It would be great to apply some of the 'ethnoclassification' (dreadful term) ideas that flickr and del.icio.us use to ´óÏó´«Ã½ News. The only way I can see this working is if you give the users a reason to bother: by providing them with a personal page containing the news articles they've collected, suggestions for new ones based on the tags they've used before, and any contributions they've made to Have Your Say.
The of backstage.bbc.co.uk is just over 4 weeks away, and to whet your appetite we’ve just launched a new feed: , in XML format (TV-Anytime).
The feed contains daily snapshot of ´óÏó´«Ã½ TV and radio schedules for the forthcoming week. We're offering it in XML data format. TV-Anytime contains some interesting new flavours of metadata and is well worth exploring.
From your feedback we know that a lot of people are itching to incorporate schedule information into prototypes – so we're looking forward to seeing what you all conjure up. !
Please bear in mind that this feed is not as robust as many we make available via backstage.bbc.co.uk. Due to its experimental nature, we will be making the feed available for an initial trial period of three months.
Don't forget, like all backstage.bbc.co.uk feeds the TV and Radio listings are provided strictly for non-commercial purposes, in accordance with the backstage.bbc.co.uk . If you’re not sure whether your intended use complies with this, please first.
You can find out more by reading the associated , or why not ?
launched the latest version of today, which now includes official support of podcasting.
Having downloaded the latest version, and we were proud to discover that the top podcast in the iTunes network was Ted Gilchrist's .
Ted's done a fantastic job creating a text-to-speech application that reads in and outputs them out as a podcasts. If you haven’t already subscribed, !
Congratulations Ted!
We're considering producing our own backstage.bbc.co.uk podcast - showcasing the great prototypes our users are working on, and keeping you up to date with the latest news from the project. Do whether this is something you would find useful.
is proud to be title-sponsoring this year's (formerly known as Not Con).
Open Tech is a London-based, informal, low cost, one-day conference about all things related to technology – from "open source"-style web services through to repurposing electronic hardware! It takes place on Saturday 23rd July 2005, at Imperial College's , Hammersmith, London.
(the inventor of hypertext) is already confirmed as a speaker, with some other big names to be announced shortly.
Open Tech will also hold the official launch of backstage.bbc.co.uk. The ´óÏó´«Ã½'s Ben Metcalfe will be discussing why backstage was created and where it’s going now - plus showcasing some of the amazing work already submitted to backstage.bbc.co.uk.
However, it's not too late to . Do you want to speak about a cool project you've been working on or share some knowledge with your industry peers? There are opportunities for both "in depth" talks (30mins – 1hr) and 15 minute "lightening presentations" – check out the on the Open Tech website for more details. Submissions must be made by midnight on Saturady 25th of June 2005.
Tickets will be available shortly, again check out the for details or join the .
Just thought it would be neat if there was access to calendaring information in the form of say an iCalendar ics file and/or an RSS feed of what was happening when.
This would be especially useful for sporting/news events. i.e. Wimbledon starts then, Honours list published then, Jackson trial to end then etc.
Perhaps this already exists in some form and I missed it but it'd be neat to have an idea of what might clash when planning events and also to encourage people to view/use ´óÏó´«Ã½ sites at the appropriate time so they don't miss things they want to watch/listen to/find out about.
Simon
Among the few dozen (about 60 or so) news feeds I get are the ´óÏó´«Ã½ feeds for world, science, and related news. The problem is that I was reading so many feeds that I spent more time sifting through news I have already read in one form only to see it in another. Finding the hot topic at any one time was difficult and almost defeated the purpose of the system.
What I wound up doing was designing a system that will determine the hot topics on the fly and lump related stories together, ranking the whole thing by popularity. It's updated every two hours, and tracks breaking news quite efficiently. By cutting across so many sources from around the world, I get a more complete picture that I would find with only one or two sources, and I can scale to numerous sites with ease. unlike bayesian techniques, there is no training to do, as the approach automatically determines categories.
At this point, monkey news has been running for almost two years without little problem. It needs some more polish, search features, and improve navigability, along with better story correlation through a real scoring function.
This prototype displays the latest road travel news on mobile phones using Flash Lite as the client. Flash Lite is the mobile profile for the Macromedia Flash Player. The travel RSS feeds are loaded into the phone via a GPRS connection.
As I'm using the RSS feeds and not the Tpeg feeds, you only get a title, description and the severity of the report. In the future I'd like to look into using the Tpeg feeds to display more information back to the user.
I'd also like to add a "Report an Incident" section that replicates this page: /travelnews/report/
The application could post data back to the ´óÏó´«Ã½ via HTTP or email. This could also be done with SMS as Flash Lite can send a message via the mobile phones existing SMS functionality.
