• Submitted by: Fraser Murrell
• Link: http://www.dailysnooze-gadgets.com/

The BBC News Sidebar Gadget and BBC Weather Sidebar Gadget are hopefully the last ever gadgets that you will need to view news and weather on your desktop, according to Fraser who created these great looking Vista gadgets.

• Submitted by: Ben Smith
• Link: http://uktrains.pbwiki.com/

Inspired by this tweet from MP Tom Watson and enabled by the excellent BBC Backstage's travel feeds, this prototype service tweets disruption alerts for 25 UK train operators.  The original data is processed and shortened to less than 140 characters (in most cases) by Yahoo Pipes and tweeted via Twitterfeed which also adds a short-link back to the original BBC report.  Tweetlater provides the automated welcome DM.

• Submitted by: Duncan Robertson
• Link: http://whomwah.com/2008/11/02/bbc-programmes-via-instant-messenger/

This IM bot comes from a BBC member of staff Duncan Robertson...

I have been playing with ejabberd, Jabber, XMPP and the various client libraries, specifically the rather wonderfully simple Jabber::Simple and Jabber:Bot.

It all started because I was doing a Fireeagle integration job with a product at work, and was getting frustrated with the fact that it is still not super simple to update my location. It struck me as I stared at my desktop, that I always have Adium running. Wouldn’t it be great if I had a Fireeagle contact that I could just tell my location, and it would go off and update, letting me know when they’re done. Now that part is midway done (post to come), but before I started that, I wanted to research more the workings of a Chatterbot, a computer program that pretends to be a human and can answer basic commands. They have been around for a long time, I remember playing with an IRC bot a while back, getting it to display the last commit messages from Subversion.

So that research turned into a BBC Programmes bot. As I worked on BBC Programmes, I have good knowledge of the site and the data within, and building a bot that integrated with that data seemed a good example of using the restful API available.

If you just want to try this thing out, here are the details of what you need to do.

1. You need a Gmail or Jabber compatible IM account
2. You need a Jabber enabled client, I’ve listed a few:
   • Linx: Pidgin, GTalk
   • Mac: iChat, Adium, Psi
   • Win: Psi, Trillian, GTalk
3. You need to add a new contact: im.bbcprogrammes@gmail.com

This should be it. You should have a new contact appear in your list (They have a BBC logo as an avatar). You can now begin a conversation with this contact. It’s probably best to start with: HELP

• Submitted by: richard skew
• Link: http://www.richardaskew.co.uk/infusednews

Infused Entertainment brings the News idea and recreates it for the BBC entertainment feeds. It actually works slightly better as the music and media is more likely to be found on the sources I use. The idea behind it is the supplements you now get in most newspapers - this is the entertainment section.

• Submitted by: Andy Shearer
• Link: http://iplayerlist.mibly.com/map/

Andy explains what iplayerlist is and how it works.

I scrape bbc.co.uk/iplayer for all the current TV shows (a-z atom feeds help).Then I extract the synopsis from /programmes for each episode.

I then throw the episode synopsis at the Beta Open Calais API. This API will extract a ton of concepts, including some geographical information that it thinks the synopsis relates to (don't ask me how, I assume some sort of magic elf reads it).This geographical information (states, countries, towns etc) now includes longitudes and latitude info thanks to Open Calais chatting to Freebase. It works best with the larger synopsis.

I'm still questioning if this is any use to an non techy user. Would my dad like to see a map showing TV shows which relate to them? Anyway, in the future I might add a bit of colour coding on the markers for program type
(childrens, factual, comedy etc).

Because you can do it doesn't always make it useful but its the point of Backstage. To explorer the useful, artistic, clever, serious, etc. Keep on submitting...

• Submitted by: Chris Riley
• Link: http://www.trackplaying.com

Chris has been hacking about with the code for his previous prototype trackplaying recently.

Now there's a few different interfaces/stylesheet changes per machine type,

iPhone , mobiles , Wii and iGoogle . This is on top of existing changes to the interface.

But thats only the start, in response to feedback. Chris has added integration with the BBC's Radio Pop beta, using the Radio Pop API. So now you can Pop your trackplaying habits to Radiopop. Chris is using OAuth to pass the users information back and forth smoothly.

Chris evening are pretty full because he's also trying to add Last.FM support, so like Radiopop, you can add tracksplaying to your audio-scobbling and Instant messenger support via imified.com.

Chris is still welcoming feedback.

• Submitted by: Adam Lindsay
• Link: http://twitter.com/recomme

Following from the previous prototype Adam has launched his twitter bot which will recommend you other artists based on one you send it. It was first demoed at Mashed 08 but has now gone live for anyone using twitter to use. Just send a message using @recomme or direct message recomme with a single artist name and it will search through last.fm and other sources like /programmes for other artists it thinks you might like. Simple but clever.

