Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
Cutting edge comedy from the BBC's Now Show. Found via Richard Sambrook's blog.
If you missed Marcus Brigstocke's comic rant against the Abrahamic faiths on The Now Show, you can find it here. It's seven minutes in total – but the first three are inspired. Strangely not as many complaints as one might have anticipated – that's the benefit of being even handed I guess….
TV recently has been a little slow since the likes of Lost, Heroes, etc have taken there break. But luckily there is some great UK series which are not to be missed. I've already mentioned Doctor Who which finishes next week. But what I failed to mention is this great new series called Jekyll (you can see the trailer here). Its a drama with a chilling edge and well worth watching.
So I recently watched the Panorama programmes on the White flight, WiFi and Scientology.
The most recent one was the WiFi one, and its caused once again a huge stir online. The programme tried to delve into the world of radiation but failed badly. For example there was never a mention that Mobile phone signals operate on a much lower band (850 – 1900 Mhz) that wireless (2.4 Ghz). This was critical mistake when assuming the women who were sensitive to mobile phone towers would also be sensitive to Wireless. I also never heard anything about the fact Radiation is all around us all the time. For example the Sun gives of radiation which is very dangerous but some of you still bake in the sun on a good day.
What then bothers me is the school arguments. Its a obvious trick. Don't you want your children to be safe? Yes maybe there might be some long term side effect to wireless but by the time we know we'd have moved on to ultrawideband type communication, etc. This isn't going to be in our lives forever. Even if I'm wrong and next week someone does the maths and works it all out, I'm sorry but the Panorama programme was an obstacle not a helper.
Anyway, Miles found an excellent cartoon of the whole debate.
Very brief comments on the other programmes. The White flight one was quite worrying but interesting none the less. I don't think the problem is as bad down south. Maybe because the property prices are so high you can't be picky. The scientology one I felt was very good. You can see how the team tried to be balanced and open with the documentary but how it got hi-jacked by the scienctolgies in the end. When the reporter snapped my instant reaction was no don't let them do this to you, this is the reaction they wanted and yes I bet it made all the scientology videos this year. It also became clear how much money and resources this cult at its disposal. Its going to require much more distributed efforts to get the low down on whats going on in this cult.
It was great being at Xtech this year but it wasn't all play. I did actually film a lot and take notes. Ok there were sessions which were a little too early for my liking but that's the way it always is.
Along with all the videoing and write ups about Xtech 2007. I shot a few interviews while at Xtech 2007.
meta-technorati-tags=videos, backstage, bbc, interviews
As previously mentioned on the backstage blog. Hackday.org is now official and you can sign up and grab yourself a ticket now.
The dates are the weekend of the 16th – 17th June at Alexander Palace (yes now it makes sense why I had pictures of the venue on my flickr stream)
Its a partnership between Yahoo! Developer Network and BBC Backstage, which we've been developing for quite sometime. Matthew Cashmore, Tom Coates, Matt McAlister and many others have been involved in this from the start.
As the hackday.org site says, stimulation will be provided in Food, Drinks, Feeds and APIs. Like BarCamp, you are welcome to play werewolf sorry hack or (sleep) through-out the night. Tomski's already offered his shower for Sunday morning. Its going to be a very cool event. No I won't
be doing a live DJ session from stage 1 afterwards but nor will Beck this time around.
From Backstage
The BBC is looking for people to join a six-month trial in which 20,000 UK residents will get free access to hundreds of programmes from the BBC archive, including reports of historic events as they happened, ground-breaking documentaries, soaps, action-packed children's shows, sumptuous dramas, and comedy shows that thrilled the nation.