Newsbot takes a ´óÏó´«Ã½ RSS feed (or any RSS feed) and turns it into speech read out by an animated avatar.
Ours chatbots can already read RSS feeds to answer questions like "what is the news/weather" but we thought it would be great to shrink-wrap the RSS reading part to create vritual newscasters.
The next stage of development would be to allow users to drill down to individual stories and have those read out too.
Just a thought, lots of cool stuff with maps flying around and i'm loving them. I've recently become addicted to geotagging my flickr pictures and thought this could be a smart way to geo tag the news as an experiment. I've seen conversations about extracting data from feeds to do this or getting journo's to add the info but what about letting the public have a stab at this? (well the public who can add greasemonkey scripts to firefox...)
So.
Take stories from ´óÏó´«Ã½ News and let people tag the news to locations on a google map. A story can appear in multiple areas of the country and a tagger can add a simple description when tagging a story to a location eg. "first stabbing took place here" or "Cheese rolling here".
Not sure how the passing of time would work and what to do when stories die but hey it's an idea, could be intresting?
I get bored with TV news, constantly repeating the same blurb over and over - but only certain stories make the headlines, and then only if they are dramatic, such as Iraq. I am very keen to keep up with modern history & current affairs by following these stories - after the "News" hubbub has died down.
Like, what is happening in Chechen? Liberia? Afghanistan? Georgia? Now.
I'm fed up with personal details about celebs & pop stars. I want to understand how stories evolve after the press has lost interest.
Can this be done on a webfeed?
The ´óÏó´«Ã½ Podcast Trial running throughout 2005 has now got an index page from which you can subscribe to indivdual feeds taken from any one of the radio programmes participating. Highlights include , In Our Time, Mark Kermode's Film Reviews and the main interview [8:10] from the .
See
Access to the TV/radio schedules would be great. I'm thinking of a firefox side panel (or WAP/mobile viewer for tonights tv) with what's on / next for my channel selection from RT. A url returning xml with various levels of detail (now / next, next 3 hours, links etc) would be ideal.
The RT website is much better than I used to be, but the content wants to be set free..
Figure out a way to use the technology in touchgraph to visualize the news and other content connected with the news. Allow searches to reshape/enrich the visualization.
I think the "listen again" part of the website is great (apart from the restricted bandwidth on the audio). I think what would be even better is to present all the audio on a single page. You could have a timeline along the top, going from 12 am to 12 am and all the channels down the side. Each programme could be represented as divisions on the bars going across the page, similar to the listings pages at radiotimes.com.
Building on some of the previous prototypes using Google Maps, I've built a system that can take almost any geographic data and overlay it on a map.
It currently displays ´óÏó´«Ã½ travel news, ´óÏó´«Ã½ London traffic cams, local weather, geotagged Flickr photos and UK Gatso speed cameras. But I'll be adding more soon!
I built this site as an experiment is using Google Maps and XMLHttpRequest. It provides maps of traffic, public transport events and London cctv feeds. The data is updated hourly. I would like to fix some of it's shortcomings. My programming skills are stong but my html and design skill are a little basic.
The purpose of this is to show the top news stories from a specified period of time. However, it only has data from 27/05/05 onwards.
It can output in RSS, HTML or plain text formats, and the time period can be easily changed, as well as the number of news articles shown. As an example, the RSS output for the top stories for the past week is at https://backstage.min-data.co.uk/topstories/?o=rss .
One of the troubles with it was working out how to rank the importance of the news articles. In the end I went for a simple system, where each time the url appeared in the top 3 items of the main ´óÏó´«Ã½ news feed, it got a certain number of points (5 for being the top item, 3 for the 2nd and 1 for being 3rd). It was pointed out that the urls may change, as well as the titles and descriptions, but working out which one is which really is too much work, so I decided that they were suitably different to be classed as different news items.
We've had some amazing prototypes built by our users that remix ´óÏó´«Ã½ feeds with .
Some of them have been spotted by , and Nat Torkington has written a great article about the various projects.
We've been discussing these prototypes a lot on the – so if you're not signed up, you're missing out on some great idea-exchange.
Here's a quick round up of some of the mapping prototypes:
It's a prototype for an online version of the 'Missing Word' Round from 'Have I Got News For You'. It takes 100 most recent headlines from the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Backstage RSS news feed, updated every 15 minutes. The missing words are selected semi-randomly by the server, so may not have quite the comic potential of the TV version. PHP isn't renowned for its sense of humour.
The feeds are filtered for certain keywords, since death, murder and destruction aren't really that funny. The odd one may still slip through...
Because it is based on an RSS feed, there's the potential for 'guest publications' - just like the show. That is, assuming 'Knitting Machine World', 'Sea Shell Quarterly' or 'Centre Parting Monthly' publish an RSS version of their headlines!
To-Do
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