Tag: bbc

Geek Dinner is back with a bang

So yeah I hear Robert Scoble is back for another Geek Dinner on the 10th December via Ben's Blog. But I've got an announcement to say that I'm currently arranging with Tim O'reilly a geekdinner for thursday 13th October. I'm sure Tim will say yes and hopefully by the time I blog this, he would have agreed already. Lee Wilkins is fully aware of this and is stand by waiting for the final go from myself (just sent him the email).

Obviously he will also be doing some presentations and interviews around the BBC before. So if your a BBC member of staff working on the 13th October, try and keep your calendar clear on that day, so you can either attend a session in White City or Bush House with Tim. If your interested but have never heard Tim talk before, please check out this recommended podcast by Paul

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Why are there so few uk bloggers?

So I was also in the "otherwise NDA’d BBC blog policy meeting" when Tom Coates suggested that the reason why there are few UK bloggers compared to our ummm friends in the states. Ben metcalfe paraphrases

Maybe the reason the UK public are a little behind our Amercian cousins when it comes to being across blogging is because it’s not very ‘British’ for the common man to stand and up and ‘have his say’ on something.

And as you have predicted, I have to agree. But I'm not so sure its quite as simple as to blame our British culture. I feel Geek culture is still kinda of looked down on while America geek culture is much more prolific. I'm not saying that's the only reason either but it like broadband pentration, etc have there part to play in the sum. But lets not forget the ability for the British to quickly change like in the case of House music in the late 80's.

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Ajax powered BBC News RSS Reader

Nigal Crawley is looking for feedback on his BBC backstage prototype. Its a web client which will pull a RSS feed and display it as a neat little ticker type box. Just the kinda of thing our partners would love to see intergrated into there sites. I dropped Nigal a quick email asking if he's considered building a Widget out of it and if it would support multiple encodings and right to left languages like Persian and Arabic?

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Visual mixing with creative archive footage?

BBC Radio 1's Superstar VJs

So finally the BBC has launched its first lot of creative archive licenced material. There will be some kind of major vj competition to follow. I think this is all good stuff, except a couple of things.
1. UK only? this is a real shame for the billions who happen to live outside of the UK.
2. No P2P downloads of the files. I thought there would be somewhere on the site where you could download everything in one go. But nope it looks like a click and browser type of affair. I did look around to see if anyone had hosted a torrent for this, but I cant find one. Its tempting to do so myself and try and restrict or at least inform the downloaders of the licence rights. I'm sure under the creative archive licence I would be in my rights to do so? And wasnt this the point of a creative commons type licence? I would be interested to hear if the BBC are using Geo-ip type blocking for downloads or relying on the licence conditions. Found out there using Geo-IP

I know Bit Torrent has a bad rep when it comes to most mainstream businesses. But the simple fact is that it works. You can distribute large files around the net without hammering one server farm. I even believe its possible to tell the Bit torrent tracker to use Geo-ip type systems when deciding who should and shouldnt beable to download the files.

Till number 2, the distribition of the files are handled differently, superstar vjs is going to require alot of clicking and browsing. So close, but so far…

Update – It would be more than my jobs worth to recommend using a Proxy to bypass the Geo-IP system. I also would not link to such proxy servers in the same post. But we all know once its online, location makes no difference. Just making downloading difficult is not ideal when thinking about the audience. But if it serves the purpose of convincing the lawyer, that a certain percentage of the rest of the world wont download the UK only content. Well theres no more to say.

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I’m off to work at the BBC

Yes yesterday I was offered a great job at BBC World Service and of course I took it. So I will be leaving Ravensbourne College behind for now, but I will still be hopefully involved with the Interaction design course even if its just regular checkups on students. I was also offered another position today, but for BBCi's iCan which I had to turned down.

Just wanted to say thanks to all which made my 5 years in Ravensbourne College enjoyable, challenging and interesting.

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