But why social listening?

It's where radio's going. No one doubts that the singular and intimate experience of listening to the radio - voices and sounds from far away - will persist. But the collision of radio and the Internet is producing a kind of hybrid: personal and collective at the same time. Listeners will spend part of their time in the old radio bubble, alone with the voices they love, and part of it in this new social space, where they share those voices with others and contribute to a conversation about them.

Read more, comment and join the club at the Radio 4 blog.

Steve Bowbrick is editor of the BBC Radio 4 blog.

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Steve Bowbrick the BBC's "blogger in residence" reflects on his six months at the BBC in this short video.

Details of Steve's event on Tuesday 10th March can be found here. If you have any comments on the video please do leave them below.

Why do I want the BBC to be more open?

I want it to open up to the people who fund it and - more important - the people who underwrite its legitimacy (that's you and me). The closed, broadcast-era BBC sells me a licence to view the stuff it makes. In the open, network era it's the other way round - I licence the BBC to represent me and my aspirations in its output.

I want the BBC to set out its plans for the post-broadcast era (which is here now, in case you hadn't noticed). I want the clever people who work there to show us how they plan to replace old-man Reith's monolithic, centralised consent machine with something more distributed, more open - something adapted to the network era.

I want to hear how the BBC can adapt to the shift from the creation of linear content to the creation of a library of tools and resources, open source code and rich, reusable content (some of which will still feature Bruce Forsyth) that will make things possible and create real opportunities for generations of British people.

I want to learn how the BBC will adapt its magnificent, industrial-era guiding principles - Inform, Educate and Entertain - to the manufacture of tools that support learning (formal and informal), creation (for love, for fun, for profit), enterprise (encouraging entrepreneurship), participation (in the democratic process, in society and institutions) and community (linking people, finding common ground, social coherence).

I want to see evidence that the BBC can create content and processes in a web-like way, that loyalty to arbitrary broadcast-era concepts and structures - channels and series and genres and so on - won't hold back the transition to new forms and ways of working.

Photo of a fortress from stevec77 on flickr

I want to see that the BBC believes in all this, that there's an acceptance that fortress BBC is indefensible and that a retreat to 'what we do best' (the defence of existing brands and practices) can only make things worse. This is not about change for its own sake or about imposing trendy Internet novelties: it's about the survival of the Corporation and about its continued relevance for Britain.

And finally I'd like the BBC to do all this with real confidence and optimism and with a sense that the benefits of getting this epic transition right are incalculable. If the Corporation can tackle two or three really big, really ambitious open projects - liberating the archive for the nation's benefit, creating an identity platform that gives ownership of user data back to the users or pulling off some kind of Wikipedia mind-meld to blend the BBC's awesome editorial resource with the net's fastest growing library, for instance - the support and enthusiasm of the licence fee-payers will be much easier to secure and the whole task will seem much less daunting.

Before I started here I wrote a handful of blog posts on this topic at my personal blog:

Freeing content at the BBC

The BBC Common Platform debate

A common platform

In the last couple of months I've seen some evidence that the BBC is ready for this challenge and I've documented some of the important work that's already under way.

Picking a couple of examples:

Mark Friend, Controller of A&Mi, told me about a fascinating plan to provide access to web site users' attention data and about his vision for an open speech radio archive.

Tom Scott explained the explosion of links to external music resources taking place at /music. Rob Hardy (and Michael Sparks) told me about the huge amount of code already released under various open source licences by the BBC's developers.

But there are large parts of the Corporation (not least in the various management suites) where the old broadcast truths still hold and where the transition has hardly begun. At Common Platform I drew a picture of the barriers to openness I've learnt about since I arrived: daunting but not in any sense insurmountable!

The BBC's Building Public Value, written four years ago, offers an early blueprint for the transition to the network era. It's a sadly neglected document that could do with updating.

Here's a terrific blog post from Tom Scott who is a very important techie in BBC Audio & Music. His starting point is Building Public Value.

I'll keep you informed!

Steve Bowbrick is blogger in residence, BBC Future Media & Technology

Steve Bowbrick, Nick Reynolds and Roo Reynolds [no relation] at the Social Media Champions session at FM&T's Open Week

It's a truism that institutions that are important in one era find it difficult to maintain their relevance in the next. Everyone knows that the BBC in its second great era - the one starting about now - is going to be markedly different from the one that dominated the British broadcast ecology for the last 80 years. So far, so obvious.

The question, of course, is how will it differ? What will a national broadcaster funded by its viewers look like once the network era is properly underway? Can it survive in its current form at all?

Big questions. Happily. not ones that I plan to answer. Which brings me to my new job here.

I've been blogger-in-residence at BBC FM&T for a few days (I don't have my staff pass yet but I'm on the Beeb part of the Yammer microblogging system). I realise I've made it to 45 years old without ever working at the BBC, and it's genuinely exciting:

I find a big, breezy rather optimistic place full of brainy people (lots of them quite young) doing a huge variety of interesting things, many of which are aimed in one way or another at answering those big questions.

And the word that's on more or less everybody's lips is "openness".

• How open can we be?

• Should we share this insight with outsiders?

• Should we be opening our banks of content and code to licence fee payers, entrepreneurs and organisations?

And for the BBC, these questions are given an extra urgency by the context: by the chaotic decline of commercial broadcast TV, by Ofcom's apparently unending review of public service media, by the troubled birth of the Kangaroo JV and even by Channel 4's bid for the social media high ground with 4iP.

So, fear of total systemic meltdown notwithstanding, over the next few months, I plan to roam the BBC's corridors - with my trusty guide Nick Reynolds - meeting everyone who has an opinion or an interesting project or a problem to solve with some relevance to the BBC's increasing openness and readiness to share.

I've been writing about this sort of thing for a long time (I've got cuttings going back to 1996) and not long ago, I helped to organise an event at Broadcasting House called The BBC: A Common Platform, which some of you will have attended.

You should bookmark or subscribe to commonplatform.co.uk [rss], where I'll be blogging everything.

Meanwhile, if you'd like to know more, or if you'd like to contribute to the project, from inside the BBC or outside, drop me a line or visit commonplatform.co.uk (and forgive me while I get the site finished!). And if you work for the Beeb and you see me in a corridor, stop me and say something entertaining.

Steve Bowbrick is blogger-in-residence, BBC Future Media & Technology.