Editor's note: this weekend sees a special 60th anniversary double episode of The Archers on Radio 4, set to 'shake The Archers to the core'. Jem Stone introduces our planned online activity by reminding us that interacting with listeners is nothing new.

On Sunday mornings, if you're a Radio 4 listener, you know where to look. On Twitter, talking about the station's legendary daily drama The Archers (five million weekly listeners!), you might bump into a famous writer, a Radio 4 broadcaster, an Archers scriptwriter or a funny passionate listener you've never met or a plethora of Archers characters (are they real or the product of the fevered imaginations of fans? As someone recently pointed out: "The Archers is real. There is no cast."). For some, listening to the Archers live now seems inconceivable without turning to a screen of some kind (the jargon here is a 'two screen solution', although the phrase makes more sense for TV viewing).

One of our jobs in the social media and interactive teams in BBC Radio is to take that real-time feedback (not just on Twitter on course) and present it back to scriptwriters, producers, editors and presenters in ways that make sense to them. More importantly how do you visualise it for listeners? Or should the BBC even try? How would you make it accessible to the (still) millions of online Archers listeners who've never used a message board let alone Twitter?

Zane Lowe reviews tweets

Of course BBC Radio has been trying to incorporate and reflect listeners' feedback, ideas and opinions into its programming since 1923. For nearly 50 years this was relatively simple given that it was almost entirely by letter. I can still remember the BBC postcode for Radio 1 - W1A 4WW - so frequently was it used as a 'call out' and it remains embedded in my memory alongside that other BBC staple: 01 811 8055. It wasn't until the proliferation of local radio and new commercial stations in the 70s that the ubiquity of the phone started to change live radio formats and it was another thirty years again before the mobile phone and SMS, (apart from a very brief moment in the sun for the fax machine) changed everything again. Now of course the blur of noise around any cultural event is fragmented, frequent and crucially very live. For example BBC radio networks receive over half a million SMS/texts a month, there are over 100,000 posts just to the messageboards for Radio 4, and tens of thousands of replies to our Twitter accounts and likes and comments on our Facebook pages every day.

We've been trying to make sense of this activity and document these links and recommendations publicly via what are often private closed systems online for several years. A few months ago we launched buzz, where on many of our pages now you can see, after an episode, the online discussion; currently an edited selection of the most relevant blog posts about that particular radio programme episode (for example, this episode of Desert Island Discs). The Archers, itself, has a regular blog post that rounds up social media comment a few days after the episodes have been aired.

As anyone who has clicked on the #xfactor twitter hashtag during a programme will confirm you can sometimes see 1000 messages fly by in a instant. It's virtually impossible to read them all or make sense from them. So trying to do this in real-time, last year, I hosted (with Steve Bowbrick) Something called Good Radio Club. We reflected the conversation and online chat about radio programmes while they were on-air. We do this with our music events all the time. See Chris Evans' regular live events or Radio 1's spectacular UCTRLKATY with Katy Perry.

So how do you actually weave this into a programme or onto a screen whilst a programme goes out live? On January 2nd we are having another go using the 60th anniversary episode of The Archers as our excuse. We've already been experimenting through December by tapping into the existing online conversation.

As with The Archers itself, it's easy to think that every new development 'shakes us to the core'. In fact, of course, things are remarkably the same. Join us on the Archers blog from the beginning of Sunday's omnibus episode for the build-up to the big one and, if you're on Twitter, use the hashtag #TheArchers.

Jem Stone is Executive Producer for Social Media at BBC Audio & Music

• Read how to join in with this weekend's Archers 60th Anniversary celebrations, starting at 1000 on Sunday 2 January and building to the climax of the special double episode at 1900, on the Radio 4 blog.
• The picture shows a sketch for the 'Archers tweetalong' app that will be running on the Archers blog during the double espisode.
• The Radio 1 interactive team visualised feedback (SMS, Twitter and email) for Zane Lowe's Masterpieces.
• MTV used Twitter to do something similar for their American Music Awards (design company Stamen wrote up the exercise too).
• The Chris Moyles team did some interesting visualisations in 2008:
• And how about some Bieber-powered slot cars (via SMS).
• Tayler Cresswell rounds up Archers online feedback, quotes and comment for the Archers blog.

Why did you make these changes?

