabinet Magazine. My current project is looking at representing narratives and drama online and as part of this I’ve been researching existing visualisations of narratives and stories, some of which I’ve collated below along with my own sketches and thoughts. They’re in approximate order of complexity and we start off with some relatively simple hand-drawn diagrams illustrating general plot features.

The Archers

A hand-drawn diagram from one of the scriptwriters on The Archers radio drama. It shows the intensity of the storyline for each character over the week.

x: time, y: intensity of story, a line per character

Cinderella

Another hand-drawn diagram, this from Kurt Vonnegut in his book, Palm Sunday discovered via this post. He shows the Good or Ill fortune of the protagonist over the duration of the story. The steps up represent the gifts from Fairy Godmother to Cinderella culminating in a plunge at the stroke of midnight when everything changes back again, but then the prince finds here and she lives happily ever after (tends to infinity).

x: time, y: fortune

Tristram Shandy

Illustrations from Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne circa 1760. Described by Cabinet Magazine as “indicating the non-linear path of a well-told story; narrative digressions appear as deviations from a straight line.”.

x: time, y: digression

Napoleon’s invasion of Russia

The classic infographic from Charles Minardi, “Carte figurative de pertes successives en hommes de l’Armée Française dans la campagne de Russie 1812-1813” represents the story of Napoleon’s march into Russia and shows location, time and his army size.

x/y: map, width: size of the army, annotations: events and temperature

Now onto some interpretations of plot and episode structures.

Hill Street Blues

Diagrams from Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You illustrating the increase in complexity of contemporary television drama and the evolution of multiple storylines. The featured image shows a Hill Street Blues episode with each grid square representing a scene and each row representing an individual storyline.

x: time/scenes, y: storyline

Jazz on 3

Following on from Steven Johnson’s diagrams I drew these a few years ago showing the fractal-like nature of nested events in TV and shows. “The radio show (Jazz on 3 in this instance) can be broken down into segments - the introduction, a discussion of the artist, interviews and a live session. Each of these segments is further broken down (in green) into the individual interviews and the individual tracks.”. This could also apply to TV and radio drama.

x: time, y: scenes

The Archers again

This comes from a project a couple of years ago to build a web app that segmented the Archers radio drama into individual scenes and marked up each one with relevant facets. This diagram illustrates how the episodes are split up and how ongoing storylines would thread their way through the episodes.

x/y: time/episodes/scenes, annotations: facets and storylines

Movie narrative charts

And then there’s this classic from xkcd to “…show movie character interactions. The horizontal axis is time. The vertical grouping of the lines indicate which characters are together at a given time.”. The Lord of the Rings diagram is beautifully constructed to simultaneously show time, character groupings and major locations and events.

x: time, y: character and groups, annotations: places and events

Stories are rendered as TV Programmes

I recently drew this after considering TV drama and how a show is a particular rendering of a story into the form of TV. The conceptual story happens along a timeline with significant plot events marked. These events are then rendered in scenes in the TV programme thereby creating a programme timeline. But sometimes events may be portrayed in multiple scenes, as flashbacks or different points of view for example. And sometimes a single scene on the TV may portray multiple narrative events. An ongoing story arc comprises many events in the timeline from many episodes.

x: time, y: rendering, annotations: connections and storylines

Memento

The film Memento is a particularly good example of using a complicated structure to create a compelling story and Density Design have created this set of visualisations based on it. The example above has slices showing the order of the scenes in the film and then the same scenes re-ordered as they would have been experienced by the protagonist. This diagram is also interesting and shows character involvement as a coloured bar in each scene, ordered both by film- and real-time.

x: time, re-ordered by film or real timeline, colour: b&w or colour scene

Now let’s have a look at some time travelling stories which makes things a bit more complicated…

Doctor Who: Blink

This diagram comes from my colleague Paul Rissen who has been doing some very deep thinking about modelling narratives in data. It is based on events from the Doctor Who episode Blink) that features characters being thrown back in time. The diagram shows various timelines from the show - the timeline from the perspective of the main character, Sally (which is the same as the timeline shown in the broadcast episode), the universe timeline (i.e. how events occurred in linear time and different from the episode) and the timelines of various other characters who time travel in the episode and thus experience events in a different order.

x: time/scene (re-ordered by character), annotations: connections

Time travel from fiction

An original work from Information is Beautiful showing all the time travel in various films and books on a single timeline.

Universe timeline, annotations: time travel

George Bush

Ben Fry talks about these complex hand-drawn depictions by Mark Lombardi of “social/commercial interactions and their hierarchies, and politics” where “…he began to create drawings such as this one to depict the complex narratives he would uncover through his curiosity about anything from failed banks to corruption in government to organized crime.”. This one shows the investments and relationships of George W Bush. An interesting combination of a timeline and complex relationships.

x: time, annotations: relationships and connections

Jules et Jim

Finally, another set of film visualisations from Density Design based the the film Jules et Jim. The one shown above uses the curve of the storyline to represent the feelings and involvement of the three characters. There are lots of others in the set.

x/y: storyline and feelings, colour: involvement

I’m particularly taken right now with the very simple illustrations of the shape of the story from Kurt Vonnegut and I’d like to incorporate something like that into our project. And time travel also gives you a lot more to play with. Have you seen any more story visualisations that you like? Please add them in the comments below.

Books read in 2009

2010-01-11T12:55:00.002Z

This is the third year I’ve done this. Overall I read 14 fiction and 17 non-fiction, 31 in total. I reckon that’s about 60-70cm of bookshelf per year, which btw is overfull, any bookcase recommendations appreciated. To save you reading the whole list my favourite books of 2009 were Anathem by Neal Stephenson for fiction, The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer for non-fiction and a special mention for What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami if you do any running. Here’s the full list, this time they’re in the order I read them.

Tokyo Year Zero (Tokyo Trilogy 1) by David Pearce
4*. Atmospheric crime thriller set in Japan immediately after the war ended.

Heat by George Monbiot
4*. Good overview of the issues and a set of good solutions. Still very worrying that we’re not doing anything about any of it.

The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker
4*. Always interesting

A Florentine Death by Michele Giuttari
3*. Crime novel set in Florence written by an Italian policeman.

Gemma Bovery by Posy Simmonds
4*. Funny and sad

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
4*. Good story, memorable character.

Psychogeography by Will Self
4*. Excellent compendium of his interesting and funny pyschogeography essays. I think I enjoyed this more than when I read the odd one in the paper.

Perdido Street Station by China Mieville
3* . Good story, I just don’t really like fantasy as a genre.

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks
-. Didn’t finish, a bit disjointed.

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
4*. Good to read on the flight between London and Tokyo.

Hokkaido Highway Blues: Hitchhiking Japan by Will Ferguson
2*. Easy read with lots of anecdotes about Japan, nothing more than that.

Cities by John Reader
4*. Really good book about cities, where they came from and what they do. From the table of contents it looked like it might be a linear history but much more interesting than that. “The human gait is inefficient, on a par with penguins.”

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein by Peter Ackroyd
2*. Dunno, just not the best book to read in the hottest week of the year.

