"BBC Online should enable the BBC to develop a deeper relationship with licence fee payers and strengthen the BBC's public accountability."

The more fanatical readers of this blog may remember me from a previous life as the BBC's Interactive Editor for Music. But I now work for an independent consultancy who have been commissioned by BBC Online to help explore some key questions around accountability and how that relates to the BBC's social media activity.

As part of this work, I'm spending a bit of time studying ways in which BBC is fulfilling that stated mission - developing a deeper relationship with licence fee payers and strengthening its public accountability - through its social media activity, and in particular through its blogs.

It's clear from previous discussions on this blog and elsewhere that some of you have strong feelings about this already. It's also clear that it's hard to please all the people all the time. And many of you have thought carefully and coherently and have already arrived at some firm conclusions.

But beyond the heat of the arguments, I'm also very interested in trying to nail the definitions of some of the words and concepts in play.

So here are some questions for you:

What is accountability? (here's one definition from Wikipedia)

What should accountability look like online and in the context of blogs in particular?

Can you think of examples of the BBC getting this right? Getting it wrong? For example is the way the Internet blog has discussed DRM a good or a bad example of accountability? How does what the BBC is doing compare with other organisations?

What would make for a "deeper relationship" with the BBC (assuming you want one)? If you're reading a blog, is the key relationship more with the author of the blog post? Has the BBC's social media offer made you feel you have a "deeper relationship" with the BBC or BBC people?

Please let me know your views on this - especially if you haven't had the chance to do so in previous discussions. I will read every comment, and your views will form an important input into this piece of work, some of which will (hopefully) be shared on the BBC Internet blog.

Matthew Shorter is a director of Doubleshot Consulting.

Picture: "Accountability" from Felix42 contra la censura on Flickr.

The man responsible for the Herculean feat of ensuring all of this content was brought together with the minimum delay is Tim Clarke, Senior Content Producer for major music festivals. Tim has written a behind-the-scenes look at how that was accomplished for the BBC Music Blog. You can read his post here.

Matthew Shorter is Interactive Editor, Music, BBC Audio & Music Interactive

Much of our focus over the last few months has been on building the internal tools and databases to enable us to harvest and represent relevant data around our broadcast activity - in data terms, how our domains at /music and /programmes intersect. This means that we expect the play count data we display on artist pages to improve over the next weeks and months as these tools are rolled out. Currently this data still has significant gaps which is why we're still retaining the beta label. It should also enable us to begin generating really useful contextual links from our programme pages, such as making artist names clickable on tracklists. This work also represents the foundation for future views of data which might enable us, say, to provide navigation and aggregation around the broadcast of sessions or live events.

We've also added a few more innovations to the pages themselves since the beta was launched last July. We've added links to BBC news and blogs (here's how) and links to our own album reviews. We've made it easier to access the pages by guessing at a human-writable URL redirect so you don't have to rely on the ungainly-looking MusicBrainz ID that sits in the page's URL, though of course the pages are also now available via BBC search and web search.

We've added our "Now On The BBC" feature to artist pages (here's one for Bonnie Prince Billy). Set against our aspirations for fully domain-driven design and semantically linked data, this is something of a blunt instrument, as it's effectively linking data to flat pages. But compared to where we are now, we think it offers some pretty neat features. It gives us the raw material for an enhanced artist gateway, and the tool that sits behind it also lets us publish in a streamlined way to an artist page at the same time as we update the homepage and genre pages of the new music site.

It's also one of a number of APIs that we are making available with the new site (alongside the playcount data, news and blog updates and album reviews). If you're a developer or publisher of a third party site we'd love to hear your ideas on working with this data.

Elsewhere on the site, we've brought our overall template and design conventions into line with most of the rest of BBC Online. We've added contextual programme recommendations to our album reviews - so if you're reading a review of Marianne Faithful's new album and would like to hear the kind of programmes that broadcast her music, you can follow the links to Nemone, Iyare and Shaun Keaveny's programme pages. We're experimenting with a new Flash interface as well to display our "most played" artist data on the homepage.

We've been grappling with some fundamental editorial questions in bringing the artist pages to full public beta. As mentioned when we launched the beta, we are now publishing several hundred thousand pages automatically, which harvest third-party content from Wikipedia and MusicBrainz, both sites run by the contributions of a dedicated, self-appointed pool of experts. This is new territory for the BBC, and we've had to give careful thought to our policies and how we communicate them to our audience. We would love to hear your feedback on the approach.

We have a lot of plans for building on this foundation. In the short term, we'll be working through a somewhat miscellaneous snagging list which includes everything from making sure we build URIs for all the resources windowed on our pages to getting audio clips back on our album reviews. We're keen to get our content around artists and albums on to the mobile platform. We're looking at ways in which we can reflect and link to activity around artists from the rest of the web.

Most importantly, we'll be working hard on systems to automate meaningful aggregation of all of the BBC's own content around artists, so that you will never miss, say, a documentary featuring a given artist, or an interview that's available on one of our programme pages. Coupled with that, we'll be building a variety of ways of navigating contexutally between different kinds of content (music, programmes, topics and so on). We'd also like to bring our users into the picture, by gathering attention data, fanship and the like and starting to offer personally useful journeys around our content.