The change in look finally brings the messageboards in line with other pages on BBC Online. The pages have been simplified and several new features such as 'sticky threads' - which users and hosts had been asking for - have been introduced. I scheduled the work for Radio 4 as part of a change that's been going on across all the BBC's messageboards over a number of weeks.

Jem Stone is Executive Producer, Social Media at BBC Audio & Music

Read more, listen to the interview and comment on the BBC Radio blog

But then Radio 4 announcer; Kathy Clugston found herself on a train journey home yesterday evening was bored and tweeted this...

Read more and comment at the Radio 4 blog.

Jem Stone is Communities Executive, BBC Audio & Music Interactive.

Small steps. Small steps.

Simon Dickson made this plea back in April when we upgraded the blog platform. Nick Reynolds then pointed me to Tony Kennick's blog post yesterday. An open letter no less, asking us very kindly to do the same.

I find full content feeds much more useful especially when catching up with feeds on other devices on the move. Mobile browsing has vastly improved and where I am required to click through in most cases I can do so to read the whole content, but I would rather remain within my feed aggregating application.

Well, quite. So we did. From this afternoon, all of the BBC's blog feeds are now full-fat, as you can see above from the lovely Google Reader screengrab of Mark Mardell's blog post from this afternoon on the Irish Lisbon Treaty vote.

Sorry that it's taken so long.

Jem Stone is the Portfolio Exec, Social Media for Future Media & Technology

Obviously, the document we've been scouring most round our way today is the review of bbc.co.uk by the BBC Trust. I expect there to be further posts from my colleagues reacting to this in the next day or so. I'm only just getting through what seems to be at least a dozen lengthy PDFs of consultation, review and recommendations. The early press coverage, from what I can tell, has focused on only a small amount of what the Trust had to say about the site. So - if your printers can bear it - it's worth ploughing your way through it.

You can read the document in full, the terms of reference, and supporting evidence on the BBC Trust site.

Documents summarising the considerable amount of consultation with "institutional stakeholders", the BBC's Audience Councils and the BBC's submission itself are also published in full.

As ever, the fullest press coverage (three stories in as many hours earlier today) has been at The Guardian, which even extended to a gallery of past homepages. There's also a lengthy piece in Paid Content.

Blog coverage and Twitter comments are only starting to trickle in. Emily Bell and Patricia Hodgson went head-to-head on Today this morning but the audio for this will vanish into the ether in a few hours. [Update: the audio is now availabele here as an mp3]

Update: The BBC issued a statement in response to the report which is published over at the Press Office site.

Jem Stone is the Portfolio Exec, Social Media in the BBC's internet group.

Mike Butcher, the editor of TechCrunch UK and a passionate reporter of the European startup scene, criticised the BBC from another angle. He threw down the gauntlet last week with a plea for the BBC to be more open with its data and argued that FM&T should provide a ecosystem of BBC feeds and APIs with which companies and individuals could innovate. His message seemed to be, in contrast to Eggington: focus on your data standards and everything else will follow. My colleagues from Backstage, FM&T for A&Mi and those sitting just over there on /programmes have all responded arguing that, even if we have a long way to go, we're are already stepping up to the plate.

So, adding to the noise, I'd like to make one further smaller announcement which suggests that the BBC's role is more than just as Eggington puts it; "a new content strategy".

This week the BBC has joined the OpenID Foundation.

People have been speculating about the BBC's attitude towards OpenID for a while. And getting identity right is key to our future plans - with that in mind, we are looking very seriously at how the increasing number of data portability technologies could and should work for the BBC.

OpenID, being a shared identity service, is part of that mix and is already starting to gain adoption amongst leading technology companies and the BBC is (I think!) the first large media company to join the likes of Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and IBM in the foundation. This means that we can share our future plans, show support and contribute to existing OpenID technical and marketing work groups.

However, at this stage, and wary of being named and shamed here, this doesn't mean that we are going to immediately be offering OpenIDs on bbc.co.uk or even promising to do so. We would want to make absolutely sure that this is right for users, is secure and can be implemented properly across all the BBC's many services.

However, joining the Foundation, which I am excited about, is a small step in that direction.

