bbc radio programme plots it's listeners on map

BBC Radio 4's Eddie Mair recently asked listeners of PM and iPM to submit their postcodes to be plotted on a google map and were flooded by over 22,000 responses.

The result, visible using google earth or as a google map, clearly illustrates how internet streaming has helped the programme build audiences far outside the broadcast footprint of the network.

The experiment also highlights one of the problems with what I call the "send it to us" approach to audience engagement - the shear volume of responses could quickly become overwhelming.

Comments

[chris]

Thanks for the link Robin.

I should add that we have an "over to you" approach to the map itself. We're very keen for people to remix the map and tell us things we didn't know about our audience.

The map was/is very much an experiment and like all good experiments we did learn some really useful things...particularly about handling maps and the issues that arise with large(ish) data sets. We're still learning too.

We needed a lot of help to get this far and there are still a few bugs and imperfections, but in the end I think we have a really fun way of visualising the audience. We'd like to do more with maps, not just this one, and we're very open to collaborative working. Contact us at ipm [at] bbc.co.uk