Ripples, or The Social Life of a Broadcast
Building an architecture for media on the web
The recent redesign of the BBC Radio 3 site featured a joint project between the BBC’s Radio & Music Interactive department (where I work, running the Technology & Design team) and Central New Media division to deliver unique, persistent pages per programme. (Ed. This piece was originally published at cityofsound.com on July 28th 2004.)
Tom Coates, of my aforementioned team, has written an excellent summary of both the practical aspects of the project and the significance of the work from a user experience point-of-view. I thought I’d step back a bit and talk about the genesis of the project, and the thought process behind the project from my point-of-view.
Building on some related work around automated search results for programme information and some informal R&D that Tom Coates and Matt Webb led around time-based navigation models, I wondered if we could jam these ideas together to deliver something I’d been wanting to address for a while: in short-hand, making a radio site blog-friendly. Or rather, beginning to create a site which presented information spaces of the appropriate shape, size, dynamics, and formal quality to enable them to be informational building blocks for others, in an on-demand media world.