The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson
4*. OK, I reckon if I read this again I’ll probably nearly understand the building blocks of the world’s financial system. I’m a bit financially illiterate and this made sense. “The concept of interest was probably derived from the natural increase of a herd of livestock”

Hertzian Tales by Anthony Dunne
3*. Interesting things but a bit too conceptual to be useful. “I use the term ‘genotype’ as an alternative to ‘prototype’ to shift importance away from whether or not a conceptual design technically works, to the ideas it represents”

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
4*. Post-apocalyptic tale of GM gone wrong.

The Craftsman by Richard Sennett
4*. Wide-ranging book on craft and craftsmen, it was an interesting read, possibly with a few too many confusing metaphors, but lots of fascinating anecdotes and useful thoughts. I blogged about what it has to say about innovation

A Certain Justice by P.D. James
3*. Standard PD James and Inspector Dalgliesh.

Batman: Year One by Frank Miller
3*. Seemed surprisingly close to the film, if I remember it correctly, though it concentrates on Lieutenant Gordon.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
5*. Anecdotes about his life and what running means. Loved it.

V for Vendetta by Alan Moore.
3*. Again, seemed surprisingly close to the film.

Shapes: Nature’s patterns by Philip Ball.
3*. OK, not as inspiring as I hoped, and not enough detail for me to try simulating things.

The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes
3*. It took me a while as it was a massive hardback that I didn’t want to carry back and forth in my bag everyday but an interesting journey through ballooning, astronomy and other 18th century science and the beginning of the Royal Society.

A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro
4*. Perfectly formed little book. How do you interpret the ending?

Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton.
4*. Brief look at how people and societies have dealt with status.

Anathem by Neal Stephenson
5*. Immense story of an alternative universe featuring 1000-year old philosophers.

The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer.
5*. I know nothing about American photographers and this was fascinating. Loved his way of drawing connections between photos and photographers.

Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees by Roger Deakin.
4*. Made me want to visit forests. And buy a tree identification guide.

Matter by Iain M. Banks
4*. Latest Culture novel, I read some a few years ago and enjoyed coming back.

Performing Rites: Evaluating Popular Music by Simon Frith.
3*. For work, I’m interested in how people describe their musical taste. Fairly readable for an academic book.

The Secret Life of Birds by Colin Tudge.
3*. Avian equivalent to Wildwood above. Now know lots of useless facts. For instance, squirrels rotate their rear ankles 180 degrees when climbing down trees.

I also quickly re-read The Plenitude by Rich Gold and blogged about what it has to say about innovation

2010 was brought in by What The Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell and on the stack for 2010 are The Patient by PD James , Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro, Staring at the Sun by Julian Barnes and The Nature of Technology by W. Brian Arthur.

All reading was tracked by the marvellous bkkeepr and graphed by the velocity of reading, which tells me my last 20 books, with 6936 pages in total, were read in 215 days. There was an average of 346 pages per book. That’s about 32 pages per day (or 1.34 pages per hour).

Reviewing electricity usage in 2009

2010-01-09T17:04:00.008Z

Timelapse movie of electricity usage during one day (more detail)

I've also been collecting my electricity usage during 2009 using a Current Cost smart electricity meter. I don't have it connected up to a computer all the time as that would require me to leave a computer on, somewhat self-defeatingly, so I had to regularly grab the data every 30 days or so. There are a couple of graphs below and the data used for the graphs is available for download in the unlikely occurrence that you'd like to use it.

This is the year graphed as daily kWh (kilowatt hours) readings in grey with a moving average superimposed in green. The zeros in the daily graph are days when I don't have any reading.

And this is the total usage in kWh per month.

There are other graphs I've made here, more information on how to get data out of a Current Cost in this post and more about our typical electricity usage here. Data gathered using one of these...

Listening to the radio in 2009

2010-01-06T16:40:00.001Z

In a possibly foolish feat of dedication I spent 2009 adding (almost) all of my radio listening to the BBC Radio Labs prototype, Radio Pop. The principle use of Radio Pop is to track online listening, but as most of my listening is done on DAB radios and podcasts I used the manual update feature of Radio Pop every few days to regularly add my listening. You can browse my complete profile at http://www.radiopop.co.uk/users/tristanf. As you can see I mostly listen to BBC Radio 4.

As 2009 is now over I've extracted all this data using the Radio Pop API, some Python scripts and a spreadsheet and this is what I found.

In total I listened to 1021 individual programmes for 633 hours and 17 minutes.

I listened to Radio 4 for 35,140 minutes over 974 individual programmes
I listened to Five Live for 1860 minutes over 31 programmes
I listened to Radio 1 for 417 minutes over 4 programmes
I listened to Radio 3 for 326 minutes over 5 programmes
I listened to Five Live Sports Extra for 228 minutes over 5 programmes
I listened to 6 Music for 24 minutes over 1 programme
I listened to the World Service for 2 minutes over 1 programme

(35,140 minutes is around 586 hours or an entire 24 and a half days listening to Radio 4.)

My top 20 most listened to programmes for 2009 were...

1. Today for 8712 minutes over 215 episodes
2. Saturday Live for 1795 minutes over 32 episodes
3. Any Questions? for 1479 minutes over 30 episodes
4. The Archers Omnibus for 1465 minutes over 20 episodes
5. In Our Time for 1335 minutes over 31 episodes
6. Woman's Hour for 1262 minutes over 22 episodes
7. Afternoon Play for 1041 minutes over 23 episodes
8. Saturday Play for 990 minutes over 15 episodes
9. Broadcasting House for 984 minutes over 18 episodes
10. Kermode and Mayo's Film Review for 960 minutes over 16 episodes
11. Pick of the Week for 927 minutes over 22 episodes
12. Simon Mayo for 900 minutes over 15 episodes
13. Desert Island Discs for 855 minutes over 19 episodes
14. The Archers for 705 minutes over 47 episodes
15. The Now Show for 636 minutes over 22 episodes
16. Front Row for 595 minutes over 22 episodes
17. The News Quiz for 549 minutes over 19 episodes
18. Classic Serial for 540 minutes over 9 episodes
19. Excess Baggage for 420 minutes over 14 episodes
20. Gilles Peterson for 417 minutes over 4 episodes

And then splitting all the listening data per day over the entire year gives the graph at the top of this post. The big gaps every now and then are mainly holidays. The regular cycle of spikes are weekends, when I tend to listen most.

It doesn't quite represent all my listening as I wasn't religious over doing this every day. It certainly misses out some podcasts which I listened to well after the broadcast date (mainly the excellent Thinking Allowed) and it's all BBC, but that's the only radio I listen to anyway. Whilst I was writing this up I discovered Dale Lane's excellent statistics of his TV viewing, which looks much more automated than my data gathering. But ideally we want this automatically aggregated and collated for us, just BBC TV and radio would be good enough for me at first. Obviously internet-connected radios and TV, from Olinda to the Sensia and iPlayer to Project Canvas, have the potential to do this but we'll need large-scale open systems from projects like RadioDNS, NoTube and URIPlay to get us to that personal media informatics utopia.