I've posted some more details about the changes we're making to the front end of the website on the BBC Music Blog here and here.

As I say, we'd love to hear your views - comment here or mail us directly.

Matthew Shorter is Interactive Editor, Music.

But I digress - because the good news is we also have a nice juicy new piece of content to announce. One of our developers, Patrick Sinclair, has found a very smart way of automatically including links to relevant BBC News stories in our artist pages. The gratifying thing about this is that we've found a way of rewarding good web citizenship. Patrick explains it all much better than I could.

Matthew Shorter is Interactive Editor, Music, BBC Audio & Music Interactive.

These pages form the foundation of an ambitious programme of work to improve the way we make our music content available to our audience.

Daphne Oram blowing a mijwiz while Richard Bird records the sound on a tape machine, BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Maida Vale, 1958.

The BBC has a long and distinguished track record of bringing music to new audiences through its music brands (programmes, events and websites) from Later... with Jools Holland to the BBC Proms, Radio 1's Live Lounge and new brands like the BBC Electric Proms and BBC Introducing. The other half of the equation - bringing brands to new audiences through the music they love - has been harder for us.

For example, if a fan of the band Foals doesn't know that we have video available online of both an excellent BBC 6 Music Hub Session for the band and an interview on the Later... website, they're not going to find out by searching for Foals on Google. If they find their way to the BBC's artist profile of Foals, they may spot the text links to this content, but how are they going to find the artist profile in the first place? And if they do, they still won't be aware that 6 Music is the best place to go on the BBC to hear more of Foals' music.

On a worldwide web where music content is abundant and readily discoverable - just look at some of the links on those Foals top ten results on Google, including free streamed music from Last.fm and YouTube - the BBC owes it to its licence fee payers to make it easier to find our music content. Particularly since, unlike many of our rivals, we invest so heavily in such a distinctive mix of music, including an unparalleled range of music that's new, live and specially recorded, British and from right across the genres.

We've taken a significant first step in this direction with the beta launch of our new generation of artist pages. By associating artist IDs with programme IDs, we have laid the foundations for making our content, and by extension our brands, much more discoverable by our audience. By exposing play count data (ie, displaying which networks and programmes have played a given artist), our beta artist page for Foals makes it clear to the audience that it's well worth tuning into 6 Music if they want to hear more from this band, and offers some pointers of which programmes to sample, with links to those programme's pages on /programmes.

The artist pages' URLs will also remain the persistent and definitive home of these artists on the BBC's website in the same way that episode and brand pages on /programmes remain the persistent, definitive home for individual programmes.

Having a persistent, and increasingly rich, resource to link to for each artist on the BBC should also help those pages appear higher up the search rankings, making it easier for our audience to find them.

This is only the start. There is a lot of work to do before these pages effectively aggregate all the BBC has to offer for individual artists. It's also important to point out that there also remain significant gaps in the play count information - one of the main reasons why this is a beta and not a live launch. For example, our data currently excludes Radio 2's specialist output and all of Radio 3, as well as significant amounts of content from across the radio networks. We also need to extend the concept of the unique ID from artists to releases, sessions, tracks, events and so on. But by establishing the crucial link between unique IDs for programmes and brands on the one hand, and unique IDs for artists on the other, we have put the building blocks in place for this work.

Another way in which we would like to make our content more discoverable is by openness to the web. We are working closely with the community-generated and -maintained music database MusicBrainz, which provides a unique ID for every artist as well as data on how they are related to one another and external links. By adopting this open standard, our pages are able to benefit from public domain content linked from MusicBrainz such as biographies from Wikipedia and discographies from MusicBrainz. But MusicBrainz IDs also make it straightforward for third parties to work with our data and automate links to our pages. (Photo of MusicBrainz banner by mayhern on flickr).

Tom Scott is blogging later this week [editor's note: Tom's blog post is now published here] about some of the ways we are facilitating this activity, by making our data available in different formats.

By the way, as this is a beta and most of the pages are unlinked, you may be wondering how to find a given artist. Here's how:

• visit http://musicbrainz.org
• enter artist name in the "artist" field under "Search" on the left hand side
• click on the name you're after on the list of results
• select the alphanumeric ID from the page's URL, eg from http://musicbrainz.org/artist/4dca4bb2-23ba-4103-97e6-5810311db33a.html, select 4dca4bb2-23ba-4103-97e6-5810311db33a
• paste the ID to the end of the URL https://bbcstreaming.pages.dev/music/artists/, eg https://bbcstreaming.pages.dev/music/artists/4dca4bb2-23ba-4103-97e6-5810311db33a
• careful, it's addictive

We plan to move from beta to live launch later this year, once we have added a few features to the pages, including the facility to promote content from around the BBC and more accurate play count information. Watch this space.

Matthew Shorter is Interactive Editor, Music, BBC Audio & Music Interactive.