Tom Coates at Plasticbag.org has a great post describing how the BBC are "reinventing" radio. In a nutshell, the idea is to let people "bookmark" (timestamp, in fact) music using SMS on their cell phones as they hear it on the radio, perhaps adding tags to the bookmark, and subsequently login to a website to rate it.

The best way to describe it is to start off with some Principles for Effective Social Software that we developed as a result of working on the project. I'm not going to pretend that they cover everything, but they've proven very useful for us. We believe that for a piece of Social Software to be useful:

• Every individual should derive value from their contributions
• Every contribution should provide value to their peers as well
• The site or organisation that hosts the service should be able to derive value from the aggregate of the data and should be able to expose that value back to individuals

So this is how it works. Phonetags is about bookmarking songs you hear on the radio using your mobile phone. The way you use it is very simple. If you're listening to a radio network (initially BBC 6 Music) and you hear a song you'd like to make a note of, you pull out your mobile phone, type an 'X' into an SMS (remember: X marks the song) and send the text to a BBC short-code. Later when you come to the site, you type in your mobile number into the search box to see a list of all the songs that you've bookmarked...

Tom provides great screenshots, and discusses operational tags, which he calls "magic tags" (a term that I hope does not catch on), which *do something* as opposed to being just an assertion. For example, "*four" represents assigning the value of four stars to the tagged song in your personal profile, not just associating it with other songs tagged "*four."

Note: this is much like the example I outlined in Open Tags: Made For A Distributed World, where I denote a restaurant as being "4 out of 5". Because I was making an argument for an open tagging system -- one in which the author does not know what hypothetical or real taggregator services might be taking advantage of the tags at some point in the future, the "4 out of 5" model of rating is better, since it does not presume what the the rating scale is:

I believe, in the long run, the services will have to become smart enough to look at the tags and decide whether an entry is relevant. A restaurant review service like the idealized Dinnerbuzz could simply look for the "restaurant" tag, and rely on elements from the restaurant review domain -- cities, states, cuisines, "4 out of 5", and the like -- as markers. It might be smart enough to ignore the other tags -- "Cohiba Churchill" and "Gruet" for example -- that other services might pick up on.

In the case where a service has a 10 point ot 100 point scale, the "4 out of 5" can be normalized, where "*four" is hanging in space. The BBC system is yet another fascinating example of a closed tagging model for music -- like Last.fm -- and so "*four" is only meaningful there, where you know its a five star scale.

In the long run, the BBC project is a glimpse into the future of a socialized model of radio participation, leveraging cell phone mobility (don't tag music while driving, folks!). But, although Tom offers Priciples of Effective Social Software, he and the BBC are not dealing with the issue of who owns the metadata.

Tom Coates

We're getting in incredible metadata on music that we simply didn't have before - metadata and descriptive (emotive!) keywords that we can analyse and chop up and use as the basis for all kinds of other navigational systems. This is metadata that is often sorely lacking and could help us enormously in the future.

Yeah, well... except the metadata should be understood to be the property of the listeners, perhaps made open to the BBC, but actually should be held in trust. There is going to be a tug-of-war between media companies at their "audiences" which increasingly are going to become active participants in the crafting of media experience. As user's attention and social gestures increasingly form the social architecture that forms media experience users will want to control -- to own -- the elements of their social profiles that contribute to the greater good.

Tom makes the case as to why BBC and other media firms will want to tap into the social aquifer, the wellsprings of this future experience, but they don't really make the case for us handing over all that information to the BBC. I agree that radio needs to be reinvented, to be socialized (a la the personal radio station at Last.fm), but this is not that.

As the first comment states at Tom's post:

What do i get again? :) Sorry to be obtuse, but as a user what's the benefit to me? [posted by Stewart at August 30, 2005 01:05 AM]

In the final analysis, I agree that radio will need to be socialized, but I am not sure that a broadcast medium like conventional radio can make that jump. Certainly, the BBC or other broadcast media would like us to provide all those tags and ratings, but why would we hand over all that metadata to them, since it may not actually change our personal experience of the radio a bit? They can't fracture the broadcast into a gazillion streams, with those tagged "downtempo" finding their way to me. It just provides a "tagalicious" means for the BBC to profile their market, as opposed to a way to have a many-to-many communication setup.