Mooso and moving forwards

2009-12-04T14:52:00.006Z

We’ve just launched the latest Radio Labs prototype, Mooso. It’s a game to play while listening to BBC 6 Music radio, enter tags to describe the current song and score points if you match other players. Sign up and play here or read more about Mooso on the Radio Labs blog.

But this is the end of an era, or something like that, as Chris and I have left BBC Audio & Music and are now part of the Prototyping team at BBC R&D where I'm the lead producer. Soon after we formed the A&M R&D team we held a planning week and scoped out four major project areas for us to tackle. One was around presence, attention and socialness for radio - this became Radio Pop and Olinda, another was around live events which became an internal-only prototype of a social gig attendance site, the third explored how the web could create new forms of radio content which evolved into the work we did exploring chopping up the Archers narrative and the final area aimed to develop new ways of music discovery. This final brief, combined with our interest in games, became Mooso. It’s certainly satisfying to have completed these four major prototypes, as well as lots of other things along the way including (with the help of James) setting up the Radio Labs blog.

These have been good times but the new team is just as awesome and I’m already knee-deep in many exciting projects, from representing narratives on the web to a number of possible prototypes around digital music. And hopefully, when I get some time, I’ll be writing about them either here, on Radio Labs or on the new R&D blog.

Some connections between (digital) books and music

2009-10-29T15:20:00.004Z

Just dumping some thoughts and links and connections about books and music in the digital world that I’ve noticed recently.

With the recent UK launch of the Kindle the news outlets were writing and talking a lot about digital books including the usual worries about piracy, DRM and price points (at the moment they seem to be priced similarly to physical books despite no printing or distribution costs). Which is the same set of things that the music industry went through years ago and which has now just about settled down, generally in favour of the consumer.

And I suspect the publishing industry will need to address some of the other problems we’re seeing in digital music - things like unique identifiers, search, content resolution and distribution. Which leads me to some things that all seem to link together somehow.

XSPF is a standard format for describing music playlists but Michael tweeted about the possibility of using it for lists of books - ‘xspf spec “An XSPF playlist describes a sequence of objects to be rendered. Objects might be audio, video, text, playlists or any other media type” erm, book lists?’

Playdar is a music content resolver which has been getting a lot of coverage recently - give it a song name and it will search for it on your hard disk, across all your computers, on your intranet and across music services on the internet. The latest README on Playdar says…

"Depending on the plugins loaded, Playdar could be used to resolve anything.
Here's a fictional example query for an academic essay:
{
   "qid"    : "XXX789",
   "author" : "Jonathan swift",
   "year"   : 1729,
   "title"  : "a modest propsal"
}
... and if you have a resolver plugin that could search for essays and academic
papers, it might respond like this:
{
   "sid"    : "YYY123",
   "qid"    : "XXX789",
   "result" : {
       "author" : "Jonathan Swift",
       "year"   : 1729,
       "title"  : "A Modest Proposal",
       "score"  : 1.00,
       "category"   : "humour",
       "url"    : "http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html"
   }
}
In this example, the resolver matched the query to an essay posted on the web
instead of the local filesystem."

Could we have content resolution for books, essays and academic papers?

And finally, maybe bringing some of these together, there’s the recently announced Internet Archive’s BookServer which is, as I understand it, a federated search architecture for discovering, buying or borrowing digital books. There’s a little more explanation of it in this presentation but not a huge amount of detail yet.

Rural computing and nature's delights

2009-09-23T17:00:00.001+01:00

Russell Davies has written a somewhat contrary piece on the urban computing movement and addresses what could be called "rural computing". For that he gets my support and some thoughts.

"I suspect one of the reasons the countryside gets overlooked in all these conversations is that the aesthetics are so disappointing. Certainly the natural stuff's good; landscapes, hedges, skies etc. But as soon as something gets designed it looks like either Poundbury or Hobbiton..."

True, but I think nature's aesthetics are more than just good - the design and engineering of nature is marvellous - and designers, engineers and architects are already using biomimicry and copying the best bits.

And the thing that always gets me is that the countryside is full of delights and beauty; the heron guarding his rapidly evaporating pond in the late summer, rivers glinting in the evening sun, autumn leaves on the ground, unexpected birdsong and glimpses of deer in the morning mist. I think I want a kind of slower, maybe seasonal, noticings for the countryside...

The Plenitude and innovation

2009-09-12T17:49:00.004+01:00

I’ve just quickly re-read The Plenitude by Rich Gold while researching something. It’s a lovely little book about the “…dense, knotted ecology of human-made stuff ‘the Plenitude’”. But for now here are some dog-eared passages I picked out about creativity and innovation.

On creativity…
p.5 “In this context, creativity is not just making things (factories do that), it’s creating new things, things that have never existed before.” and also p.54 “…I don’t mean that stuff has to be physical. It could be an idea, or a concept, or a string of words.”

On problem solving, engineering and design (try to ignore the “hats”)…
p.25 “The hat of engineering is close related to the hat of design. Both work from need and desire. Both are concerned primarily with the user and the world - the “real world”, as they like to say. Unfortunately, in most companies design is pitted against engineering, a battle that tends to reduce the effectiveness of both. I think this is caused by a misunderstanding by both engineers and management, who see the hat of design as the hat of art. They think that designers work from inner vision and not problem solving.”

Chapter 3, on the seven patterns of innovation…

“Necessity is the mother of invention. Find a problem and solve it.”

“It’s a thing of genius. I had a vision and just had to do it.”

“The Big Kahuna. Scientific deduction of stuff from 1st principles.”

“The future exists. We just have to intersect it at the perfect moment.”

“Colonization. Find the unowned; package it; sell it back.”

“Stuff desires to be better stuff. Humans are how stuff makes more stuff.”

“Change the definition. Language and metaphor create/are the world.”

Which includes this on corporate R&D…
p.38 “A company can build too much of an ivory tower. While visions don’t flow directly from problems, they often grow, like a pearl, from an irritating grain of sand.”

On naming and defining things…
p.48 “The seventh pattern, Change the Definition, is the one that designers often invoke when they work on corporate identity construction […] These changes allow their respective companies to innovate in new areas, to develop and create in new ways, to behave differently. In a very real sense it changes the frame of imaginable invention.” and p.49 “The definition of a product (the product genre) determines to a large degree what it can and cannot be. It sets up the frame of expectations, not just for the customer but for the producer as well.”

On how we need to innovate…
p.55 “And since we can’t make what others are making - by law and by the law of the marketplace - it is only through creativity and innovation that we survive.”

And I’ll finish off with a couple of passages that are not so much on these themes, but that I found liked.

On brands and nature…
p.63 “There are differences between the bio-Plenitude and the stuff-Plenitude. As far as I know there is nothing quite like brands in nature.”

And on the fractal nature of stuff…
p.67 “I once asked Hal Varian, the economist, how much stuff is there in one room? “Well, what’s the definition of a piece of stuff?,” he asked. “How about: something that was individually designed, shipped, marketed, and sold,” I replied. “OK,” he said, “then there is no answer, for stuff is fractal.”“

On a final note, there’s a companion autobiographical PDF which is well worth reading alongside the book.

