On ma radio. The radio and music division of the BBC have come up with a lovely little HTML radioplayer app, which redistributes the BBC’s radio output as streams not solely by channel, but by genre. It’s mainly a outlet for the specialist music shows that the BBC produce, and there’s also some limited faceted classification applied to these to increase serendipitous discovery of previously hidden gems.

This from today’s Guardian:

“The simple addition of a list of shows based on musical genre will open up shows to people who would not normally listen to a particular station, believes Chris Kimber, head of BBC Radio Online. “Radio brands work both ways – they probably turn as many people off as they attract,” he says. “A lot of people still think that Radio 3 is wall-to-wall classical music, for example. But it’s changed beyond all recognition in the last couple of years. Using the player, someone who would never usually tune into Radio 3 might stumble across something they love on Mixing It or the Andy Kershaw show, which they wouldn’t otherwise have found.”

There’s also an interesting linkage mentioned in the Guardian article between interface choices and digital rights:

“The sticking point has been in agreeing terms with the record companies who control copyright restrictions on the music played. In a world where the music giants are paranoid about the threat posed by the internet to their industry, it was an arduous task to persuade them to allow shows that often contain records played months before their release to be archived. To mollify them, the BBC has agreed to archive shows for seven days only and to make them available only “as live”, and not for download on to a PC. You can skip through the shows in 15-minute chunks, but it is not possible to rewind them to listen to the same track again and again.”

» Guardian: “Web radio is finally getting its act together”