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Listed below are comments made by onpause between Wednesday, 18th June 2008 and Wednesday, 1st July 2009.

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Shownar: reflecting online buzz around BBC programmes 8:38pm on 01 Jul 2009 hi again.

in reference to "how does the system know the difference between a blog that criticises and one that praises a programme?", Blanche Hunt's Grimace (aka Nippie Sweetie) is right -- we don't, at this point at least, intend to highlight the difference between criticism, praise, or indifference...

partly because that's a significant technological challenge (see, for instance, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentiment_analysis) but also because Shownar isn't intended to reflect positive or negative opinion per se. it's all about linking to Web-based discussion, and it's intended to lead Shownar site users to discussions of BBC programmes.

then users can read those discussions, positive, negative, & indifferent, and decide for themselves whether to watch or listen or perhaps take part in the discussion and comment themselves...

by the way, this isn't at all to say that the BBC isn't interested in negative (and positive!) opinions about it's programmes -- of course we are interested in that. it's just to say that the collection of this type of feedback isn't the purpose of the Shownar.com prototype...
Shownar: reflecting online buzz around BBC programmes 11:54pm on 30 Jun 2009 thanks for the comments on Shownar, everyone. i'm part of the BBC team behind Shownar.

good point, Blanche Hunt's Grimace (aka Nippie Sweetie) -- that's why we don't use the term "popularity" at all on the Shownar website, but, rather, "buzz". Shownar is not about popularity, it's only about discussion which references BBC programmes on the Web, whether positive or negative.

so, the top "buzzing" programmes on the Shownar charts could very well be there due to less than glowing reviews -- but that's important for the BBC to reflect in some way, we feel.

Tengsted, assuming Digital Spy publishes a blog online, then, yes, we are almost definitely following it. and when/if it links to a BBC programme webpage, then very likely Shownar will link to the Digital Spy post. see http://www.shownar.com/about/get_involved for the background on how links to blog posts get surfaced on Shownar.com.

as for "fads", well, if faddish websites are where people are discussing BBC programmes, that's where we need to look for buzz, i'd suggest? still, i think i get your point: we shouldn't forget about the more established arbiters of taste here?

Boilerplated, how's this:

blog posts and microblog posts (for instance, twitter posts) that include a link to a BBC programme webpage get tallied up by Shownar as "buzz votes"... the more buzz votes a programme and/or episode gets, the higher, in general, it'll rank on Shownar charts.

the ranking system is a bit more subtle than that in practice, but this, i hope, gives you a less "merkating" sense of what Shownar is up to?

more here: http://www.shownar.com/about/technical
music beta and linked data 8:34pm on 31 Jul 2008 yes, Topics has appeared, and is a node -- the Topics node links to Programmes (a bit), but Programmes doesn't link to Topics (yet)... but that's the plan, oh yes!

getting the User node going will be profound, no? getting User linked to other nodes will be rather Web 2.0 ;-)

that pentagram will grow into a hexagram (add News), a septagram (?) (add Sport), an octagram (add Food), etc etc... an N-gram, really...
BBC Music Artist Pages Beta 12:45pm on 29 Jul 2008 yes, i'm sure it's possible to collaborate with iMDB, but my point is that it's not as straightforward as using Wikipedia data -- wikipedia has, by design, a more liberal license.

and, yes, i'd say that the Beeb is a commercial company in this regard -- certainly has market impact (for instance, impact on the markets iMDB and Amazon are interested in)
BBC Music Artist Pages Beta 11:06am on 29 Jul 2008 i think you are mistaken about IMDB, ed lyons -- the data can be downloaded, but can't be resused commercially without special arrangement...