The good craftsman and innovation

2009-08-05T19:51:00.003+01:00

The Craftsman by Richard Sennett

I'm just finishing this book on craft and craftsmen by Richard Sennett. It was an interesting read, possibly with a few too many confusing metaphors, but lots of fascinating anecdotes and useful thoughts. So I'm going to blog a dog eared page. Around p.262 the author writes about the 20th century philosopher Wittgenstein and his obsession with perfecting the architecture of his sister's house. At one point he had just about finished it all when he decided the ceiling of the drawing room needed to be raised by an inch. Anyway Sennett uses this as a jumping off point to write about how to manage obsession.

Paraphrased...
The good craftsman understands the importance of the sketch - that is, not knowing quite what you are about when you begin.

The good craftsman places positive value on contingency and contraint.

The good craftsman needs to avoid pursuing a problem relentlessly to the point that it becomes perfectly self-contained.

The good craftsman avoids perfectionism that can degrade into a self-conscious demonstration - at this point the maker is bent on showing more what he or she can do than what the object does.

The good craftsman learns when it is time to stop. Further work is likely to degrade.

I liked that. And those five points certainly apply to our prototyping and innovation work on the web at the BBC, indeed I've got some more notes that I need to write up about this sometime. But is what I do a craft? I don't know. And anyway what is it that I do exactly with the internet and technology? Produce, manage, build, innovate, design, code, craft?

Instapaper and reading on the iPhone

2009-07-30T17:59:00.004+01:00

I've been finding Instapaper really useful lately for reading longer articles from the web.

Instapaper facilitates easy reading of long text content.
We discover web content throughout the day, and sometimes, we don’t have time to read long articles right when we find them.
Instapaper allows you to easily save them for later, when you do have time, so you don’t just forget about them or skim through them.

A one-click bookmarklet adds it to your list and there's an iPhone application for reading the articles. It works for me, giving good clean text for in-depth reading on my iPhone during my daily train commute. It's more like reading a book than a feedreader and I think that mode of reading is valuable. Anyway, some of my recent favourites...

Paul Morley on how a year studying at the Royal Academy of Music changed him
Leviathan or, The Whale | PD Smith
Pitchfork: Poptimist: Poptimist #23 on the charts
3quarksdaily on "DESIRE PATHS: READING, MEMORY AND INSCRIPTION"
The Best Bits » American Scientist - A new technology called compressive sensing slims down data at the source

If you use Instapaper you can subscribe to my starred articles using my username, tristanf.

Local searches on the BBC

2009-07-18T17:27:00.000+01:00

We had an informal hackday in the RAD team on Friday, Suzy got the top 10,000 search terms in one day, July 9th, from the BBC search team and we extracted and plotted any UK placenames (see my previous cuckoo map). We're interested in how much local information people search for.

Interesting things at Activate 09

2009-07-02T11:19:00.004+01:00

Martin and Roo have posted much more comprehensive write ups of the Activate 09 conference put on by The Guardian yesterday, so I'm just going to add some interesting facts and quotes which show, I think, what a remarkably diverse, interesting and sometimes inspiring conference it was.

Use tech as a way of thinking for rebuilding failed states. Clare Lockhart

"Mainstream media is ADHD, new media is OCD." Arianna Huffington

The Plague of Justinian in the 6th century left 100 million dead, about 50% of the population of Europe. Nick Bostrom

"Context = location + time + history + social" Ed Parsons

Jon Udell is building a local events site that takes inputs from Upcoming, Eventful and a curated delicious account of relevant iCal feeds, aggregates them and publishes them, including onto the local community TV channel. (me: I love the connections going on here.)

Political blogs are Henry Ford's "faster horse". The technologies that don't look like journalism will be those that change government and politics. Tom Steinberg

Amazon's Mechanical Turk made work into a game - you can choose tasks, do them when you want, you get points and you can communicate socially with other workers. Some key dynamics of games: Personal progress, competition, recognition and goals. Andy Baio

(me: I didn't note who said these and I'm paraphrasing...)

Highly usable online credit card transfers made the difference for Amazon and Obama.

"Test it, if it works scale it"

"We need a government where tolerance of failure is accepted"

"Teach people how to use the tools of participation"

"Develop tools that allow us to understand and analyse all the information that is now available on the internet"

(me again) Go and read something from all the people mentioned above, it'll do you good, and if we actually do or make some of these things that would be even better.

The Springwatch Cuckoos

2009-06-08T20:36:00.001+01:00

My BBC colleagues, Tom Scott and Roo Reynolds were recently kicking around ideas for what to do with the 12,000 or so comments (a BBC record) that a blog post for the BBC TV show Springwatch recently received after asking if people had heard a cuckoo. They had lots of interesting ideas but I immediately connected this with the recent release of the Yahoo Placemaker API. This service allows you to submit some text and receive a list of recognised places back - the place name, a unique Where-on-Earth ID (WOEID) and a latitude/longitude. So I've written some Python scripts to extract placenames from the cuckoo comments and plot the sightings (hearings?) on a map.

I submit the comment text to the Yahoo Placemaker API in batches because Placemaker has a 50,000 byte limit for posted documents. This discovered 16078 place mentions consisting of 5386 unique places. The Top 20 are...

New Forest, England, GB, 99 mentions

Scotland, GB, 94

Woodland, England, GB, 83

Suffolk, England, GB, 80

Yorkshire, England, GB, 79

Norfolk, England, GB, 77

Lake District National Park, England, GB, 77

Dartmoor National Park, England, GB, 77

Wales, GB, 74

Essex, England, GB, 72

Sussex, England, GB, 66

Surrey, England, GB, 66

Kent, England, GB, 59

Somerset, England, GB, 51

Hampshire, England, GB, 50

Cumbria, England, GB, 48

Norwich, England, GB, 47

Island of Skye, Scotland, GB, 47

Perthshire, Scotland, GB, 46

Dorset, England, GB, 45

The top places are mainly counties or areas as you'd expect but further down the list are towns and villages. There are some false positives, like "Woodland" above, but by filtering the place names to include "GB" I removed many of these. There is another problem where some comments will generate multiple locations - e.g. "Basingstoke, Hampshire" gets two places extracted.

Then I converted these places into KML, the data format used by Google Earth, and generated a compressed KML file of the sightings that you can download. You can load this into Google Earth and it seems to cope, though it's pretty useless looking at a map full of pins until you zoom in. You can also paste that URL into the Google Maps search box to see the sightings but it will only load 1000 points and only plot about 80 points at one time - zoom in for more detail.

Finally, as originally suggested by Tom, I drew a heatmap-type image using Nodebox and Python to plot translucent dots onto a map of the UK (courtesy of OpenStreetMap). I fiddled around with the size and opacity until I got this (click to enlarge)...

Tom got into contact with Springwatch and I was phoned by Paul, their web producer. It turns out they had already got a data entry company to extract the place names from the comments, using people to do what I'm doing with code, but hopefully getting higher quality results. They are also sharing the data with the British Trust for Ornithology who will work on producing more accurate results from it. I redrew the map using their manual data and they also asked for a couple of closer views of London, Birmingham, Manchester and Scotland which I also generated though these aren't quite as pretty..

