大象传媒

We've mentioned before, but Steve Hermann - editor 大象传媒 News Interactive - has just blogged about it.

It comes at a time when the 大象传媒 is constantly being challenged to be more open about it's processes and editorial proposition, but Steve makes some good points in his post;

"what it mostly reveals is the minute-to-minute editorial processes of 24-hour online news, where stories are written, published, then updated and added to for as long as details continue to emerge."

He then goes on to ask if we - as the 大象传媒 - should be providing this service. Outside of the editorial questions that raises; does anyone want to see that a 大象传媒 journalist has edited a spelling mistake? What would this mean for us technically? How much resource should be made available for this service? Should we just allow other people to monitor us via the feeds and apis that we can / do make available?

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Taken from Chris

This site shows how 鈥渋n touch鈥� the 大象传媒 News editorial team are with the general public using a simple percentage figure (see below), determined by comparing the top 10 headlines on the 大象传媒 News front page with the 10 most popular (most read) stories on the 大象传媒 News web site. Whilst the 大象传媒 editorial team should never strive to match the two lists and achieve 100% (as they are employed after all to decide what they think is most newsworthy) it is an interesting way to look at the data and see what really interests the general public. Having an overarching figure for this data means we can track how in touch the 大象传媒 are over time very easily.

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We're considering changing the Fabulous but somewhat bland Backstage T-shirts. Yes they're great schwag but we can certainly do better.

So we thought it would be great if we'd ask you guys what you think is the best T-shirt schwag you've seen or owned and what witty slogan or design should be included to make a even better backstage T-shirt?

Let us know what you think...

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Having started with a simple RSS importer for Second Life I've now put together a scrolling RSS and text display. This first one has 10 "character" elements, with each element supporting the characters A-Z,0-9 and about a dozen common symbols. Scroll rate is user configurable, but running at about 0.5 second per move works well. There is currently an LED or Arial font, I may do others - but users can upload their own. Text message or URL of RSS feed are set by chat commands.

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To coincide with the release of Firefox 2, I've taken advantage of the new 'Live Text' Microsummaries feature, to show what's on air on 大象传媒 Radio Stations. I hope this will lead people to find other uses for this technology to grab info off the 大象传媒 website. Of course, it would be great ultimately; if this were to encourage the 大象传媒 to offer their own Microsummaries and save us all 'chasing the goalpoasts.' Enjoy!

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Using Mike's location OPML (see https://mike260.dyndns.org/~mikef/countries.opml) and the 大象传媒 weather feeds, the following experimental IM bots should now be running:

MSN: bbcweather@hotmail.co.uk
AIM: bbcweather
Jabber/GTalk: bbcweather@menti.net

They're very simple - add them as a new contact and say hello, and take it from there...

It's done in Perl, using an open-source framework ( https://www.duncanlamb.com/sdba/) and the various CPAN modules that provide connectivity to the individual IM protocols.

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With backstage running a , there has never been a better time to get into writing widgets. But the chance of winning 'a well known media player' should not be the only reason why you want to create a widget!

In the last few months I have written a couple of : a to demonstrate the and .

One of the main reasons why these projects were developed as widgets is that they allow you to make client-side cross-domain XMLHttpRequest calls. The Last.fm widget makes calls to two different domains and therefore cannot be hosted as a web page. Widgets can also make calls to control installed applications, such as streaming audio through Real Player, and display OS information such as laptop battery life or WLAN coverage. In essence widgets provide a sandbox with fewer restrictions than web browsers but they do have their disadvantages.

Widgets are downloaded applications and therefore any updates which you make means users need to download a new version - you do not have control like you do a web page. There are a number of popular widget engines which are all different - Yahoo! Widgets are defined with XML and JavaScript while Apple Dashboard widgets use Safari as their engine and are defined using HTML and JavaScript. Windows Vista incorporates its own Gadgets system which, no doubt, will be different again.

I have only had experience in developing Yahoo! Widgets (originally Konfabulator). I chose Yahoo! because they are (in theory at least) cross-platform. XML defines the widget in terms of visual components (text, image etc.) which have their own built-in events, specified using JavaScript. You can also use JavaScript to define and change the visual components. I guess writing a widget is similar to writing a (sorry, but I can't think a better way to describe it) 'Web 2.0' web page - the vast majority of the page is coded in JavaScript, especially when the visual components are flexible and dependent on remote data. Remote communication is very simple and should be familiar; the XMLHttpRequest object has the same methods and properties as found in web browsers. In writing the Last.fm widget I decided to write a separate class which allocated and released XMLHttpRequest objects in order for multiple calls to be made asynchronously.

Overall I think widgets are a good alternative to web pages and traditional applications, but you should only develop one if the circumstances don't allow the same operations to be carried out in a web page or if a widget will provide a better user experience.

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and

Interesting...

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Yes the rumours are true...

There is a 大象传媒 Backstage Christmas Party being planned for Saturday 9th December in London.

