Peter Day, the BBC's Radio 4 Business Correspondent has been covering business issues since joining the BBC in the mid 1970's. The podcasts of his programme are among the most popular that the BBC does. See what Peter has to say about his career and podcasting.

If you are interested in seeing what BBC podcasts are most popular in terms of donwloads and plays then check out the BBC Site statisics.

I subscribe to the blog by Richard Sambrook, Director of BBC Global News. His update on how the BBC is opening up its programme content to its audience is very interesting. The news teams are not yet at the stage of using 'citizen journalists' (and not sure they ever will) but their use of blogs and podcasts to supplement traditional news programme production is very interesting.

The BBC is conducting an experiment using blogs to decide the content of the PM radio programme. They call it iPM.

I checked out the details with Chris Vallance of the BBC today what they are doing with it.  

The idea is to add real interactivity to the programme. As one of the team, Rubert Allman says,

iPM is a weekly programme as well as a podcast. The “i” stands for interactive and “i” as in something personal. You can discuss ideas with the production team on this blog and during the course of the week you can view and comment on stories that are being lined up for Saturday's programme.

Chris explains that the ideas for content comes from two sources – conversations on the blogosphere (which the team is tracking and monitoring for potential news stories) and listeners suggestions. Comments on the blog influence the content of the programme although the ‘editorial’ team do the final selection.

At the moment there are no plans to engage ‘citizen journalists’.

There is no set end date for the experiment (although Chris mentioned the end of December) and no pre-agreed measure of what ‘success’ will look like. It will be up to us as listeners to influence the programme and ensure the experiment is continued.

The 10^th of November at 5.30pm is the date of the first programme.

If you have an idea for an item drop the team a comment on their blog.

There is also a Facebook group page.

Very interesting exercise in progress at the BBC. The Today Programme has had a 'listeners write in' section for a while but recently adding blogging and podcasting. I heard today that they are going to attempt some 'crowdsourcing' and have people suggest what the omnibus edition on Saturday will look like. As they put it - they want to try real interactive conversations.

Worth listening in to see how it all works out.

According to this BBC report the Littlewoods saga is getting legs. We have the differences of opinion with various trading standards over the legality of Littlewoods actions in retrosepctively charging people the discount taken in error.

What I do not understand is this. Littlewoods are a database marketing company so will have all sorts of credit and historical tracking records in their operational databases. If they issued only 70k+ codes to specific current customers then they know who is illegiable to use them. When someone other than one of the original 70k+ people respond then it is a simple database field look-up to see that they are not elligiable as they do not match the name on the Littlewoods database.

I bet you Littlewoods can identify people who are over their credit limit and put order processing and delivery on hold. Why not the ones who were not entitled to the discount?

Slowly but surely the internet as a viable channel of quality content delivery is happening.

BBC Worldwide has just announced the availability of material by Michael Palin and Steve Coogan amongst others. No longer do you have to rely on YouTube to see such content. Traditional production companeis and broadcasters are realising many people now want content delivery via the internet either at home or when out and about.