Category: culture-and-politics

Jason who now works for Google instead of the BBC had some crushing words to say about the BBC's online future on his blog. I hadn't noticed because my RSS Owl is playing up (yes I'm going to write a bug request for this problem) so I've missed a lot of what my friends have been writing about. Anyway Jason makes the point that the BBC's web efforts are doomed to fail because we are a broadcasting company with broadcasting type funding in a nutshell. So when I first read his blog entry, I was going to respond on the backstage blog but felt the backstage blog wasn't the right place to reply, as some of these points are my own view and not of the BBC. So I may just link to the post on backstage and leave it as that. It won't spend much time on the front page either because there will be posts from the Future of Webapps Expo tomorrow.

Here's some choice quotes.

Moving away from the economic analysis of the situation facing the BBC, we can see the tide already turning. The BBC was an innovator in radio (2LO – in beta 1922, v1.0 when licenced in 1923) then TV (BBC Television Service – beta from 1929, v1.0 release 1946) but not now in the online age. Sky Anytime, 4OD, and ITV.com's video revamp have all launched before the BBC's iPlayer service (iMP beta 2005, iPlayer in beta, v1.0 not released at time of writing) showing commercial efforts in this field have trumped the BBC. One person working on the project called it “worse than boo.com”. With the lead now lost, how can they pull it back?

Frankly and I'm sure I'm breaking some part of my contract here. iPlayer is a mess and I can't / won't defend it on my own blog. Everyone I speak, asks what happened? Why would the BBC put out iplayer and think it was acceptable? Even in Boston the developer of Miro/Democracy player was asking me seriously why would a public broadcaster do such a thing? I don't have an answer, I really don't. In the first BBC Backstage podcast, Dave Crossland answered Tom Loosemore's question if the BBC should have done nothing over releasing iplayer. He answered yes, do nothing because it was morally wrong. Well thats his view but lets be honest would we better off if we didn't do iplayer? I actually think so. Tom Loosemore was right, we do need to deliever to those who don't understand bit torrent or simlar technologies but I wonder how many of us we're eating our own dogfood?

Lets go through the some of the principals of Web 2.0 and the BBC…

• Rich user experience: archaic BBC tech standards say that you can't rely on javascript/flash to deliver content, and pages need to be below 200kb in size. Buh bye innovative user interfaces, widgets/gadgets, Google or Yahoo Maps style interface, or YouTube for that matter.
• User as contributor: BBC requires moderation of content before publishing it – see above for 606 example.
• Participation, not publishing – as above.
• Enable the long tail – BBC tech has limited ability to cater for large amount of content in the first place. CMSs are disparate and clunky, content distribution network is run off one single, overloaded computer (!).
• Radical trust – this simply doesn't happen at the BBC, see 606. Not even to employee's, see first point.

Right so, point one. The BBC Standards and guidelines are under consistent review and lots of those archaic are being shifted as our audience become more internet savvy. Backstage also doesn't have to live by those standards and guidlines. Jason is right publishing is cheap and free, we need to reflect that. Yes long tail, we need lightweight cms which don't require a room full of people to understand how it works. Trust I won't talk about right now.

Anyway, there's lots more I want to say, but its late and I got a early start tomorrow at FOWA. So I'll finish off later (maybe Thursday).

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Filmmaker Deborah Scranton talks about and shows clips from her documentary The War Tapes, which put cameras in the hands of Charlie Company, a unit of the National Guard, for one year in Iraq. The soldiers' raw footage and diary excerpts tell a powerful, unsettling story of modern war.

Wow, powerful talk and I did go check out the site later. Its self described as…

Straight from the front lines in Iraq, The War Tapes is the first war movie filmed by soldiers themselves.

This is Operation Iraqi Freedom as filmed by Sergeant Steve Pink, Sergeant Zack Bazzi and Specialist Mike Moriarty. Steve is a wisecracking carpenter and a gifted writer. Zack is a Lebanese-American university student who loves to travel and is fluent in Arabic. Mike is a father who seeks honor and redemption.

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Something about Freetards and the BBC, but it all started here, don't ask me – I'm not going to comment.