It's not scientifically accurate by any means but it is interesting and was a good experiment in extracting useful data from large numbers of comments.

I've just been watching Springwatch right now and they featured a map but I'm not sure it was mine - looks like it was this one from the BTO.

Disclaimer: These are my thoughts and opinions and not those of my employer

Links for 13-03-09

2009-03-13T17:22:00.003Z

279 Spore skeletons
Using the Spore API and Processing to draw Spore creature skeletons

Eclipse | EcoArtTech
Online artwork that alters images of US National Parks based on the current air pollution. Nice idea though the image corruption could be more interesting

Guardian API Maps
Cute geocoder for Guardian articles, developed by Stamen...

ContentTagger
...and a prototype article tagger built on the new Guardian Open Platform which uses Freebase for lookup and disambiguation. The problem with both of these is that there's no motivation, apart from the goodness of their hearts, for people to tag.

Sinatra
Very lightweight Ruby web framework...

Heroku
...and Rails hosting in the cloud

Wall Street on the Tundra | vanityfair.com
"Iceland’s de facto bankruptcy—its currency (the krona) is kaput, its debt is 850 percent of G.D.P., its people are hoarding food and cash and blowing up their new Range Rovers for the insurance—resulted from a stunning collective madness. What led a tiny fishing nation, population 300,000, to decide, around 2003, to re-invent itself as a global financial power?"

About that Vanity Fair article
Good rebuff from an Icelander pointing out the more fictional parts of that Vanity Fair article.

Queen’s student gives twitterers ‘new voice’
A hacked radio that "...allows fans to listen to Twitter messages posted on the website in real time so they can keep up to date with friends, celebrities and even complete strangers. Mark uses an old fashioned radio to receive the tweets..."

More at http://delicious.com/tristanf

Links for 03-03-09

2009-03-03T18:09:00.002Z

Haven't done this for a while so this is a somewhat random selection of recent interesting links...

Flickr: stolenstrategies
A Flickr group for photos of "things that have been translated into code. images must be split into inspiration and outcome. real thing on the left, coded thing on the right."

melka » Soundscapes
An ambitious series of visualisations of music from Messiaen to Pink Floyd using the EchoNest API to analyse the MP3 and then translating the results into a PCR/DNA-like diagram

In search of the click track « Music Machinery
Also using the Echo Next, but this time using the remix Python library to work out which drummers use a click track (or can keep time)

Good Radio Club
From Jem and Steve - "Its like, social listening. ie: its a bunch of fellow radio4 fans tweeting along in real time listening to a 30 minute radio show chosen in advance. Its live. We thought about doing Listen Again but went for an old fashioned scheduled broadcast. Its 8.30pm. This Thursday February 26th on BBC Radio 4."

S3 Radio
"You make a bucket on Amazon S3, filled with MP3s. When someone visits your S3 Radio station, it builds a playlist from the contents of the bucket and starts streaming it to the listener, in a random order." - easy internet radio from Tom Taylor.

The Curious Cook - Do You Need All That Water to Boil Pasta? - NYTimes.com
"My rough figuring indicates an energy savings at the stove top of several trillion B.T.U.s. At the power plant, that would mean saving 250,000 to 500,000 barrels of oil, or $10 million to $20 million at current prices"

More at http://delicious.com/tristanf

Radio for the Facebook generation

2009-03-03T10:49:00.004Z

Over the last year or so I've been giving this presentation in various altered forms, various places and various times. It's about Radio Pop, a social listening site, Olinda, a future radio concept, and how we're trying to take radio into the future. I've finally got round to uploading it to Slideshare and include the full talk below. I hope it's useful to someone. Apologies for the zeitgeist-riding title, (it might be his fault).

Radio For The Facebook Generation

View more presentations from tristanf. (tags: bbc radiopop)

[1. TITLE SLIDE]
"In a world where social networking is all the rage, where does radio fit in? How can broadcasters help manufacturers develop new products, and help listeners discover new programmes, new music and new stations? Includes a practical demonstration using cutting-edge technology; and everything you need so you can take this idea and use it for yourself."

I'm Tristan and I work for the Future Media & Technology team at BBC Audio & Music Interactive.

[2. WHO ARE WE]
We're the people that bring you the technology behind bbc.co.uk/radio/ and bbc.co.uk/music/ websites, Listen Again on the Radio Player, BBC podcasts, digital radio, our interactive TV services, our mobile sites and lots more.

I do Research & Development (R&D) within our team, working on innovative ideas and building prototypes. Much of my R&D work involves leading teams working on prototypes, mainly on web-based applications and sites. And this forms a basis for this talk, what I'm going to show you are working prototypes. They are real but they are for the illustration of ideas, for experimentation and for scoping how a real solution might work. But they're probably not quite ready for release to the public.

[3. THREE THINGS]
I'm going to be looking at three things today, three talks in one in fact

I'm going to be talking about consumers and audiences, a social networking site for radio and a new radio.

---------------
[4. GENERATION C]

First I'm going to talk a bit about audiences and consumers.

Generation C is something described by a Trendwatching.com report, it's a marketing term, but useful as a framework. They identified Generation C as not defined by age but defined by activity. Those activities are lots of things beginning with C!

They create things and generate content, they form communities, they like control over things and like to customise things and they're connected with the internet, other technologies and devices and each other.

[5. COMMUNITIES]
Generation C like communities, in real life, on the internet and in the overlapping of the two.
Look at how much people use SMS, how kids use it as a kind of gift-giving, behaviour seen in many cultures.
And websites, particularly those Web 2 point 0 sites (sorry) are really good at creating and supporting communities. Sites like last.fm and Flickr - generally known as social software.

[6. CO-CREATIVE]
Generation C like to create things. And they like to be involved in products, they want to help form the next device. And they want to adapt them, customise them, put stickers on them
They also have options, and if a product is no good then they'll adapt it, do or use something else or just make it better themselves. Think how the TV broadcast infrastructure has been completely reinvented with BitTorrent or how the music industry is struggling to deal with P2P music downloading.

[7. CONNECTEDNESS]
Generation C are used to being connected and they're also used to their devices and services connecting to each other.

Flickr is a photo sharing site and one thing it does well is provide services for other websites to get to your photos. Because they provide these services (or APIs) then other companies can sell services like printing your photos, or turning them into stickers. Or users can download screensavers that show their friends' latest photos, direct from the web. The API enables a commercial ecosystem to develop around Flickr's product.

Or look at the connector on the bottom of an iPod - that lets you customise your MP3 player with all sorts of things from radios to voice recorders to electronic pedometers! There's a whole additional market.

So there you go, a bit about Generation C, an interesting sector of the audience.

[8. SOME YOUNG PEOPLE]
I'm going to have a break from talking now by showing you a video. These are a few Voxpops from some research done by the BBC around the use of new media and technology by teenagers, what they called "Wanabees"

(PLAY VIDEO)

Sorry about the mention of TV at the end. But that was Facebook, MySpace, Facebook, MySpace etc etc! You get the idea.

