We're excited about chapters for several reasons.

Firstly, they allow listeners or viewers to navigate back and forth through programmes e.g. jumping to the start of an interview, or replaying an item you found interesting. We think this will be useful for existing fans of programmes.

Secondly, chapters will help people to find items of interest from across the BBC - including items from programmes they might never have watched or listened to before.

For example a listener might notice an interview with the manager of their football club promoted on the 5live website, and they could follow a link to listen to that chapter. Or they might do a search for a subject or person (perhaps climate change, or Andy Warhol) and find not just full programmes that relate to that, but also links to specific chapters about or featuring that subject. (Actually, chapters aren't appearing in BBC Search results yet, but they will be later in the year).

In the future you might be able to download those chapters, or embed them in a blog, or sign up to get a podcast of all items on a particular subject... but we're only just starting to think about these possibilities.

Right now it's still early days, and we're interested in experimenting and learning. We're not even sure whether 'chapters' is the right way to describe this (if you've got a better suggestion, post it as a comment!) and we plan to keep working on improving how chapters look and work, based on user testing and audience research.

5live were the first to experiment, and they're adding chapters to several of their programmes. You can find links to them on the 5live homepage (look out for pink links) and the Simon Mayo show is a great example (visit any episode, or click on the Chapters link).

Digital Planet from World Service are also involved, and you should start to see chapters on a few select TV programmes over the coming weeks, hopefully followed by a wider range of radio programmes later in the year.

We're starting slowly, with a limited selection of programmes, as we learn about what does and doesn't work. A couple of factors that may influence the selection are whether there are people available to do the extra work, whether we are able to add chapters from a rights perspective, and whether we think it's editorially appropriate and valuable to add chapters. The intention is to grow the number of programmes over time, but in a controlled and measured way.

We also need to do some work behind the scenes to make it as easy and efficient as possible for producers to add chapters. At the moment they're having to type the info in by hand, but we are aiming to tap into existing data from around the BBC like running orders and subtitles. This work is really vital if we want to make chapters an everyday feature of bbc.co.uk.

Sarah Prag is Executive Producer, BBC Audio & Music Interactive

Yesterday something small but significant happened. Instead of disappearing from iPlayer when its 7 days were up, the first Episode of The Complete Smiley - The Spy Who Came in From the Cold stayed put. Which means that you can go back and listen to it before listening to Episode 2.

Read more on catch-up for Radio 4 at the Radio 4 blog.

The main idea behind the site is to make it as easy as possible for listeners to find podcasts that'll be right for them - whether you're into a particular station or genre, want to search for a specific podcast, or just want content that's the perfect length for your journey into work, then the new site should work for you. I'll mention a couple of the highlights here, but I'd definitely encourage you to have a play with the site to see all the options and features that are now on offer.

If you're interested in finding out which podcasts are new, or in the limelight, then the new Recently Launched and Editor's Picks selections might be for you, and you can hover over the images to find out more about each series.

If you're pretty sure which podcast you want, but are not quite sure what it's called then you could try the clever new search box. As you type it auto-suggests podcast titles which feature those words, and will even suggest a whole category of podcasts that might be of interest.

If you fancy more of a browse then you can now drill down by radio station, genre, or a combination of both.

So you could request to see all Sports podcasts from 5 live that are about Football, or see what Radio 1 offer in the News category. Any podcasts that meet your criteria will appear below the filters, and you can then arrange them based on which is the most recently updated, or longest/shortest. Once you've found a podcast that you're interested in you can hover over it to find out more, or click through to the full page for that series.

The podcast pages themselves now offer more info and functionality than before.

The biggest new development is that you can now play any available episodes in the page, in addition to being able to download them, or follow the steps to subscribe to the series.

This page also now recommends other podcast series you might like, as well as links to relevant pages elsewhere on bbc.co.uk.

There are Help links throughout the site, and a fun new Short Introduction to Podcast video for people who want a simple overview.

On a more technical note (look away now if you're faint of heart), the directory is built on the new Forge platform. Forge supports dynamic, database-driven services rather than static page-based services and an infrastructure that includes new hardware, systems and updated technology. All this is good news for the developers; and those maintaining and updating the podcast directory. Hopefully, the end users get a better experience too!

This site has been built by a great project team in FM&T for Audio & Music, with significant input from Jim Downie in my team. They've really enjoyed building it, so I hope you'll now enjoy using it!

Let me know what you think, as we're hoping to continue to develop the site over the course of the year and would appreciate your feedback.

Sarah Prag is Executive Producer, BBC Audio & Music Interactive

There are four of us (me included) and we're responsible for working with technology and production colleagues to develop and help run the various services you use to listen to BBC radio online. We're responsible for the podcast service, and used to run the old Radio Player, but since July we've been mainly focusing on the BBC iPlayer.

As you may know, there have been a few teething problems with radio in iPlayer, so most of our time since the summer has been spent on trying to fix and improve things. I'd like to explain a bit about why this is, but I'd also like to tell you about some of the exciting NEW things we're hoping to move on to in the New Year.

So, first the teething problems... The big challenge with moving radio into iPlayer was that we already had a very popular listening service that had been running for over 7 years. We needed to migrate all of the listeners, all of the content, and all of the producers to a new way of doing things. It was rather like changing all four wheels while you're driving down the motorway, and writing the manual at the same time.

Unlike TV in iPlayer, which has one team managing all of the content, radio is managed by teams in all of the radio networks - so there are people sitting in Radio 1 or Radio 4 responsible for setting things up for their station. There are also over 2,500 episodes of audio arriving in iPlayer every week, compared to several hundred hours of TV. This means a lot of people to train, and a lot of people using new tools. Some of the tools have also taken a while to bed in, which has added to the challenge. Oh - and one further thing, there are actually seven different systems that audio and information have to pass through to get out to the listener!

If your interested in such things, these systems are: Coyopa (which does the encoding), PIPs (a database which stores and handles programme information), PIT (the Programme Information Tool which producers use to schedule and manage their content in iPlayer), Radio Bridge (which picks up the audio files and moves them to a public folder), MAD (the Media Availability Database which keeps a record of which audio should be available), Dynamite (the publishing platform that publishes the iPlayer website and console) and EMP (the Embedded Media Player, which plays the audio). All of these were either new, or being asked to do new things when we moved radio into the iPlayer. So maybe that's like changing seven wheels on an articulated lorry while driving down the motorway? I think you get the picture.

None of this is meant to sound like an excuse for things not working, but hopefully it's a bit of an explanation. On the plus side, my team and many others have been working flat out since we launched to overcome some of these challenges, and I think we're really making progress, which is why we're now starting to focus on how we can add to the listening experience with new features.

So, what about the NEW things? Well, one significant development that we've all been working on is improving the quality and reliability of our streams. James Cridland has written about this here. We're also planning to redevelop the pop-out radio player based largely on feedback from listeners (this should arrive some time in March), and we're looking at how we can introduce audio downloads and podcasts to the iPlayer next year. We'll also be feeding into wider iPlayer developments from a radio perspective including how to make the iPlayer experience more personalised, which is something we're all really excited about.

Sarah Prag is Executive Producer, Audio and Music Interactive.