主播大秀

Hello, I'm the product manager of the .

In November 2012 I wrote a about a project I was working on with an agency called as part of the 主播大秀鈥檚 initiative.

I鈥檓 really excited that we have now been able to put the live on the .

The 主播大秀 publishes and broadcasts thousands of pieces of content a day both online and across our stations and channels. 主播大秀 Now gives us a new way to share more of this content but in a digestible way.

We know how busy people are and that we all expect the latest most relevant information to be there for us almost instantly.

We have therefore created a time based 鈥榝ast lane鈥� of content on the right hand side of the 主播大秀 主播大秀page. This tells people what鈥檚 happening right now and brings out the personality of our brands.

It not only helps people discover new content they might have otherwise missed, it also uncovers the conversations around that content which happen every day.

A quick look at 主播大秀 Now gives you the top four trending or most popular terms. This updates dynamically as soon as another item is published which makes it even easier to follow a news story just as it's breaking or a big event like Glastonbury.

I wanted people to be able to find out what鈥檚 happening in the 主播大秀 and the world right now without having to move around different areas of the 主播大秀 website. You can get your , see which song was last played on , read headlines from journalists overseas, see what鈥檚 about to start on and of course get the latest results all in one place.

The stream is made up of a mixture of recently published content and official 主播大秀 accounts including 主播大秀 News and Sports journalists, Radio shows and DJ鈥檚, popular TV programmes such as , or and Radio 1鈥檚 . These accounts are all used as additional ways to communicate and have conversations directly with audiences.

I know people feel passionately about the 主播大秀 brands so it was important that every feed includes the appropriate logo. The Twitter Feeds also include the twitter handle for example , we then display the whole tweet.

The internally published content, i.e. content that sits on , is slightly different.

We make sure the brand that the content lives under is still prominent then, for example, for music we display the artwork of the song which is currently playing, and there is a prompt to listen live.

feeds work in a similar way: we show an image from the show, a brief description and a prompt to watch now in iPlayer.

Why do a prototype?

We do prototypes to test ideas quickly. It also gives us the opportunity to use a range of technology which means we can build as much as possible in the time available, which in this case was just four weeks. So unlike our current 主播大秀page this prototype won鈥檛 work on older browsers or devices.

, from Red Badger, shares some insight on how they built the prototype

鈥�By combining a variety of data sources and data strategies we created a unified stream of real-time 主播大秀 data which is delivered to each user's browser via Server-sent Events. Using our custom 主播大秀 Brand database we ensure each update is first associated to a configured brand so by the time it reaches a users browser, the update has been contextualized to a common brand. The stream of data is also passed through our trend analysis module, which uses a natural language query processor to extract common terms and aggregate trends occurring over the last six hours across the 主播大秀.

is at the core of 主播大秀 Now, being suited as it is to real-time web applications. We used to power the 主播大秀 Brand database and to facilitate inter-application pub/sub. The trend analysis module uses 聽and the (Natural Language Toolkit). We used to provide virtualized development environments, provisioned by . We also used Chef to provision production environments.鈥�

What next?

I鈥檝e got several user testing sessions booked in where we will test the prototype with users across the country.

As this is a prototype this is just the start. My vision is that by offering different levels of manual and automatic personalisation each person will get live information on the things that they are most interesting in, be it , , or . This could be an optional piece of functionality, allowing people to chose how they want to see and receive their content from the 主播大秀.

I would love you to give me your feedback by leaving a comment below or tweeting using the hash tag #bbcnow.

is the product manager, 主播大秀 主播大秀page.