Four guys from the BBC are talking about radio.

They say it’s a popular medium. It’s growing. In fact, in terms of the hours per week people spend listening to it, radio is at an all time high. It is, they say, a re-emerging tech.

The BBC Radio Player lets you listen to any radio program over the past week. They’re broadcasting 4M hours of radio over the Net every week and 6M of on-demand music [or possibly vice versa].

So, they ask, how can we make radio more social and interactive? Last April they tried an on-air experiment to see if they could combine aggregation and lottery. It was called the 10 hour takeover: Listeners could text in their requests. They posted the text messages live on the BBC web site, lightly edited for profanity.

Now they want to go further. They want the individual to get value from their contribution, the contributions should provide value to others, and so should the BBC. The BBC should, they say, be more like a participant than “an overarching Sauron’s eye.” They talk about a demo that allows you to use your phone to bookmark songs that you like. “We’re not immune to fashion” so they let users tag the songs. Then they get a folksonomy going. And you should be able to do “group listening”: See what your friends are listening to, listen along with them, interact in ways that support the shared experience, and schedule future interactions.

They end by asking what the social implications of networked TiVo would be.

(The BBC guys are: Matt Biddulph, Tom Coates, Paul Hammond and Matt Webb.)

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