For as long as the BBC has been making programmes, audiences have been talking about them and we have done our best to showcase some of those conversations on-air, via programmes like Feedback and Points of View. However, it is only with the advent of the internet that those conversations have become accessible to a much wider audience. Here on bbc.co.uk we have a range of blogs, messageboards and other commenting tools, which enable users to talk about our output. However, much of the conversation about BBC programming inevitably happens away from bbc.co.uk on people's personal blogs or microblogging services such as Twitter.

Shownar aims to track the wealth of activity that takes place around BBC progammes online and work out which are currently gaining the most attention. So why do it? To borrow from the site's About pages: "First, it will help you find shows that others have not only watched, but are talking about. Hopefully it'll throw up a few hidden gems. People's interest, attention and engagement with shows are more important to Shownar than viewing figures; the audience size of a documentary on BBC FOUR, for instance, will never approach that of EastEnders, but if that documentary sparks a lot of interest and comment - even discussion - we want to highlight it. And second, when you've found a show of interest, we want to assist your onward journey by generating links to related discussions elsewhere on the web. In the same way news stories are improved by linking out to the same story on other news sites, we believe shows are improved by connecting them to the wider discussion and their audience."

So, how does it work? In the first instance, we decided to focus on tracking in-bound links to programme-related pages on bbc.co.uk, so we could be confident that the discussions were actually about a BBC programme, rather than a different usage of, say, 'archers' or 'apprentice' (although intelligent keyword matching remains a future aspiration). Rather than develop technology to crawl the web ourselves, we decided to partner with data providers who were already doing that, and who could supply us with good, clean data. We took a look at a range of possible suppliers, and for this initial prototype chose data provided by Yahoo! Search BOSS, Nielson Online's BlogPulse (which indexes over 100 million blogs), and Twingly (which searches microblogging services like Twitter, Jaiku and Identi.ca for links, even when they are shortened using URL shortening services such as TinyURL and bit.ly). We are also ingesting data from LiveStats, the BBC's own real-time indicator of traffic. Once ingested, this data is processed according to a specially created algorithm to calculate the 'buzz measure' for every BBC programme - more detail on the algorithm can be found on Shownar's Technical information page.

The front-end interface offers a range of different ways into the data, from the 'fresh buzz' chart on the homepage, to the schedule heatmap which shades the 'hottest' programmes on each of the BBC's TV channels / radio stations (which also have their own pages). There is also a Catch up on iPlayer page, enabling you to filter programmes available to watch on demand by channel, genre and time of day. The genre cuts are particularly compelling, enabling you to see, for example, which Comedy programmes are generating the most buzz. There's also the blueprint, which provides full access to all of the data, including permalinks, so I can tell you that the most buzzed about factual TV programme at midday on Monday 22nd June was BBC Two's James May on the Moon.

The site has been live as an internal BBC beta for a few weeks now and it's already started to have a real impact on my consumption habits, introducing me to programmes I had missed in the schedules such as Radio 2's Back from the Dead: The Return of Spinal Tap, BBC One's Famous, Rich and Homeless and BBC Two's NASA: Triumph and Tragedy. It's also doing the job I hoped it would do in terms of onward journeys, with particularly rich discussion around Radio 4's The Reith Lectures. To find out how your blog links and microblog updates can end up on Shownar (and for information about moderation) visit the Get involved page.

We're keen to hear your feedback on Shownar, so please leave a comment below or send us your thoughts by email. If the prototype proves successful, we are hoping to integrate the functionality of Shownar into bbc.co.uk. Possible future developments include additional data sources and a full API.

Shownar was designed and built by Schulze & Webb, with input from a small BBC project team: Katherine Sommers, Mark Simpkins, Catherine Wingate, Yuri Kang, Andrew Barron, Chris Sizemore and myself. We hope you enjoy using it.

Dan Taylor is Senior Portfolio Executive, Internet for BBC Vision.

It also heralds the switch on of live streaming (simulcast) for BBC Four, CBBC and CBeebies, joining BBC Three, BBC News and BBC Parliament, which are already available to watch live online, with BBC One and BBC Two due to follow later this year [see recent press release and previous multicast trial].

Last but by no means least, today also marks the passage of /programmes from beta to fully
fledged live service, boasting a permanent, findable web presence for every TV and radio programme that the BBC broadcasts.

A lot of things to launch all on one day? Unquestionably, but it's indicative of the increasingly interconnected nature of the BBC's online offer, where the channel websites are no longer discrete content areas, but are fully integrated with the wider programmes offer and beyond.

So, how did we set about redesigning (and hopefully improving) some of the most visited pages on bbc.co.uk? Well, we started with your feedback on the previous sites, collected via the bbc.co.uk Pulse survey, which told us that the basic tasks of finding out what's on television and quickly locating information on specific programmes were most important and could be made easier.

With this in mind, we placed a schedule carousel along the top of the new channel homepages and a snapshot of what's on now and next across every BBC TV channel at the heart of the new TV homepage. We also added a Programmes A-Z module to the top right of all of these pages to provide quick access to the wealth of programme information housed within the newly minted /programmes.

A significant development since the channel websites were last refreshed (in July 2007) is the availability of catch-up programming via BBC iPlayer, which we've reflected via a dedicated module on each of the homepages, showcasing the most popular programmes on demand with a link through to the full iPlayer offer. iPlayer availability is also reflected in the schedule carousel with a Watch Now button appearing for programmes which can be viewed on demand and Watch Live buttons for those being simulcast.

The eagle-eyed among you might notice that the channel homepages have a discreet temporal metaphor to them, with past programming on the left of the page, the present reflected in the centre, and future highlights to the right, reflecting the expanding life of programmes beyond a single moment of transmission (for more on this topic, check out ex-BBC staffer Dan Hill's blog post on "The Social Life of a Broadcast").

Lower down on the homepages, you'll find links to top video clips, photo galleries and "Be on a Show" information, as well as channel-specific elements such as BBC Four's Newsletter and Have Your Say comments forums.

Of course, it's not all about the homepages. Behind the schedule links are full TV listings for each of the channels (including regional variations), which are fully integrated with /programmes, meaning they will they will be permanently accessible, unlike the What's On What's On listings (which these will replace) which became inaccessible after just two days.

Each channel site also has an area for channel trailers (known in the industry as "idents"), compiling the stings that appear between programmes on BBC One, BBC Two, BBC Three and BBC Four.

Far too many people have contributed to the above projects to list them individually; suffice to say it's been a truly pan-BBC effort with colleagues from Vision, Audio & Music and Future Media & Technology all collaborating to raise the bar for the BBC's programme and channel support online.

We're really keen to hear your feedback on the new sites, so please leave a comment below.

Dan Taylor is Senior Portfolio Executive, Internet for BBC Vision.