[9. ACTUAL RADIO FOR FACEBOOK]
So here is some actual radio for Facebook.
This is the BBC Radio Listen Live application for Facebook, developed by one of our software engineers. You can add this to your Facebook profile to make it really easy to listen to your favourite BBC Radio stations from within that site. I think we've got around 8000 users now, and that's with no promotion, just word of mouth. Quite interesting.

OK, that was a bit of a diversion into some of the kind of audiences and consumers that are out there. What could we, the BBC, and the radio industry, build for them?

-----------------------------
[10. SOCIAL NETWORKING FOR RADIO]
We're developing something we call Radio Pop. Radio Pop enhances your radio listening. Enabling you to create a personal record of the radio programmes you like, and see what your friends and everyone else is listening to.

I think it has two key aspects...
* Social networking for radio - see what your friends are listening to, track their favourite stations, get notifications when they are listening etc.
* Attention data for radio - it tracks and stores what radio you listen to - i.e. data about what you are giving your "attention" to.

[11. WHY?]
Well, radio listening today is a very solitary activity, at least we don’t often sit as a family and all listen to the radio together like we used to. Or listen to the radio with our friends.

[12. WHY?]
So we wanted to create something that would show a sense of liveness and community, some things which are really important to radio. But we wanted to reflect these on the web.

But how do we get people to use a site like this? Ideally we want something that doesn't really require the listener to do anything much extra than they do already. Let me talk a bit about communities and participation.

[13. CREATION AND COMMUNITIES]

Bradley Horowitz, who runs product strategy at Yahoo!, has suggested that communities on the internet have a pyramid-like model of how people participate. 1% of a group might create something - start a messageboard thread or upload a song, 10% of a group might actively participate - contribute to the thread or comment on the music, but 100% of that community benefit from all the activity above - they all read it, listen to it, watch the video whatever.

[14. CREATION AND COMMUNITIES]

You can also look at the pyramid by the type of activity. Here's some activities that could apply to radio and radio websites, or indeed media in general...

At the bottom we have listening - just listening to the radio is participating (in the broadest sense) and is contributing something to the experience of the radio show.
Up from that we have "like"; showing an interest in something, whether it's a song, a programme or an interview, like a thumbs-up.
Then "rate" - bit more than just "liking" an item, you can explicitly give it a rating. i.e. like the star rating of a book on Amazon
Then "tag" - describing something using one or two words or tags. You might be familiar with sites like Flickr ,delicious or last.fm which allow you to tag photos, bookmarks and music respectively. When you do this you're helping create a user-generated taxonomy - a folksonomy as it's known.
Finally "create" - "user-generated content" whether it's sending in photos, posting on messageboards or remixing radio programmes. This is at the top of the pyramid needing a fair amount of effort and motivation from the user. And this corresponds to the smaller percentage of people that do this.

I would propose that more people will do the things at the bottom of the pyramid, maybe not the 100% of Bradley's pyramid who are just part of the community of visiting the site but certainly closer to the 10% of people who participate.

[15. CREATION AND COMMUNITIES]

So to encourage participation and for a low barrier of entry to our social networking site for radio we've built Radio Pop to support the two lowest layers of the pyramid - Listen and Like. The system tracks and stores your radio listening in a database - which requires no more participation than just listening to your radio - and you can express an interest in something on the radio; like it, bookmark it.

[16. LEAN BACK]
There's another way of thinking about the distinction between modes of participation and interactions with systems like this. Lean back and Lean forward.

Lean back - something you can do while leaning back in your comfy chair. Not literally, but something you can do without actively concentrating on it, or while doing something else. An examples of lean back activity like this would be listening to your radio whilst cooking.

[17. LEAN FORWARD]
Lean forward - what you do when you're interacting or concentrating on something. So examples of this this might be checking out your Facebook page on your laptop or sending someone an SMS.

And people will switch between these modes at will, but one will generally be more appropriate for a particular situation.

So for Radio Pop leaning back would be listening, and leaning forward would be expressing an interest or liking something.

[18. SUPERMARKETS]
OK, now a third metaphor - we've had pyramids and chairs. Now supermarkets.

We've talked about how we can encourage people to use the site and how we track and store data about listening.

You can think about tracking radio listening as a bit like a supermarket loyalty card - all the data about what consumers consume (or what listeners listen to) can then be mined for all sorts of interesting information about the people or the products which can then be used for targeted promotion, personalisation, audience analysis etc.

[19. LOYALTY CARD]
What might a BBC loyalty card look like? Hmmm...Probably not like that!

[20. WHAT DO WE GET?]
What could we do with this lean back (listening) and lean forward (liking) data about people's radio habits in real-time? We could build many products and services.

Personal data on your listening - Diaries of what you’ve listened to - maybe print out an annual report of your listening, the ability to import and export the data from and to other related services.

Community data showing what everyone is listening to right now, or over the past week. what are the fastest growing programmes?
And we could visualise of the data and get instant feedback all over the web.

[21. RADIO POP]
So let's have a look at the prototype site we've built, Radio Pop. I've done a movie of it in action because it's never good to try a live demo, something will go wrong...

[22. HOME PAGE]
[23. SCREENCAST DEMO - just starts]
We thought around the branding quite a bit and ended up with the words - "you, tap, buzz and pulse" to represent you, tapping into your friends, the buzz of everyone and the pulse of gathering and distributing the data. These terms meshed nicely with rounded, circle and bubble-like graphics. This was also at the time when the BBC radio networks rebranded, and the new consistent circular logos work really well with this graphical style and are used in some of our infographics, animations and graphs on the site.

"Pop" was used as the term for liking something, and also as the name of the service - Radio Pop. OK, it might not be appropriate for a real service, with its suggestions of pop music, but it's good enough for now

This is the homepage if you're not signed in.

However if you've signed up then you get this page when you visit - the "you" page. This is the page for your data - I'll come on to how we get the data in a moment, for now just assume we can collect radio listening data.

We've got 3 infographics on this page. At the top is your listening for the past 7 days - there's a stacked bar chart showing your listening by network for each day and there's scaled logos representing your total listening that week.

Next is your all-time listening - a bar chart by radio programme and a pie chart by network.

Finally there's a list of when you have "popped" - ie. when you expressed an interest in a song or a programme - it shows you when and what network you were listening to.

Oh, and there's also an RSS feed of your recent events, which you or your friends can subscribe to.

So how do we get the listening data to create this?

--------
(Radio page)
Ideally Radio Pop would track your listening through the BBC Radio Player - both Live listening and Listen Again. But Radio Pop requires you to be signed in to the service, so it knows who you are, and we don't have a sign-in facility in the radio player yet. In the time we had we weren't able to integrate Radio Player listening directly into the prototype. Instead there is a "Radio" page from where you can listen to Radio Player live streams while it tracks your listening and lets you pop the interesting bits.

Let's listen to something (i.e. lean back). Sorry, there's no audio in this capture.