If you do want to use IMDb data for commercial purposes, you must contact our Content Licensing Department at http://www.imdb.com/Licensing/

so, not a no-brainer, certainly...
Under the iPlayer hood for radio 7:40pm on 27 Jun 2008 andynormancx, you are right, something we noticed too. it's a bit of a metadata snafu, and we're working to fix that now.

it's perhaps interesting to consider the source of the confusion, which is that, way back in the mists of time ( ;-) ), shows like Old Harry's Game were commissioned and first broadcast on Radio 4 (as i understand it, anyway). so this is what the iPlayer for Radio browse-by-network has been based on -- mistakenly, as it turns out.

mea culpa on that one, as i helped make the wrong call on that in the first place. but, it should be sorted out during the beta period.
The Simple Joys of Web-Scale Identifiers 11:44pm on 25 Jun 2008 yes, you are right, academic research confirms 5% drift over Wikipedia's lifetime.

you know me, though, always looking on the bright side: i say hooray, 95% remained persistent! ... ;-)

i'm sure MusicBrainz fairs even better than 95%, but surely not 100% persistence?

plus, Wikipedia *URLs* actually remain persistent, as in dereferenceable -- almost no 404s... it's the *resource* "behind them" that changed, which is actually what you are getting at, no? i agree that this is unfortunate, but they sometimes surmount this via redirects and implied redirects via disambiguation pages. but it's inconsistent and non-machine readable, alas.

Wikipedia has changed the *meaning* of 5% of it's persistent URLs. so they still point to something, but what they point to has changed.

much thanks, as that's an important point to make, no pun intended.
The Simple Joys of Web-Scale Identifiers 10:01pm on 25 Jun 2008 hey ed, i think you (and maybe michael originally?) have misinterpreted what the Beeb's programme episode identifiers actually are?

the unique identifier isn't: b00c53g4...

it's: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00c53g4

thus it's web-scale and guaranteed unique.

i think we're getting confused because the MusicBrainz IDs, both internal and external, are GUIDs...

but URIs are just as unique, and arguably more web-scale, than GUIDs...

"Nobody else (e.g. ITV, Channel 4, HBO etc) can use your identifiers without risk of overlap." -- yes they can, just keep the BBC namespace at the beginning. the whole URI is the identifier.

mattcopp, i agree with you that Wikipedia has URLs to die for. luckily and fortuitously for them, their "business" process ensures this: consider the workflow of how wiki pages are created and named...

but disagree with: "you just need a bit of imagination" -- imagination is at a surplus, believe me... what you actually need is a wiki-style URL naming scheme enforced inside an organisation, like Wikipedia lucked into, and so far the BBC hasn't been able to enforce a wiki-style unique naming scheme to it's programme titles, nor has it been able to curate disambiguation pages (or afford the server load to automate such beasts -- and automated naming conventions lead to abstract IDs anyway... "let's say there were 2 bands called 'Queen' one would be 'Queen (1980s)' and the other would be 'Queen (2000s)'." what if there were 2 Queens in the 1980s? what would we call the 2nd? whatever we called it, a human would need to be involved, or else an automated process would start to name things in less-than-human-readable ways: Queen1, Queen2, Queen3, etc?)...

nor has MusicBrainz, for that matter, thus the GUIDs...

"let's say there were 2 bands called 'Queen' one would be 'Queen (1980s)' and the other would be 'Queen (2000s)'." -- fine, but some human being actually needs to name these thing in that way by hand, or else some pretty clever software must do so -- but then that would depend on human-entered metadata in the system somewhere in the chain, no?

plus many "episodes" simply don't have titles at all, much less unique ones.

anyway, human-readable is a delight. persistent is a drop-dead requirement. Wikipedia lucked into both, because it has lots of free labor that literally has to give each page a unique name, by hand.
Wikipedia + Lucene's MoreLikeThis = useful bits about the bits? 9:22pm on 18 Jun 2008 thanks for the comment. yes, smuggyuk, the work described here has fed into the Muddy Boots commission -- we've asked them to, amoung other things, improve my system to the point where, hopefully, it can be run as a realtime, Yahoo! Term Extraction or Open Calais-like API... as you can see, my prototype runs painfully slowly... things look very promising in the Muddy Boots work, so watch this space...

your question: "how would you extrapolate the category tags to be used on the episode pages?" -- the Wikipedia articles' titles are all unique by definition, so we can use those as "tag" link text on the content page badge. the Wikipedia/dBpedia URI is a key for a bunch of useful info: Category Title, précis, links to other Wikipedia and Web pages, etc... does that answer what you were wondering?

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