Big thanks are due to Phil Wilson for pointing me in the direction of Audioscrobbler's RDF output, something that I'd claimed was missing, so you can now see what I've been listening to in glorious RDF as well as HTML.
This in itself doesn't sound like a big deal, but it provides a great example of using the MusicBrainz RDF metadata vocabulary, which is just what I needed for RDF Radio.
So what's RDF Radio? Mostly vapour right now, but it's a concept Matt Croydon and I have been tossing around for a few weeks. The basic ideas of which are a little similar to Nokia's much touted but equally vapourous Visual Radio.
The main tenet of both is to provide some additional metadata about an existing "Radio" audio stream on a side channel. Visual Radio appears to be quite tightly constrained around proving visual (wap/html based?) user oriented information over GPRS as an adjunct to FM radio. RDF Radio on the other hand is intended to provide timely pure RDF/XML metadata that supplements any broadcast stream; FM, AM, webcast and much more. The initial thoughts are to provide information such as:
- Station name
- The station's frequency, web site, schedule etc.
- The current programme name, and related info (the programme or presenter's web page, the time of the show etc.)
- The current track, and links to anything we can find about this
As you can imagine this could be a very rich data set, Virgin Radio's website (and their Now Playing page for instance) provides some indication of just how much metadata could be easily obtained with some simple web scraping, although ideally the station owners would generate the RDF Radio data themselves.
What could one do with the RDF Radio data? One immediate idea would be to emulate Visual Radio. But with well constructed metadata one can do far more than that, even constructing personal radio stations stitched together from your listening preferences and the playlists of many radio stations. With sufficient processing and time shifting of streams, you could construct a virtual iPod that "contained" your favourite tunes.