(select Radio 1)
And, leaning forward, we can pop if we've heard a song we like we'll bookmark it

(Pop)
Lets go back to my page
(stop listening)
(back to you page)

So we can see, at the bottom, there's the thing we just popped on Edith Bowman's show.

--------------------------------------
(Tap page)
The next page on the site, "tap", tapping into your friends. You can add friends just like any other social networking sites and if you've accepted a friend request then their data appears on this page, aggregated with all your other friends.

(Friends list)
At the top are a list of your friends and controls to let you add or remove friends.

But then it's very similar to the You page - except the infographics show the aggregate, collective data of just your friends. So you're seeing your friends' favourite radio programmes and networks.

But from here you can also click through to your friends' personal pages and just see their data.

(Click through to FridayForward)
this is chris, the software engineer who wrote most of this
So that's his radio listening

--------------------------------------
(Buzz page)
And finally, completing the trio, is the "buzz" page. This collects everyone's data and displays the favourite networks, most listened programmes and pops from everybody that is using the site.

(Show animation)
There's an animation that scales the radio network logos to represent how much each network is being listened to. OK, so we haven't many active users yet! See how the new network logos work really well here?

(Show graphs)
So this is the aggregate listening data for everyone that's using the Radio Pop prototype.

--------------------------------------
(Pulse page)
The final part of the site, the "pulse" page provides a number of extras that you can download. Shown here is a widget for Macs which lets you listen to live 1Xtra from your desktop while tracking your listening and includes a "Pop" button if you like something you hear. We've got that installed, let's try it...

(Call up dashboard)
(Start playing 1xtra and then pop)
So that's another way to listen.
That's it - a quick demo of the Radio Pop site.

[24. YOUR DATA]
[25. THEN ADD FRIENDS]
[26. EVERYONE ELSE]
[27. WAYS TO LISTEN]

[28. GETTING IT OUT THERE]
It's Zane Lowe.

We think it would be important to make this listening data available in lots of places, not just on the BBC or the Radio Pop site.
People like to display data about themselves, particularly with music and media - it's part of advertising their identity. Just look at peoples' profiles on MySpace and Facebook or the success of sites like last.fm

[29. GETTING IT OUT THERE]
So we allow users to display their data publically by putting a widget on their blog or MySpace page - this one sits on your site and then changes to show when you are actually listening to Zane's show.

[30. GETTING IT OUT THERE]
Remember I talked about Connectiveness for Generation C?
Well we've got APIs too!

We make the listening data available as RSS for people to subscribe to. All the data is available through an API so other people or companies can build it into their sites or create new products that we haven't thought of. An API is just a way of defining how other websites and computer programs can get to your data. Making your data available openly on the web can be a very powerful thing.

As we take this project further we would also aspire to making the data portable - so you can take it away and use it with other similar sites.

[31. HOW IT WORKS]
Don't worry, I'm not really going to tell you how it works. Just that Radio Pop can support lots of different inputs and lots of different outputs.

On the left are the Inputs which feed listening data into Radio Pop. This could include the BBC Radio Player, the Facebook radio player or the 1xtra widget I showed you earlier.

And on the right are the outputs, things that can use the data in Radio Pop. I divide this into two sections.
Presentation of your personal data; user pages, widgets for blogs, items in your Facebook minifeed.
And the presentation of public, anonymous, mass data; how many people are listening on Radio Player right now, charts and graphs, most popular programmes on a radio station etc.
And in the middle is Radio Pop

[32. RADIO POP QUOTE]
There are loads of things that we didn't get time to include in the prototype.

Certainly everything should link up to songs that were played. It would be interesting to see a list of all the songs that you've heard to on the radio recently or be able to use the "pops" as a way to bookmark favourite or new songs. And similarly with speech programming you should be able to bookmark interviews, news stories or articles that you were interested in.

It would be fairly simple to use SMS so that listeners could "pop" something on Radio 1 just by sending "pop" in a text to 81199.

Privacy - it's a big issue. Will people mind that we are tracking their listening, obviously it's an opt-in system, but how many people will be comfortable with this? We make all the data public by default at the moment. There is a setting to make it private and visible only to you, though by doing so you detract from the overall utility of the site for you and for others.

We'd like to make the prototype public and try it out, though this needs a bit of work - using open standards where possible and re-working the site so it is reliable, scalable and fast. Oh, and making it run on the BBC's web servers, which is another talk entirely!

----------Onto part 3

[33. OLINDA - A NEW RADIO]
I'm going to talk about a radio we've been building, it's called Olinda. It's got a number of really exciting features which I'd like to talk about.

[34. PHYSICAL PROTOTYPING]
Physical prototyping - A starting point.
Building working electronic devices has become much easier in recent years for both individuals and small companies. There are a number of kits around that enable anyone with a minimal knowedge of electronics to just plug things together and write code for them. Which started us thinking.

[35. WHY?]
But why would we want to build a new radio?

1. Physical things make people think differently and can help them better understand new concepts - like social networking maybe
2. The DAB market is fairly mature and very successful but there is not a huge amount of innovation at the moment, we think there might be room for something that will help stimulate that market.
3. Online radio is great but people still like to listen to the radio through actual radios. Could we design a radio for Generation C?

[36. BUILD A FUTURE RADIO]
Inspired by this trend towards easier prototyping we decided to kick off some exploratory work to build a future-looking radio. We commissioned a design and technology consultancy called Schulze & Webb to build a real, working, physical, innovative DAB radio.
I was hoping to have them here today to talk about it themselves, but unfortunately they weren't available.

[37. FEATURES]
These are the features that the radio will have and what each might mean...

“Radio devices can look better and work better to support home listening”
“Modular hardware is achievable and means devices can be customised for specific functions”
“Even small social features go a long way to support discovery and conversations”
What could we do with licensing to stimulate the industry?

Schulze & Webb proposed that the project should be named Olinda - it's both a city in a novel by Italo Calvino and a real city in Brazil.

Let's go into these features in more detail

[38. FORM AND INTERFACE]
The radio should be visually striking and there should be some novel interaction design.

First lets use some of the lessons of datamining from the web, and derive the presets. There'll be an automatically-generated dynamic favourites list.

[39.]
The stations that you listen to most will be really easy to find, in fact they'll have their own tuning knob.

And let's make the radio suitable for its situation. So there'll be two screens. There will be a large forward facing screen for viewing information like LiveText from across the room and a secondary, smaller screen for when you're standing over the radio interacting with it and tuning.

[39. FORM DEVELOPMENT]
Schulze and Webb talk about a product being shelf-demonstrable - meaning that even sitting in a box in shop, a product can explain itself to the customer (or at least tell its simplest story in a matter of seconds). This means that it can be hard to be ambitious in the design of products and in the end some of the visual ideas have had to be compromised and the radio is going to be relatively visually conservative. This is partly due to cost and partly because we didn't want to take anything away from the concepts and new ideas by making it look different and completely unlike a conventional radio.

