Things that Radio 4 might find interesting

I was asked to pop along to the Radio 4 interactive team meeting the other day and start a discussion around interesting things I had seen on the web - they're looking at rebuilding some of their big web sites and are looking for inspiration. These are some of my notes from the session. It's mainly internet stuff, and is actually mainly blog posts and ideas rather than sites or products...

Transcriptions and the Mechanical Turk

Waxy.org on using Amazon's Mechanical Turk to transcribe podcasts. It's something I've looked at before, there's even a company that simplifies the process, but I particularly liked this bit...

"First, I split my 35-minute audio file into seven five-minute MP3s. Why? Mechanical Turk workers are all working in parallel, so the more discrete tasks, the faster the job gets done. "

And not only could you have those segments being transcribed in parallel but you could get different workers to do multiple, redundant transcripts of the same audio and then somehow combine or select the best ones. It would be great if we could publish more transcripts for programmes on the web, particularly if they are machine-readable and searchable. Something to try sometime I think.

And discussion turned to whether we could do something like this on the Radio 4 site. Maybe some kind of marketplace with listeners requesting tasks (I mean Radio 4 website tasks like transcribing programmes, tagging up segments, adding photos...) and other listeners carrying them out to gain kudos?

News consumption and games

I like Ethan Zuckerman's blog, particularly his thoughts about xenophilia and how we could encourage people to look at things outside their usual sphere of interest, partticularly around international news. In a recent post he looks at games and game-like behaviours, suggesting...

"The holy grail in this model, as far as I’m concerned, would be a Firefox plugin that would passively watch your websurfing behavior and characterize your personal information consumption. Over the course of a week, it might let you know that you hadn’t encountered any news about Latin America, or remind you that a full 40% of the pages you read had to do with Sarah Palin. It wouldn’t neccesarily prescribe changes in your behavior, simply help you monitor your own consumption in the hopes that you might make changes. "

He moves on to PMOG...

"PMOG - the Passively Multiplayer Online Game. You play PMOG by surfing the web. A Firefox plugin keeps track of how many different sites you’ve visited and assigns you “data points” for each different site. These points serve as currency for the game - you can stash them in “crates” for other players to find, or use them to buy “mines” with which to attack other players. Basically, it turns the web into a gameboard for a multiplayer game, which you can actively participate in, or passively earn points in."

Maybe you could earn a Radio 4 badge if you download enough podcasts. And this led me on to other gaming sites such as Games With A Purpose, home of the original ESP image-describing game, Audio Puzzler where you get a set of audio fragments which you have to transcribe and then fit together, presumably resulting in transcribed or subtitled video, and Operation Sleeper Cell a new Alternate Reality Game (ARG) for Cancer Research where players can donate money to get early access to puzzles - it certainly looks like it's got puzzles that would intrigue and challenge the Radio 4 listener .

Recommendations

Good stuff as usual from David at DJAlchemi about recommendations...

"It doesn't have a screen so obviously it doesn't do video, but it's perfect for music nevertheless. It doesn't need a screen, because it knows better than you do what you want to hear. It has a comprehensive catalogue of all your likes and dislikes. Building on the Nike + iPod technology, it's connected to sensors in your feet and elsewhere so that it knows whether you're driving, walking, sitting, at the gym and so on. And it's single "Play me music I will like" button senses your mood based on the galvanic skin response when you press the button. Taking all these data sources into consideration, the perfect iPod computes the exact sequence of songs to fit your circumstances, with the right mix of familiar and new music."

"This is the Holy Grail that personalised media is supposed to be aiming for, but when I express it like this, most people seem to realise that it is (a) faintly ludicrous and (b) not the kind of music experience they want. They want a more organic and social relationship with music. Sometimes they want to share the same musical experience, whether at a gig or via the radio, even though that comes at the cost of losing personalisation. They're interested in what their friends are listening to. And, yes, they may have a few 'gatekeepers' (critics, DJs, bloggers), who they feel are on the same wavelength as them, and to whom they look for tips and recommendations. But the value of these is not to confirm or echo existing tastes, so much as to help them move on and broaden their musical tastes."

And the EchoNest continue to build on their API. You could build a serious music website on top of this lot - audio analysis, recommendations, similar artists, hot artists, buzz, charts...

Visualising literature
I love text-based visualisations and Stefanie Posavec's art visualisations of On The Road are so very pretty (the picture at the top of this post represents the sentence structure in the book). That kind of stuff inspired some of my Archers visualisation work. Also "I made tea" is cute. While showing Twistori I wondered if we could create a Twitter/Twistori-like stream of all the interesting stuff coming out of Radio 4 - so today I've been experimenting with Twittering while listening...

"Questions Questions - is the washing up bowl uniquely British?" about 2 hours ago from twitterrific

"Due to rising prices companies are exploring drilling for oil in surrey and sussex." about 3 hours ago from twitterrific

"mmm...cheese on toast" about 4 hours ago from twitterrific

"I think From Our Own Correspondent may be the best show on radio" about 6 hours ago from twitterrific

(OK, so one of those might not be about Radio 4)