I’m extremely pleased and proud that four of my team are off at ETCon 2005 next week, presenting a couple of papers around our work at BBC Radio and Music.
The four, who Matt dubbed “the Beatles of post-broadcast technology” are Matt Biddulph, Tom Coates, Paul Hammond (new site!) and Matt Webb. They’re presenting a paper around ‘Reinventing Radio: Enriching Broadcast with Social Software’, and Tom and Matt B crop up again with other colleagues from the Beeb, on our current major infrastructural project – ‘BBC Programme Information Pages: An Architecture for an On-Demand World’ (as seen on Radio 3 currently). [Matt Webb’s also presenting his ‘It’s Not Rocket Science: The Brain for Designers’, too.] They’ve had many hard day’s nights pulling it all together, but they’re going to be great. So go check them all if you’re there, or like me, watch the blog posts and Flickrbursts for second-order ripples.
[And in terms of allusions to the rather-overrated real ‘Fab Four’, Matt, I’d certainly rather have delusions of grandeur being a Teo Macero, Manfred Eicher, or Brian Eno, rather than a George Martin any day, but hey, I ain’t quibbling about being a ‘fifth Beatle’ in this company.]
One of that fantastic four, Matt Webb (the George Harrison, perhaps?!), is also moving on imminently. So I want to take this opportunity to publicly thank him hugely for all the fantastic work he’s contributed to my team, the department, and in fact no less than the future of BBC radio. Seriously, Matt – along with his excellent colleague Tom and the rest of the team – have contributed vast amounts of landscape-changing thoughts and projects to BBC Radio and Music during his 18-months or so here. Too many to list here, but his impact has been positive and profound. So again, I thank him for his sharp mind, consummate professionalism, astonishing creativity and sly humour and wish him well on his next journeys, wherever they may be.
City of Sound 
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