[40-45]
Here are some of the concepts and the development of the form of the radio.
[FINAL ONE] This is what it will look like

[46. MODULARITY]
Back to the Generation C aspect of things being extendable and customisable. The Olinda radio will have an open, standardised hardware API - with defined connections and defined protocols for the data. It's a bit like the expansion port on an iPod, and this makes the radio modular.

This hardware API enables add-on modules to be plugged in. And these modules can use the API to find out information like which station the radio is tuned to and the current LiveText, and lets them control the radio.

This enables anyone; the manufacturer or third parties, to create add-on modules which should all work with any radios implementing this API. And we think this could create a secondary market for DAB add-on products which will benefit manufacturers and consumers.
The picture shows some of the physical interlocking mechanisms looked at for the add-on modules - as part of the device's connectedness it should be obvious that it is extendable. I think the final mechanism is going to use magnets.

[47. WHAT MODULES?]
There we go, magnets!
As part of the project Schulze & Webb are building a single kind of module - which will use the hardware API and prove that it works.

[48. THE WIRELESS]
And this additional module? It's a wireless, literally! That's a bit old school isn't it? It's a social module which includes wi-fi wireless networking. And the idea is to integrate radio listening with someone's social network.

[49.]
[50.]
When you get the module you configure it to connect to your home wireless network and then you set it up with your friends, at least those who have similar radios. You'll notice in these sketches that there are slots for your friends - these will have wipe-clean spaces for writing your friends' names or windows for putting in photos. So each slot on the wireless is customised and configured to represent one of your friends.

[51.]
[52.]
[53.]
Then whenever they are listening to the radio their slot on your radio will light up. That's quite cool isn't it?

[54.]
And when you push the associated button your radio will show you what they are listening to. And if you want to listen alongside them?

[55.]
Just push select and it tunes to the station your friend is listening to.
[56.]

So this will provide a sense of community around your radio, harking back to the times when families and friends used to gather around the radio to listen. But providing this in a glanceable, non-intrusive manner. And it will start to support conversations around radio programming and the discovery of new shows and stations. Social networking for your radio.

[57. OPEN SOURCE HARDWARE]
We've agreed with Schulze & Webb that the IPR, intellectual property, for the device; the idea, the functions and design, will be made available under an attribution license, a bit like open source software. It means that any manufacturer, a third party, anyone, can build one of these radios or an expansion module and all the BBC requires is some attribution. What we want this to do is stimulate the potential market around Olinda, similar DAB radios and the modular add-ons.

What we're NOT doing is building something for the BBC to sell!

[58. BUILDING IT]
The prototype radio is being built at the moment. The actual construction is being outsourced to a model-making company. The electronics were prototyped by Schulze & Webb and the PCB is being built as we speak.

[59. OLINDA - A NEW RADIO]
Unfortunately it's not quite ready yet, I was hoping I might be able to demonstrate it today...sorry!

I've talked about consumers and audiences and Generation C. A social networking site for radio and a new radio with social features. Where does this get us...?

-----------
[60. LOOK! THEY JOIN UP!]
Well, they join up. That's not an accident is it?

We've got an emerging set of consumers and listeners that spend their time on social networking sites and expect to be able to customise and connect their devices.

We've got the Radio Pop website that enables social networking around radio. And it's got an open API for getting data in and getting data out.

And then we've got an actual radio, Olinda, that includes a wireless module with social networking type functions.

Maybe we could join them up?

[61. OLINDA + RADIO POP]
I mentioned earlier that with the wireless module of Olinda you can configure it with your friends. Well, that configuration will happen on the Radio Pop site. When you first turn on your Olinda radio you will be given a unique code for that radio. You can enter that code on the Radio Pop site to associate that particular radio with your account. From then on, whenever you use Olinda to listen to the radio it will update your Radio Pop account with that data. And when your friends listen to their Olinda radios, their data will be sent to Radio Pop and then on to your radio, causing those friend lights to turn on.

But, obviously I guess, it's not just other Olinda radios that this will work with. Anything compatible with Radio Pop will work with Olinda and vice-versa. So if your friend is listening through the internet then their button on your radio will still light up.

[62. NEXT?]

What are we going to do next?

Well, talking here is a start.

Because it shouldn’t just be the BBC...something like Radio Pop might work if it only supported BBC Radio stations but it wouldn't work particularly well. Really it needs to support all radio stations.
Now, we don't really know how this would work - who would run Radio Pop? Maybe there would be a Radio Pop equivalent for each broadcaster, but they all inter-operate? Well I'd like your help - let me know if you're interested.

We can work together to make it a common platform and then compete with our content.

And radios as well. Do any of the radio manufacturers out there want to look at using the concepts in Olinda? Like I said, it's all under an attibution license - so you can.

Finally, very soon we should be in possession of a working Olinda radio. Well, two actually, otherwise it would be a bit hard to demonstrate properly!

[63. APPENDIX]
That's our team's new blog - Radio Labs - and my email address.
Thanks to Schulze and Webb for all of the Olinda sketches and photos used.

And that's it, thank you for listening. Any questions?

The velocity of reading

2009-02-11T13:53:00.005Z

The end of 2008 seemed to be all annual reports and end-of-year list making - reading lists, last.fm charts and the Dopplr Annual Reports.

bkkeepr, if you haven't seem it, is like last.fm for books. It's a simple site for tracking what books you're reading, using Twitter as the update mechanism. You just send a message to the bkkeepr Twitter bot with the ISBN number and whether you're starting, bookmarking or finishing a book and the site does the rest.

I was looking for a project over Christmas and I wanted to add my reading to this self-measurement trend and generate some stats for my book habits. As bkkeepr had recently gained an API this eventually led to me building the velocity of reading.

If you use bkkeepr then head on over to the site and enter your username, it'll grab your recent reading from the API, look up the number of pages for each book with Amazon's API and spit back some graphs and stats on your reading. If not, here are my stats and graphs...

Reading velocity for tristanf
Over 228 days you read 19 books with 6722 pages in total.
There was an average of 353 pages per book.
That's about 29 pages per day (or 1.22 pages per hour).

First there are some stats, then a graph showing progress through each of your books, where each "tooth" in the graph is one book, followed by a graph showing your total cumulative reading. The gradient of the graph lines is the reading velocity - in pages per second. I've got quite neat reading habits, tending to read one book after another, others don't. I also only started using bkkeepr's bookmark feature during the site development. A physical bookmark still works for me.

There are a few limitations. The app is relatively complex because bkkeepr, and the data it produces, is pretty freeform. bkkeepr doesn't do any validation, or allow editing of your list, so people sometimes finish books before they start them, bookmark them in random orders or accidentally add books when they get the Twitter syntax wrong (guilty!). So there's a lot of error handling. The site is built with the Google App Engine and the Google Chart API. So, the main restrictions...

The books graph and the statistics ignore unfinished books, the cumulative graph includes them.

The app ignores bookmarks that aren't in page order.

If the book isn't found in Amazon's API then I give it an estimated number of pages (350 - the average pages per book from my recent reading) and it probably won't have a title.

The app only deals with the last 20 books you've read - this is mainly due to a restriction in Google charts.

Don't take it too seriously - as one of my colleagues said, "that's not really the point of reading books, is it?"