Duke Listens!: Visit my main blog at MusicMachinery.com

BBC Radio labs has just launched Radio Pop - social listening for the BBC.  With Radio Pop, your listening habits are scrobbled to the BBC - which will then show you all sorts of charts, graphs, and eight-by-ten colour glossy photographs with circles and arrows about your listening habits (notice I used the British spelling of 'color').

Radio Pop is making the data that they collect available through an API so researchers and developers can play with the data and build new apps and websites around the data.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get the Radio Pop Player to work (the player is the thing that scrobbles your listening, and it doesn't seem to be mac-friendly), so I haven't been able to see how well it works or to play with  the data yet.  Still, I think this is a really interesting idea and I am eager to try it out when I can figure out how to scrobble my BBC listening.  I've been really impressed about  the folks at the BBC labs.  They  are thinking hard about how to bridge the divide between traditional radio and the social web.   I think there are lots of opportunities here - especially when you think of the social possibilities when millions of people are all listening to the same show.  Read more at the BBC Radio Labs blog.

Update:  It is working now ... I just had to install realplayer.  Works great.