I thought that it's also worth reminding you of two other key bits of technical work which we need to complete first:

1. Replacing our platform: A lot of the the more substantial changes to bbc.co.uk are dependent on the infrastructure of our website, which is going through a substantial upgrade. Those of you going to XTECH can hear directly from Brendan Quinn and Ben Smith about how we are replacing our existing stack with "a data-driven, RESTful service oriented, platform independent architecture".
2. Replacing our identity platform [enough platforms - ed]: If you wish to log in across bbc.co.uk, then we use what we internally call SSO (Single Sign On). This ageing system pretty much handles authentication (we know who you are) - but little else. More on this on this blog very soon, but at the moment it's just not possible, even if we wanted it, to be OpenID-compliant.

Finally, I'm wary as well that, at the moment, 99.99% of internet users are completely unaware of OpenID. Yet we do know they increasingly they care about safety, trust, ownership of data, and simply and easily sharing information across services.

All this will take some hard work, but I'd like to see us have a bigger role in learning from and contributing to the substantial progress that others have already made.

Look out for further announcements.

Jem Stone is Portfolio Executive for BBC FM&T's social media group.

The upgrade to our blogs platform is a bit like the infamous Guns N' Roses album Chinese Democracy. It's a subject frequently discussed around here but, given the requests for patience and "bearing with us", I'd understand if you'd be struggling to believe that it might ever happen.

Yet now, seeing a couple of bleary-eyed members of my team finish what has been the equivalent of a BBC Election Night shift and looking around our blogs themselves, I'm relieved to say that the first phase of our improvements is substantially in place.

A lot of the work in this first phase has been behind the scenes: ideally, you shouldn't really notice many changes this afternoon (apart from one key difference - see below), but we're relieved that the migration of over 12,000 blog posts, nearly a million comments and hundreds of different templates has gone reasonably smoothly. Once we're sure that the system is stable and bedded down, we'll be introducing more substantial changes to look and feel and functionality.

For the moment, the two key changes that you will notice are:

(1) A new registration based comments system

This uses the existing signon system across the BBC, so Message Board or Have Your Say users will be able to login as normal.

We thought hard about introducing what some call a "barrier to entry" for leaving comments but, to be honest, we'd had enough of 502 errors and the system seizing up with spam attacks. There are obviously other solutions ("captchas"; upgrades; the installation itself) - but registration, being people-based, is now in place for many other high-profile blogs (as Giles Wilson mentions at The Editors Blog) and is far more useful in helping us to manage the communities well.

We also believe that the ability to comment directly on bbc.co.uk is now for some of our blogs less important, given the increasing ease with which users can refer, bookmark and/or blog themselves, away from bbc.co.uk.

(2) A more stable platform

We've upgraded from the frankly archaic Movable Type 3.2 to its newer version MT 4.1. Many commenters have asked about why we've plumped for this particular piece of software (from Six Apart) over and above other options such as WordPress or an internal solution. It was a tough call, which we only confirmed after extensive tests and evaluation in partnership with the team at Headshift, who we have worked with closely on this project.

Anyway, these are still early days and we have a growing bug list, so I'd really appreciate anything you might spot that is out of the ordinary - and obviously, I'll be monitoring feedback wherever you might leave it.

Two final things. Hopefully, you can now leave comments with ease - but, most importantly: spammers are the scum of the earth. I curse you all.

Jem Stone is the Portfolio Executive for BBC FM&T's social media group.

I also, rather optimistically as it turned out, revealed that:

There are technical improvements in the pipeline over the next few months which should make commenting on all blogs quicker and more reliable.

Clearly, this hasn't come to pass. Apologies. Although thousands of you are still managing to accomplish what should be a relatively simple task and leaving comments across our network of 40 blogs every week and many more are increasingly quoting, linking and referring to BBC bloggers on your own sites or in non-BBC forums, we are fully aware that the user experience for leaving a simple text comment is still less than satisfactory. Timeouts are a regular occurrence, as are unfriendly error messages leading many users to give up.

Paul Canning's blog post is just one of the many pieces of feedback we have received about this issue. I left a comment apologising but thought it worthwhile sharing that with everyone here. So first of all: sorry. This has, for all sorts of reasons, taken far longer than I expected.

Thankfully, I actually have some progress to report. Over the last few weeks, we've trialled a new system for leaving comments (you can see it in action on the PM blog) and feedback from users has been very positive. We are hoping to introduce this across the rest of the network in early April, with a complete change to look and feel and a host of new features following a couple of months later.

I'll keep you updated here with progress. Obviously I'd understand if you took that pledge with a pinch of salt.

Jem Stone is an executive producer in FM&T's social media group