Interested? then you can now register your interest on the BBC Archive site
Video: Mike Arrington thinks the BBC should be dissolved
Taken from the Backstage Blog,
Yesterday (21st Feb) at the future of webapps there was a Panel Debate about what Europe could learn from American in regards to the startup culture. We captured the whole debate on a small camcorder. Including the part where one of the most prolific voices of the valley, Michael Arrington from TechCrunch.com. Showed his true feelings for the BBC's efforts online. He added…
The BBC should be dissolved
And then started to make a joke about the office, which showed his lack of knowledge of what the BBC really is about. He then wax lyrical about CBBC World and how we were distorting the industry. Daniel Morris a developer at BBC Manchester finally debunks most of Mike Arrington's rant about the BBC by pointing out that everything the BBC does has to pass the Public Value Test.
Michela Ledwidge asks the question, and we racked our brains and did a lot of searching. I think it might be, but I can't say for sure. If thats not a first, using blip.tv is certainly a first. And to be honest, if it wasn't for the ability to…
We would have never have consider it. Maybe we've been drinking too much of Lessig's kool aid. Although I was a little worried about the Blip.tv EULA. But Mike at Blip says,
As far as the EULA, we don't own all the rights. Don't want them. We need to find a way to make that even clearer. When you upload you give us the rights to create derivative works (for thumbnails and transcoding) and to distribute (i.e. make available for download). Those rights go away when you delete the content from blip.
Another reason why the archive.org angle is very important. If Blip.tv ever pulled a Yahoo/Flickr thing on its users. You could pipe them all to Archive.org and remove them from Blip. Metadata and all..
The first ever BBC Backstage podcast has caused a quite a stir. Some of it negative and some of it positive.
Generally the reaction to the podcast is positive but Ben did say he felt Backstage shouldn't be hosting such a debate. Its bigger that Backstage and should be taking place somewhere else. Fair enough, but till then backstage is where it will stay for now.
Before coming to Cory's thoughts on the BBC and DRM, I thought I'd better cover some of the other points from others first. Upyourego loves the podcast too and makes a good point about the lack of RSS like Tom Morris. Adam, Brian, Superfly
picked it up and so does Euan Semple, who is surprisingly quiet about it. But some of the comments left are interesting, including one from Cory. Weird Cory didn't post any comments to mine or Ben's
blogs entries.
Corys post to BoingBoing is over the top. I love Cory but he took a few points from the podcast and went to town on them. He threw out most of the other stuff which made it a much more balanced debate. For example,
Well yes there was something in the air but we're positive about making things right and turning things around. Open DRM is one of many things discussed but Cory doesn't mention this. Tom has a comment which I don't quite get, but I'll ask him tomorrow.
Arstechnica does a much better job at reporting a more balanced view of the podcast. Although the title is misleading – BBC explains decision to go with Microsoft DRM.
The brouhaha surrounding iPlayer makes for some good reading, but more interesting is the podcast. The BBC engineers on the show come off as intelligent, affable folks who don't like content restrictions any more than consumers do. They're also fully aware of recent technologies like Ogg Vorbis, BitTorrent, and SlingBox. For those curious how DRM and rights decisions are made behind the scenes at a major public broadcaster, this is definitely worth a listen.
A couple of good comments follow too.
That's an amazingly insightful podcast! Thanks!
Which company has used DRM longer, the BBC or Apple? Just because Jobs uses DRM and then says “but we shouldn't” doesn't mean a thing. Well, depending on how gullible you are. It's about as meaningful as Google's “do no harm”. Actions speak louder than words.
Currently Digg and Slashdot have yet to pick up the podcast or its reactions. Oh it looks like we'll be uploading the video this week.
The first ever BBC Backstage podcast kicked off in fine style on Wednesday 7th February.
We invited some of the most vocal backstagers in the long running debate over DRM, to come and join us at the BBC to discuss face to face what they felt about DRM and the BBC. The hour long discussion around DRM and the BBC included,
You can listen with the built in player below, or you can download and remix the MPeg3 file or the Ogg Vorbis file. Both are licensed under creative commons attribution. So as long as you credit backstage.bbc.co.uk, your good to go. Don't forget to check out some great action shots from the debate…
