Zapper’s Brain Dump

The gorgious Tim-licious artwork of phase 2

after 7 extremely hard weeks, and one of the more stressful dress rehearsals of a my career with the 5live team , watching mark kermode, and the shorter bloke from the peep show appear on the radio vis client was amazing,

Visualising radio mark 2 has launched, it’s a bbc experiment to see what can be done to engage with audiences more, personally i like to think of it as web red button, it’s only a trial but the tech is there to do some really cool experiences,

wanta show the wikipedia entry of outcast as their playing, sure….
wanta show a rss feed of premier league goals, sure…
wanta build a module to dynamicly parse the football press acc ’s feed and push it into the client, sure… will cost a bit though
wanta show the music video, sure… though the trust would probably never allow it

it’s a modular system easily expandable to test out how to do this thing, and it’s great, but only the start, only a fraction of the potiental has been reached, the ux ain’t perfect yet, and is even a little confused in places, are the audience passive or active, should we be pushing or should they be choosing, the important thing is the base tech is here now, with it’s extendable api mark 3 could really be something special, and i mean that, we just need the courage to build ontop of it,

today’s launch was no less amazing, alot of flash/ruby/monterosa tech went into this thing,

sage stats, rss feeds, webcams, sms messages, vcs feeds, drm(evil…. but necessary oh i feel so dirty), json, nuts, bolts, and even a few big name celebs

it’s going to be a fun few weeks

started today it, it’s to be repeated for the 5live simon mayo show 1pm to 4pm, monday to friday for the next few weeks, then expanding further into other networks

http://bbcami.s3.amazonaws.com/live_5live.html

for those of a geeky persuasion here’s the debug link (no secret easter eggs i’m afraid but it shows you a bit more about hows it’s been made)

http://bbcami.s3.amazonaws.com/live_debug_5live.html

ondemand links (of questionable if strongly debated quality) will be on the website soon

i can honestly say, with the restrictions, time-restraints, set-backs, this is one of the proudest products i’ve made, hope anyone watching it enjoys it, will probably do a bbc radio labs blog posting about the vis radio client/console at some point its a ugly disgusting, thing of beauty , most of the credit of which has to go to the the mark 1 team,

cheers

Zap

updated to include the<censored>radio blog post</censored>