On the BBC Annotatable Audio project | plasticbag.org

Good luck to Tom Coates as he leaves the Beeb and starts his new job at Yahoo. We've never met Tom, but I enjoy your work.

On his last day working for the BBC, Tom Coates describes a project he and the Radio and Music Interactive R&D team have been working on as a means of allowing users to annotate and index BBC audio content.

"First off, imagine yourself as a normal user coming to a page about a particular programme or speech. What you see is a simple interface for playing and scrubbing through the audio at the top of the page with marked 'segments' highlighted. If you hover over those segments they brighten up and display the title of that section. If you click on them, it starts the audio playing from that point. This correlates to the sections below which could be filled with any amount of wiki-style content - whether that be links or transcripts or background information or corrections or whatever. Beneath that are tags that users have added to describe the programme concerned. If you click on any of the segment permalinks to the left it starts the audio at that point and changes the URL to an internal anchor so you can throw around links to chunks of a programme or a speech. So basically you get a much richer and fuller experience of the audio that you'd get by just listening to it in a media player"

On the BBC Annotatable Audio project... (plasticbag.org)