Find, Listen and Label - Audio Tagging from the BBC

In October 2005 Tom Coates described one of the projects he was working on in his final days at the BBC:

I consider it one of the most exciting projects I've ever worked on, and BBC Radio & Music Interactive one of the only places in the world where I would have been able to have done so.

The project we undertook was focused on Annotatable Audio (specifically, but not exclusively, of BBC radio programming) - and we decided to look in an unorthodox direction - towards the possibilities of user-created annotation and metadata. We decided that we wanted to develop an interface that might allow the collective articulation of what a programme or speech or piece of music was about and how it could be divided up and described. Our first ideas looked for approaches similar to del.icio.us, Flickr or our own Phonetags - which create collective value by accreting the numerous annotations that individuals make for their own purposes. But after a fascinating discussion with Jimmy Wales, we decided to think about this in a different way - in which (just like Wikipedia) individuals would overtly cooperate to create something greater and more authoritative.

Whilst listening to "Feedback" on Radio 4 this evening I heard a segement about an "audio wiki" being used to annotate episodes of "All In The Mind" on Radio 4.

From Find Listen Label Help

This is a tool for adding notes to radio programmes. You can split the programme into smaller sections, called snippets, and then add a Label.

Radio programmes can be split into snippets, like chapters. These may be associated with articles in the programme, like interviews, or just mark out interesting bits. The purpose of dividing the programmes like this is to make it easier for everyone to Find and Listen to specific parts of the programme

It is also a wiki - this means that anybody, including you, can edit any of the information for everybody to see. This allows you, the listeners, to work together to create something that is useful to everybody.

I can't wait until we can annotate Today in real time. We could see how many times they cock up the time-check much more easily.