Michael Smethurst's dashboard

Michael Smethurst replied on November 13, 2008 21:52 to the idea "Mobile friendly parser for bbc.co.uk desktop sites" in BBC:

/programmes already has mobile friendly views:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/programme...
just add .mp to a standard url. It's still in development so there may be gaps. Content negotiation / device detection is on the way so you won't need the ugly extension. the same functionality will be on /music soon

Michael Smethurst replied on October 03, 2008 13:39 to the idea "I would like iplayer to permanently remember what I watch" in BBC:

more or less every email i'm sending and receiving at the mo is on this very idea. a persistent page per user showing what you've watched, what you've listened to and what you're planning to watch / listen to. As private or public as you like

Michael Smethurst replied on September 01, 2008 10:40 to the idea "Episodes list pages" in BBC:

absolutely. but before we can gets users to update programme data we need a concept of users which bbc.co.uk doesn't yet have. There's a whole other project going on to look at /users and personalisation and etc so that should help here

Michael Smethurst replied on August 05, 2008 08:18 to the idea "Show me a feed of when an artist has been played across BBC Radio outlets!" in BBC:

i suspect this would be something like:
/programmes/music/artists/:artist/all/episodes

or
/programmes/music/artists/:artist/player/episodes

for all episodes on iplayer. the first view might be a little long but we could look at chunking it up.
It's not on the backlog but we'll keep it in mind

Michael Smethurst replied on August 05, 2008 08:15 to the idea "Episodes list pages" in BBC:

Sorry, a further point. Some of the programme data we have is from repeats from the archive. An example might be reruns of something like Allo Allo. These repeats are often shown out of sync. So you'll get an episode from series 6, then one from series 7, then one from series 5. If we don't have reliable ordinality data the only thing we can go off is broadcast data and since we don't know the actual first broadcast (only the first broadcast since 2007) making an episode guide here might be misleading

Michael Smethurst replied on August 05, 2008 08:14 to the idea "Episodes list pages" in BBC:

Sorry, a further point. Some of the programme data we have is from repeats from the archive. An example might be reruns of something like Allo Allo. These repeats are often shown out of sync. So you'll get an episode from series 6, then one from series 7, then one from series 5. If we don't have reliable ordinality data the only thing we can go off is broadcast data and since we don't know the actual first broadcast (only the first broadcast since 2007) making an episode guide here might be misleading

Michael Smethurs replied on August 05, 2008 08:10 to the idea "Episodes list pages" in BBC:

PIPs stands for programme information platform. It's the database behind both iplayer and /programmes.

Long running series with sub-series are already split this way. But some series (eg Eastenders) don't fit this pattern. In this case these series don't always have ordinality data and the only timing data we have is broadcast - hence the current full broadcast views.
We will add episode guide views where possible

Michael Smethurs replied on August 04, 2008 19:24 to the question "Search!" in BBC:

bbc search used to be contexual. the trouble was how you define context. if you're looking at a radio 2 programme is the context all of radio 2 or all programmes. so it switched back to being an all bbc search.
2 search boxes are seen in some places (eg recipes) but users tend to find them confusing - what does one do that the other doesn't
you can now do:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/archers
if that helps

Michael Smethurs replied on August 04, 2008 19:23 to the question "Search!" in BBC:

bbc search used to be contexual. the trouble was how you define context. if you're looking at a radio 2 programme is the context all of radio 2 or all programmes. so it switched back to being an all bbc search.
2 search boxes are seen in some places (eg recipes) but users tend to find them confusing - what does one do that the other doesn't
you can now do:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/archers
if that helps

Michael Smethurs replied on August 04, 2008 12:09 to the idea "Episodes list pages" in BBC:

@matthew87 - the archive data will be in PIPs and hence /programmes soon. Unfortunately the archive doesn't cover every episode and we need a solution that works for all our programmes - those with ordinality data and those without

Michael Smethurs replied on August 04, 2008 12:06 to the question "Search!" in BBC:

It's a bbc.co.uk policy call. BBC search searches all bbc.co.uk. The only exception I know of is iPlayer. Sorry - one BBC and all that

A comment on the problem "Missing playlist data" in BBC:

we have half a plan to get session data into musicbrainz and back into bbc.co.uk. relies on musicbrainz modelling 'performance' and performance groups tho - work that's planned – fantastic-life, on July 31, 2008 21:53

fantastic-life replied on July 31, 2008 21:47 to the idea "Import historial programmes from the Infax database" in BBC:

is coming mate

fantastic-life replied on July 30, 2008 09:04 to the idea "Episodes list pages" in BBC:

The other problem is lack of data / poor quality data. The data on /programmes takes a circuitous route to the site. On route some data gets lost or mangled so for long running brands eg we don't have episode ordinality data so we can't trace the narrative arc except via broadcast. Even for short series the ordinality data might be missing or just plain wrong.

But we are working on it... honest

fantastic-life replied on July 29, 2008 10:09 to the idea "Episodes list pages" in BBC:

Episode guides are on the backlog somwhere – but probably not for a while

The difficulty is with long running brands – how do you show an episode guide for the Today programme for instance? And would it be useful to do this?

But we’ll get there