Glastonbury goes social.

The BBC have implemented some pretty cool stuff on site along with providing the usual brilliant Glastonbury coverage. It’s almost as if I’m there! Without getting muddy or wet. Last year they got 600,000 visitors in the week of Glastonbury to their page and I firmly believe with the harnessing of the social web they can double that.

Along with using wireless video cameras which overlook different parts of the festival site to give us, the people who aren’t there, a taste of the atmosphere, the site also includes an aggregation of Twitter feeds from various BBC presenters and journalists and will also be experimenting with Audioboo, the audio blogging service.

It looks to have everything you could possibly need to know about Glastonbury, all in one place and all integrated very nicely. You’ve got the weather forecast, BBC blogs, radio and TV listings, some stunning photography, videos of performances, webcams, a dedicated page for each artist and the ability for fans to comment on their performances on site. All relevant, useful and social.

They have a presence also on Flickr allowing you to comment on each individual image and share further. It will be interesting to see if it’s updated with the best of this years imagery as currently the images shown are from 2008.

What I probably found most interesting was almost an active encouragement to share the site content on your site, blog or social networking profile so you can embed the content with ease by simply copying the embed code and adding it to a post. They have a page on site listing all the embeddable content available here. I only chose not embed in this instance because it’s fairly image heavy already.

Similarly you can add a widget to see some live webcam footage, the weather etc. The red button plays a much more prominent role this year also, providing the user the opportunity to watch exactly what they want to, personalised TV.

Another nice little feature I thought was seeing who were the most popular artist pages on site. In a sense this could be seen as a barometer of how successful their performances have been in the real world, at Glastonbury. I’ve watched some of the footage from Lady Gaga’s performance and am not surprised it’s the most viewed, such an eccentric and entertaining performer.

Mobile also seems to be something that’s not been forgotten with the site being optimised to work on your iPhone’s and N97’s with a more limited service also on basic web enabled mobiles.

“We’re seeing a big difference in the number of people web browsing on phones this year. Call it the ‘iPhone effect’ or just cheap data tariffs, but there was no way we could let people have a poor experience on our festival sites,” Tim Clarke, a senior content producer for BBC Audio and Music online said.

To conclude, here are just a few ways the BBC have fully embraced old and new methods to reach out to a greater audience on a much more interactive level.

This is an example of how you can best capture the essence of what is typically a very real world physical event, online.