After just over two years I’ve moved on from the Audio & Music bit of the BBC to the Vision bit of the BBC. And for the next 12 months, at least, I’ll be working to improve the BBC’s online natural history offering – a project know as “BBC Earth”.

I am really excited about the Earth project, the BBC’s Natural History Unit is responsible for the best Natural History broadcasting in the world — everything from Planet Earth to World on the Move and Springwatch — and frankly David Attenborough is a national treasure. And because I studied Biology at university and worked in the nature conservation sector for the early part of my career in many ways I feel that BBC Earth is the culmination of my career to date, combining my early career and academic life with my more recent career and love of the Web. What more could I ask for?

If I’m honest BBC Earth is just about the only project that would have got me to leave my old job, because while it is an incredible opportunity to build something amazing — bringing great content to the web and making bbc.co.uk that little bit more coherent — I will miss the people and the projects I’m leaving behind. You see I am immensely proud of bbc.co.uk/programmes and bbc.co.uk/music/artists and, what has been achieved by the teams over the last couple of years. We now have a page for every programme the BBC broadcasts (including, as of last week, BBC Local Radio) and a page for every artist the BBC plays – in fact it’s a lot more than that with 400,000 or so artist pages. All available in a variety of formats including RDF and mobile views. And the 5 million page requests per week for bbc.co.uk/programmes is some indication that I’m not alone in the value of the service.

I will miss not being part of that anymore especially since I’ve left before we’ve launched version 1.0. Programmes might officially be out of beta but I’ve always had version 1.0 being delivered in early spring or rather when those features slated to deliver in spring are delivered as being version 1.0. I won’t spoil the surprise but it will be great.

And of course the new music site isn’t yet live – again I don’t want to ruin it for you but the next few months will see more data, more features and more views… and then of course both domains need to be stitched together, lots of lovely linking between the two – transcluding data from one domain onto the other to help people discover the unexpected. Clickable tracklists anyone? What about visualizations of artists played on a programme brand? Oh and then there’s the work to join events (things like the Electric Proms or the Edinburgh Festival) to the programmes and music domains. Next spring is going to be a very, very exciting time – it really will start to demonstrate the power of the strategy. And that’s before… ok enough.

But it is the people that I will miss most. It feels like the end of an era – one that, as Matt Wood reminded me, started on a grassy bank in Cambridge a couple of summers ago. Up until that point work had been progressing but it was over a coffee at the Spa conference where, for me at least, things real changed. And now that I’ve moved onto Earth it feels like the end of an era – even if that’s only an era in my own lifetime. I feel so privileged to have worked with such a talented, and bluntly lovable people. I only hope that I can help do justice to BBC Earth and that my friends in A&M for FM&T continue to be happy and continue to make bbc.co.uk a better place and a better web citizen. I’ll miss you.