Oh here's some more details on the Register, Open rights group, Download Squad, Cory's piece in the
Guardian, some official response and podcast on the backstage blog and finally the last word from Defective by design.

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So Maz really has shaken the gender teapot. First the post Me Tarzan. You Jane, then Geeks can be Chic(K)s.

Some quotes,

Add to this my return from a recent visit to the San Francisco to the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo where I was struck by the uniformity of the male technology enthusiasts – As one of the few females in attendance, I stuck out like a PC at a Mac convention, so much so that another woman with whom I met remarked how few ‘skirts there were amongst all the suits’. Well that’s certainly one way to put it!

It does sadden me to think that amongst my daily little foray into the Web 2.0 world, there is little realisation, nor concern about such a gender imbalance. It seems ironic that where we are very savvy at collectively contributing and sharing information there is a lack of attention about the formation of such user knowledge, shares and application creation.

Maybe the way the world is Tarzan build tools; Jane gets to use them…

Perhaps the Web 3.0 jungle will bring with it a more egalitarian gender balance?

Yep there's certainly no real argument there. Some of the comments are also interesting, including this one which points out that there more women in the less programming led fields. Human computing, interaction and even xml seem to be fields where woman are more common that straight programming.

But whats really interesting is…

It seems that gender is not the only issue here, but also the geek image. You are only allowed into The Club if you possess an in-depth knowledge of coding and more structural aspects of web development. Ok so here my own level of ‘geek ability’ does rather fall short. I do, do HTML (when forced), Javascript, Flash and so on… but hell Web 2.0 fluidity makes this less of an ‘essential’ special power – especially as I am not by ‘trade’ a web developer. However, there are
important assumptions that are being made about the types of knowledge one should (and can) possess and the association of such abilities along gendered lines.

Case in note, one of the biggest issues that a (female) friend of mine has come across is that people assume that she is not a web developer. No, not that she is not capable, but simply that she does not fit the ‘image’, that that particular role calls forth. Now where’s the equality in that?

The Geek image is certainly something which I've touched on before but I've never thought about how the poor geek image is affecting women.

I'm going to avoid the current comments about special treatment just to say if the environment and people are inherently corrupt how do you reverse that? The answer isn't simple and its something most people hate but most people have never faced such corruption.

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I saw this come up in Particls but only just watched it. Its really good and comes highly recommended

Good Copy Bad Copy is a terrific new documentary about copyright and culture, directed by Andreas Johnsen, Ralf Christensen, and Henrik Moltke. It features interviews with Danger Mouse, Girl Talk, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Lawrence Lessig, and many others with various perspectives on copyright.

Check out the film’s trailer below (via blip.tv) and download the torrent for the XviD version of the whole movie at goodcopybadcopy.net.

 

meta-technorati-tags=copyright, ip, film, torrent, music, creativecommons, goodcopy, badcopy

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Ok I actually flicked through the document linked and I'm officially very scared.

The Open Rights Group (ORG) believes that the problems observed at the English and Scottish elections in May 2007 raise serious concerns regarding the suitability of e-voting and e-counting technologies for statutory elections. E-voting is a ‘black box system’, where the mechanisms for recording and tabulating the vote are hidden from the voter. This makes public scrutiny impossible, and leaves statutory elections open to error and fraud.

The Government has prioritised the introduction of e-voting because of the perceived convenience of new technologies, ignoring other vital considerations such as confidence and trust in the electoral system. ORG considers that the problems observed and difficulties scrutinising results delivered by e-counting systems bring their suitability for statutory elections into question.

meta-technorati-tags=democracy, openrightsgroup, evoting, elections, pdf, org

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I was actually watching this TED presentation on my xbox last night and had to watch it twice because the first time around I was so transfixed on what was being said. Its a raw emotional talk about climate change without all the jokes of Al Gore's presentation. Then Blip.TV's Twitter Bot recommended the exact same video a couple of hours later, so I had to blog it as 12mins of video that everyone should see.

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Wow some of the designs are simply amazing… Don't forget to vote.

My favorite designs are these two

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