'Visualising Radio' is a clunky term.

Someone messaged the station this week saying "shouldn't this trial be called a mix of 'Radio' and 'Telly' that would be 'Telio'". 'Visualising Radio' isn't very sexy and when I hear Chris Moyles or Aled say it on the radio it feels horribly corporate.

But knowing what to call it, what we should call, it is interesting. The listener above felt the connection to telly - others understand radio with webcams, some are transfixed with the flow of texts that appear on the screen and their relationship with the studio.

Truth is I don't know what to call it. It's not really telly - mainly because we are not asking you directly to stare at the screen all the time, we are not constantly using the tricks of TV to keep you close. This is because everyone is busy doing radio. It is weird how addictive it is - this isn't just me feeling this - our audience are constantly telling us on the free messaging service that they are late for work/school because they are gripped by DJ's working.

It's funny as the same thing happened when we did ScottCam - voyeurism took a hold! This is probably the second most exciting thing we've realised at Radio 1 not the first.

The first most exciting thing is how engaged listeners are, how being able to see people, message them, then see your message pop up is simply brilliant. You know your message is arriving in front of your favourite DJ because you can see them reading them on the screen. This is our number 1 WIN.

We are putting as much effort into shoving as many texts back out to our listeners as we are worrying about our video. To be honest I'm struggling to see why we've never done this on such a scale before.

So we get a lot of text from our listener base - I mean a lot - on a good month 500,000 texts. We've seen during this trial that around half of the messages that come in are from SMS messages and half from our visual console. It's an impressive conversion rate - and I have worked out - (really roughly with some initial data) that people are 60 times more likely to interact via the free messaging - we are getting roughly just under double the amount of texts than normal.

So, to recap, Visualising Radio has been brilliant so far because:
1. Engagement with our audience is fantastic.
2. Voyeurism is good and fun and can be done with out detracting from the radio.
3. It's the old favourite - track information.

Any ideas on what we should call a console of this type in the future are truly welcome.

Ben Chapman is Interactive Editor, Audio and Music Interactive.

The topic of 'openness' has been much talked about in the BBC by such monster blogtastic brains as Jem Stone, Steve Bowbrick, Hugh Garry - and things are finally starting to stick. I want to see Radio 1 behave online like the friend it is on air. A friend that welcomes contribution, pokes fun, is honest, shares experiences, excites you about music. Big Weekend is a great place to start.

During the autumn, we found a strong visual mechanic that opens up our station and lets us have FUN. It came in the form of ScottCam - live (silent) video feeds from Scott Mill's flat. We had a feeling ScottCam would be a winner due to the slightly perverse voyeuristic experience of being able to peer into someone's life, but there was the glimpse of something exciting in the live audience feedback around the streams.

Increasingly, this mix of video, interaction and data gets more exciting. I appeared briefly on BeckyCam and watched emails pour in... warm, friendly emails - full of humour - mainly about my bald(ing) head - but still.... this begged the question, how can I show them to everyone else? How can we share that conversation on BBC Online and let it spread across the web using status updates like Twitter and AudioBoo. The megaphone of Radio is a a powerful call to action, a unique kick start to online conversations - enhanced by live data and video. So check out the live streams coming out of Big Weekend in Swindon. Talented radio producers are set to have fun... and we hope an audience is poised to watch what goes on. We'll do our best to reflect back the comments the live stream brings - maybe even chat. I feel like we have a long way to go in being more open but Big Weekend is a good start...

So that has done Visual and Open, but we are also learning a thing or two about mobile - how people use their devices and how we can get content to them to share. We are building a mobile site optimised for those high end devices (see pic) - but the real fun is in the 'Bluetooth Loo' where we will Bluetooth you great stuff for your mobile while you relieve yourself - we'll tinker with QR codes again too on site, gauging where our audience is at with these things... Hopefully we'll continue to learn in this space and find great ways to connect with young people.

As ever you can watch all live performances, DJ video, check out photos and follow the festival at www.bbc.co.uk/radio1

Lots more to come from the 4th Floor in Yalding House.

Ben Chapman is Interactive Editor, Audio and Music Interactive.

Once the excitement of Christmas was over and the world was driving to their next destination for New Year's Eve, a hardcore group of us were working away to prepare for two major projects: - new homepages for Radio 1 & 1Xtra  - the Visualising Radio Trial on Chris Moyles' show and on Switch with Annie & Nick

Radio 1's new homepage went live on Sunday. It's already been in beta for a week and it's been a brilliant week! The internal dial in my guts, which seems to automatically weigh up the negative and positive responses to a project, has settled on a thumbs up, gold star, good work.

