Round-up
Following on from the BBC’s Internet Blog’s round-up for the week (featuring yours truly, at least in part), I thought I’d do my own for once. There may be some cross-over — most of the stuff I’ve been paying attention to this week has been BBC-related.
BBC Genome, Archives, Infax
The BBC has announced Genome, a project to scan, OCR and give structure to the entire catalogue of Radio Times past issues, with a view of building a database of the entire broadcast history of the BBC. This aligns with efforts to get historical programmes into the /programmes service, and would seem to be (at least in part) a successor-in-interest to the Backstage Infax Programme Catalogue prototype. All of this comes as part of (what I’m calling) “Archive week” at the BBC, which is marked by some interesting posts on the BBC Archive. This lets me sashay neatly into Brendan Quinn’s presentation from OSCON this year on the (near–) future of Ingex, and also Ant Miller’s post on the BBC R&D blog on the work at North Lab in Manchester.
HTML5, et cetera.
I have a feeling this one will run and run and run… but if you’re not already really bored of it, here’s a run-down.
I wrote a (nearly) line-by-line response picking apart Erik Huggers’ recent piece on the BBC Internet blog where he attempts to — for want of a better term — slates HTML5 on some somewhat handywavey bases. I wrote some other follow-up pieces before that, too. All of this stems from some head-scratching about the way that the BBC decided to get iPlayer content on Android.
It’s interesting, though. I re-read, with some prompting, a blog post I’ve linked to a few times in the past — Brandon Butterworth’s History of Redux, which does include this comment:
BBC TV and Radio services work on any manufacturers device, they compete on quality and features, not on exclusive access to content. It seemed silly to have to make special content for any particular internet device manufacturer but that’s how the market, governed by commercial rather than technical interests, has developed.
Entirely coincidentally, I’ve also been looking at the BBC’s browser support policy — this actually wasn’t to do with this ongoing debate, but in fact work-related — nevertheless, I came across this:
When considering which ‘Level of Support’ a web browser should be assigned, the following are some of the issues that are considered.
- The BBC should provide value for money to the licence fee payer
- Web standards are good for the web and meeting these standards offers public value for money.
- Licence fee payers use a variety of web browsers. The BBC aims to provide the best possible experience to the largest number of people.
- All license fee payers are considered to be valuable.
- Some licence fee payers do not have the choice of using a popular, modern web browser.
- Some people use accessibility tools - these people benefit greatly from web pages that are standards compliant.
- The BBC should not, where possible, provide a service that gives a competitive advantage to any particular product or service. (e.g. we should not add to any page ‘works best in x browser’).
- The BBC website represents the BBC globally. The BBC’s image abroad is considered to be of importance and, therefore, the non-license fee-paying users of the BBC website are also considered important.
Oh, and to cap it off, there’s this post from BBC RAD Labs on HTML5 and timed media, which I stumbled across for a second time earlier on today.
Lies, damned lies, think tanks, and journalists
Of course, it’s silly season. So we have Sexy A Levels and a post from Martin Belam from the olden days of 2003, both highlighting the silly ways in which A Level results are typically reported.
Meanwhile, the Adam Smith Institute published a… thing (PDF) which made for entirely predictable reading, and Steven Barnett rushed to the BBC’s defence in a rebuttal at OpenDemocracy. For the absence of doubt, the Adam Smith Institute commands in me broadly the same level of respect as Richard Desmond and the Daily Mail. That is, none at all.
Right, that’s enough for now. Back to heckling. Cheerio!
Critical Update!
I almost forget — actually, I lie; when it came to pressing “Publish” I had forgotten. I ran across this photo from Tom Bird of the End of Days at Kingswood Warren. Yes, that’s Brandon peering at a VT220. If you look closely at the big version, though, you’ll see that the terminal is plugged into a SunOS box, www0-rth.kw.bbc.co.uk, with quite a decent uptime and some very old files in /usr/local/apache. I have a suspicion this may have been the machine which ran the very first www.bbc.co.uk. Anybody confirm/deny?
Also! This week’s Shift Run Stop is out, featuring Reiner Knizia. This will be seeping into my brain via my ear-holes on my commute to work in the morning. Go get it, if you haven’t already.
And finally (I hope!), news has reached me that in a rare fit of blogging activity, Paul Rissen has written a splendid piece about News (capital-N, I think, is appropriate in this context). Hemmy Cho has penned a thought-provoking post entitled “Can technology be inherently good or evil?”. Both are worth a read!
