This week we welcomed Yves Raimond to the team, he previously worked in the team and has joined us to principally work on a -funded project to mine the World Service audio archive. In his first week he's been getting to grips with the archive; deriving some statistics from it, experimenting with for automated speech recognition and liaising with others in R&D and companies providing commercial speech to text solutions. He's currently evaluating the results.
We also recently added Pete Warren to the UX team, he’s worked with us before on an attachment and it’s good to have him back. He comes to us having grown up eating Frazzles, developing skills in interface prototyping, typography and sound design and most recently working with Radio & Music, News and others around the ±«Óãtv. Pete, Theo and the rest if the design team have been mapping the basic themes on the News Companion to P2P/LIMO, working up a proposal to News for next week and getting across the FI-CONTENT project. I’ve also been spending a lot of time thinking about FI-CONTENT this week. It’s throwing up some interesting tensions - the ±«Óãtv has strategic aims, our team has particular skills and direction, the project has specific aims, and our part of the project has a focus on prototypes and user evaluations. So we’re spending time getting to grips with all of these, whilst having to deliver some results in the short-term.
Chris N has been working on P2P/LIMO this week, working a lot of with JavaScript, apart from when I regularly interrupted him to add people to the guest list of the (previously known as Watch Later). Sean’s started work on LIMO as well after brushing up on some rusty mysql admin skills to fix a problem on http://zeitgeist.prototyping.bbc.co.uk with the help of Matt P. He also got the final draft of the RadioTAG spec out for review.
Kat has been preparing for our RadioTAG audience research test in September. She’s writing the copy for a booklet for the participants, the radio firmware’s been tweaked and Chris L has been porting Theo’s static HTML and CSS to the Sinatra app and making a few changes to support the test. The site now includes an admin area that allows us to see number of tags being made by individual users, and when they last tagged a programme, so we can monitor activity during the test. Once the test’s over we’ll take a harder look at the data, for insights such as which programmes people tagged the most, how often they tag, and at what time of day.
Chris has also been working with Matt on using the Audio APIs in Mozilla and Chrome to put together an HTML5 Radio Player demo. Matt did some fantastic work making streams available for our prototype in OGG format. They’re keen to work on this as a demo platform for future radio technology. The News linking project has slowed down a bit, with Chris L spending the week on Radio Tag and Joanne busy elsewhere too. But Duncan has been hacking along, looking through news sources and link feeds we can use for a prototype and Olivier is writing up the report whilst dealing with a lot of W3C admin.
This week Chris N’s JavaScript work led him to
Kat spotted the New York Times Labs site,
And I’ve been reading this about the various bits of work going on around the web to define a class of common actions that users do to web pages - like, follow, share, read later etc.