Innovation Labs

I thought I would give you a basic outline of the project. Its essentially a community website that allows audio files, usually mp3’s, to be searched, shared and personalised.

Search
A transcript of the audio file is used to allow more precise searching for audio. Audio would have a transcript attached by a speech to text system which would be used in a search. Podstitch would also allow users to attach keywords, or tags, to a created stitch. This would allow users to search for user created audio in different ways. The system would also offer subtle suggestions to audio files in a ’my suggestions’ section based on user preferences and the channels they are subscribed to.

Stitching
The user can grab audio from sources, be it BBC content, user created stitches or content from other sources and ’stitch’ it together to create their own programs. The audio files can be in three levels of building blocks.

1. The smallest is a segment or chapter. It’s a smaller snippet of audio, maybe a news story or feature.
2. The next level is a show or program. This is made from segments stitched together into larger audio files.
3. The top level block will be a channel. This will consist of shows stitched together. This channel could be pod cast to subscribers or be created as part of a social group i.e. Year 1 Law Lectures pod cast.

Social
As mentioned above there would be a community element to Podstitch. Users would be able to create groups containing people with similar hobbies or interests, share audio via a pod cast and blog or comment on particular audio files.

Of course this is all subject to change as part of the iterative design process.

Wow that was serious, we are having fun, honest ;)