• Submitted by: Chris Riley
• Link: http://www.trackplaying.com/

A new Mashup from Chris Riley, this time it shows as much information about a playing track as it can on one screen and updates in real time with the last.fm feed. The interesting part is, where you can put in your last.fm username and it will look and see if you will like the current track. Awesome stuff

I've written a new mashup - http://www.trackplaying.com - it displays information about the track currently playing on the radio. It takes data from BBC Music (beta), Last.fm and Amazon, and is hosted on Google App Engine. Mashup heaven! It is based on my previous attempt that some of you may recall.

• Submitted by: Fraser
• Link: http://www.dailysnooze.com

For the past 6 or 7 years I have run http://www.dailysnooze.com - mainly because I wanted a quick loading simple homepage for my browser, which included the BBC headlines and weather. Long gone are the days of screen scraping the bbc news pages and now luckily we have access to some nice feeds!

Things have moved on a little and we now have a few extras based on backstage feeds:

• dailysnooze.com browser homepage (BBC News and Weather)
• BBC News Vista Sidebar Gadget
• BBC Weather Vista Sidebar Gadget

I only just released the gadgets so thought I should share them a bit further. They are also available from the website itself.For the homepage the brief I have always stuck to is "quick loading and simple", and I like to think I have a good balance in my slightly biased opinion.

From the tech side of things the gadgets/homepage get their data from my
hosted DB and associated web services. I have an app running at home which
updates the server DB regularly with the feed information.

• Submitted by: Richard Askew
• Link: http://www.richardaskew.co.uk/infusednews

The application takes an rss feed of BBC data provided at http://dev.barnesdmd.co.uk/ff/?ffid=2. Keywords are extracted using the Yahoo Term extractor and these are used to retrive data from YouTube and Flickr, the phpFlickr classes were used to acheive this (http://phpflickr.com/).

The mix of media (Imagery, Sound and Video) often enhanced the story being presented. The keywords used often return media isn't relevant due to keywords not being given enough context, or media being tagged incorrectly. If more time or the funding was made available I would look further into utilising Ambient Interface technology so that the application could deliver the information in an engaing way.

• Submitted by: daniel nethersole
• Link: http://mugamail.com/bbc/

The script uses several external APIs from blogging communities, search engines and social networking sites to work out what people are talking about. Then using the last 50 Data from the BBC it compiles a list in order of the interest the British public has on the subject. At the time of writing this Lock keepers' cottage sale halted is the least interesting story, and Oil price up despite Saudi pledge the most. It’s not 100%, and sometimes odd results show. The system works like a automated Digg.com.

• Submitted by: Tom Scott
• Link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radiolabs/2008/05/helping_machines_play_with_pro.shtml#comments

The guys at the BBC Radio Labs have been up late again. This time while at Xtech, they have transformed the BBC Radio's programme schedule into RDF and many other types of data. Of course this is all RESTful using a API but they have taken it one step further and decided to play with XMPP (jabber) so they can create notifications of things your interested in complete with data from DBpedia.

• Submitted by: Simon Cross
• Link: http://www.simoncross.com/music/radio1/

A new prototype based on Radio 1's now playing data but this time from a BBC member of staff working in their 10% project. Simon goes into details.

We're working on a new 10% time project over here at FM&T Audio and Music - and we thought we'd give you guys a super sneak preview. There's a few of us involved here, including Yasser Rashid, Cathy Bartlet and Ramon Dodd.Its around visualizing now playing information by pulling in data from across the web.

The plan for this is to eventually build a flash version which is full-screenable to provide a visual companion while listening in the office, or on the web etc. Future data sources we hope to build on include Musicbrainz, Wikipedia, YouTube, song lyrics,Yahoo Music and loads more. At the moment, we've just got as far as last.fm, flickr and the webcam, but its a start!

• Submitted by:

New Prototype from Chris Riley, instead of rating how in touch is the BBC, he's scratching his own itch about the music playing over Radio 1, Radio 2, 1Xtra and 6 Music.

I've coded a hopefully useful, if not idea stimulating web page. It is called Now Playing http://cgriley.com/nowplaying/ and shows you information about the artist currently being played on BBC Radio 1, BBC 1xtra, BBC Radio 2 and BBC 6 Music. It is based on some BBC data released at hack day, with Yahoo Pipes and JQuery thrown in.

I made it because when I'm listening to the radio I like to know a bit more about the artist. Have I heard some of their tracks or albums before? If I've no idea who they are what have they done in the past? How much can I buy their albums for, what has been released? What is on their website, do they have a website? Which artists are they like?

All those questions are answered by this new page. It is designed to update itself in real time with the current artist being played, and seems to work quite well. As always the best way to see what it does is to give it a go, and if you want more info about how it works, data sources, known issues etc. then there is an obligatory about page. http://cgriley.com/nowplaying/about.aspx

• Submitted by: Ben Smith
• Link: http://apps.facebook.com/bbcfriendsontv/

Find friends (or, currently, name-sakes of your friends) that have been on BBC TV, what programmes and when they were aired. Currently, this finds the first TV programme's 'contributor' to match your friend's name, through the BBC Programme Catalogue (http://catalogue.bbc.co.uk).Future developments will involve giving you the choice of all possible matches to identify from and integration with IMDB (http://www.imdb.com).