While I'm talking BBC, here's a story from a little while ago. I'm a big fan of last.fm, and I've been using it for a few years. Because I used to play my MP3s on a headless linux box in my flat, I wrote a commandline python mp3 player that could ping last.fm. My profile is a pretty good picture of my listening habits.
At BBC Radio, the radio stations are moving steadily from traditional analogue studios to fully digital systems that play nearly all their music from hard disk. As a member of the Architecture Team there, I had access to experimental data feeds from these systems. One day at work I asked myself a question: what happens when you plug behavioural data generated by an automatic process into social software designed for humans?
Half an hour later, I'd rigged my last.fm plugin into the feed system and switched it on. Over a year later, when I left the BBC, sekrit had accumulated a record of more than 50,000 tracks played on BBC 6Music.
Bear in mind when looking at this data that only the most mainstream and automatable parts of this admirably diverse radio station are visible in the feed. Every dusty Ska 7" played by Phill Jupitus on the Breakfast Show is invisible here. Even with this proviso, I think the dataset is fascinating.
Ever wondered what a radio station's best friends would look like? Here's your answer.
I've returned to the working world from sabbatical and now it's a big day. I've been looking forward to this all year.
This afternoon I flipped the switch on the BBC Programme Catalogue and let everyone in. Stop reading this now and get in there.
I'm going to have a fun afternoon monitoring the server for load, but I know that lots of people are going to have a great deal more fun looking through the catalogue. The depth and quality of this unique library of information is quite stunning. It gets better every day, as it receives nightly updates from the master database inside the BBC. I was particularly pleased to discover that even my dad has a listing: he appeared on the local news as a council spokesman during the UK BSE crisis. As one of our early-access guinea pigs said, "this is as addictive as Google Earth for anyone interested in UK television and radio."
If you're interested in the technical details behind the site, I'll be speaking at the RailsConf and XTech conferences later this year about how Ruby on Rails made this one of the smoothest software development projects I've ever worked on. I doff my cap to my co-conspirators: Tom Loosemore, Julie Rowbotham, Ben Hammersley, Adam Lee, and the wonderful librarians and techies who toil ceaselessly in the BBC's archive.
Let me know what you think.