That's not to say everyone loves it - of course they don't - but before I get into that I should say what we set out to achieve with this revamp:

We want to ensure our homepage is young. It should appeal to a range of people but primarily, it's for young people. It has to be a bit cool and a bit populist but ultimately for someone who is between 15 and 24.

The site needs to be modular and feed driven. We've worked hard to pull together the appropriate feeds - the newest of which is the video feed. The video instinctively feels like it should be further up the page, but we are waiting to see how this pans out: Is it technically sound? Is the content flowing fast enough?

Modularity is important for the future. We need to be able to carve up our pages when we personalise Radio 1, and to change elements without having to spend resources on redesigning the lot. I guess this comes at a cost, as some people have noticed the new grid pattern and said they miss the curves and corners.

We also wanted to make the site simpler and there will be more navigational changes to come. We removed the 'Experimental' module from the homepage, as this content isn't a genre of its own and often falls into one of our other categories. We removed the 'Daytime' module because we use the main promotional window to show much of our daytime entertainment content. Frankly if it's daytime content that we weren't willing to put in the main promo window, then why would we highlight it?

Feedback from the audience hasn't led us to make major immediate changes, but we've got lots to think about and work on such as: - simpler navigation - toning it down (although most love the bright colour - it feels contemporary and young) - we are also going to consider a drop down menu for DJs and Shows navigation.

Whatever your views, I think we're in a better place than ever before in terms of being able to respond to them. We can make regular small and simple changes, so do let us know what you think by leaving your comments below.

Big thanks go to my colleagues in Radio 1/1Xtra Interactive and in Future Media &Technology for working so hard to deliver the new sites.

The other major opener for the New Year is the Visualising Radio Trial. My internal gut dial is still spinning on this one. Not least because you just never know how 'live' things are going to go. Yasser at Radio Labs blog and Duncan at Whomwah have more details.

I've staked quite a lot on the concept of Visualising Radio over the years. This is a concept that may not become 'normal' for many years but the ability for us to deliver glanceable content is going to be an important part of keeping radio relevant as broadcasting and IP march forward.

Early in my career at the BBC, I wrote the text for RDS and DAB. Few people at the time saw the value in LiveText on radio... they wouldn't dream of turning it off now. The exciting step here though, is in the real-time reflection of our audiences inbound texts, the automation of artist information, images and 'now playing' data, the editorial fun that we can have running filters over our SMS comments... and of course being able to watch Moyles live from 6.30 am till 10 am... for just one week.

Lets see how it goes and I look forward to reading your comments.

Ben Chapman is Interactive Editor, Audio and Music Interactive.

Radio 1 is counting down to its biggest event of the year - indeed, the biggest free festival in Europe.

I currently feel as though I am at in the epicentre of the storm - although apparently everyone at Radio 1 feels like that.

I'm feeling it particularly keenly. It's my first big gig in this job and the team I am surrounded by is made of seasoned professionals. I am the Interactive Editor for 1Xtra and Radio 1. The team has a track record of delivering innovation around this event across digital platforms - each year we aim to build on the last, and last year's Big Weekend is up for a Sony, so no pressure(!)

The 2007 event was packed full of innovation - an ARG (Augmented Reality Game) produced by Hugh Garry, which saw Radio 1 create a secret game within its broadcast content, across the web and the real world that lured audiences into a game which culminated at the event.

This year Huey has pushed ARG in a different direction offering a consolation prize on the "email we hate to send" telling people that they have not got tickets. It's called Band In Your Hand and uses technology developed by T-Immersion - it has to be seen to be believed.

[Update 2245: Hugh Garry has written about Band In The Hand in detail at the BBC Radio Labs blog.]

Radio 1 and 1Xtra focus on what our audience expect to hear and see in digital spaces. We've had the opportunity to partner with Microsoft to use their Deep Zoom technology (formerly known as Sea Dragon) - it will let us manage the massive amount of images from the weekend and allow our audience to zoom in and out of them all and really zoom in on the detail.

I feel like we are scratching the surface this year. Deep Zoom feels a bit like Google Earth in its application and the mind boggles when you start to mash the two - images with great data sets, tied to video/ audio / maps/ filters - lots of great ideas are bubbling up around festivals and elements of our programming at Radio 1.

The festival presents us with a massive amount of digital opportunities. We exploit everything we can using all available technology. Anything to get the right content to the right audience at the right time.

Press red on Freeview and we offer you more choices of music performance than last year with multiscreen, go online and watch the performances and experiences of our DJs or... don't come to our site and we'll find ways to give content via your preferred social networks.

Your mobile will offer Twitter feeds, audio downloads, photos, blogs... actually, you know what? I'd better get back to it.

Ben Chapman is Interactive Editor, Radio 1. BBC Audio & Music.