Rather than host it ourselves and clash with everyone else's parties. We decided that it would be very fitting to backstage if we collaborated together some of the best groups and communities in London. Then got them under one roof to share in the Christmas Party...

Seemed like a crazy idea, but I would like to introduce our fantastic partners for the Christmas Bash,

And our sponsors for the night,

We have an excellent (Confirmed) all to ourselves deep in the area of Moorgate and Citypoint.

So please and keep a note in your calendar, as Saturday 9th December looks to be a fantastic night to be in London.

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Yes the moment you've all ...

After the and ...

大象传媒 Weather feeds are now available to be used in all Backstage prototypes and ideas under .

Links to the weather feeds can be found on all 5 day forecast pages

The URL scheme for the Feeds is.
https://feeds.bbc.co.uk/weather/feeds/rss/{world|id}/{location_id}.xml

For example,

There are 7379 RSS 2.0 weather feeds with geo:lat/long tags for lots of mashing up. And updates occur twice a day.

Kathryn from 大象传媒 Weather is asking for feedback

We are planning more feeds, and improvements to these ones as well (e.g. dynamic generation of feeds, which will allow us to offer different flavours such as Atom; additional content such as tide times and current observations (Met Office willing); additional semantic mark-up). I look forward to hearing your comments, concerns and ideas

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Yes the moment you've all ...

After the and ...

大象传媒 Weather feeds are now available to be used in all Backstage prototypes and ideas under .

Links to the weather feeds can be found on all 5 day forecast pages

The URL scheme for the Feeds is.
https://feeds.bbc.co.uk/weather/feeds/rss/{world|id}/{location_id}.xml

For example,
https://feeds.bbc.co.uk/weather/feeds/rss/5day/id/2315.xml https://feeds.bbc.co.uk/weather/feeds/rss/5day/world/4567.xml

There are 7379 RSS 2.0 weather feeds with geo:lat/long tags for lots of mashing up. And updates occur twice a day.

Kathryn from 大象传媒 Weather is asking for feedback

We are planning more feeds, and improvements to these ones as well (e.g. dynamic generation of feeds, which will allow us to offer different flavours such as Atom; additional content such as tide times and current observations (Met Office willing); additional semantic mark-up).

I look forward to hearing your comments, concerns and ideas

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With all this talk of widgets I thought you might like a sneak peek of our 大象传媒 Radio Player + Last.fm Yahoo! widget

Last.fm is a social network around your listening habits. By creating and updating your profile with the songs you have listened to, Last.fm holds a record of your listening and offers musical and social recommendations. There are plugins to help you keep your profile up-to-date as you listen to iTunes, Winamp etc. but you can't update your profile while listening to the radio鈥� until now.

Our experimental / prototype / beta (sorry, but we can't guarantee the quality of service) widget asks you to sign in to your Last.fm account and choose a 大象传媒 Radio station (only Radio 1, Radio 2, 6 Music and 1Xtra are available at the moment). The currently playing song is retrieved and is added to your profile (unless you decide to add songs manually) and other recommended artists are displayed.

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is the first person to put the newly released on a Google map. The ideas like it have come up quite a

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These are subscribable iCals, built from the 大象传媒s 7day schedule data. They're organised up by channel/radio-station, grouping, and genre.
They're only tested with Apple's iCal, and are quite likely broken for other apps.

Notes:
- When you subscribe, please don't tell iCal to refresh more than once per day
- Try changing the 'Show X hours at a time' in your iCal preferences for a clearer view
- The genre information is a bit patchy, and the grouping info is *really* patchy, so don't expect these cals to be comprehensive.
- iCal events show up in spotlight, so you can use it to search the tv/radio schedules

Stuff I would like to fix:
- Check and fix compatability with apps other than iCal
- Basic support for non-大象传媒 channels
- Allow users to define and subscribe to customised cals containing their choice of programs and series.

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The is in full swing and as mentioned earlier, we are going to have a bash to celebrate the winner of the Backstage Widget contest. The date was set for Monday 6th November but now we have a great venue for the event. Digress City is close to Moorgate station. So count this as your official invite to the Backstage Widget bash.

See you all there...

Time: 7pm - 11pm
Date: Monday 6th November
Venue: Digress City
Address: City Point, 1 Ropemaker Street, London,
Postcode:
Nearest Station: Moorgate
Cost: Free
Upcoming: https://upcoming.org/event/117566

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I've noticed a lot of interest in the discussion groups about SMS applications. This script converts an SMS (text message) to a valid RSS 2.0 feed. It's developed using a free textback service offered by www.aql.co.uk .
A properly formatted SMS(see instructions) sent to 07766 40 41 42 is read by the aql server. It's then converted to a HTTP $_GET request which sends the phone number and message to a MySQL database via a PHP script on my server. You can then call an RSS feed to see the message at https://www.blears.net/vox/feed/rss.php
There are loads of possible developer uses for this including, blogs, message boards and voting type aps.

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From

Radio 1 launched their redesigned site last night. What's most exciting for me, apart from its excellent new design and implementation, is the inclusion of the SMS cloud (in the panel at the bottom of the page). As listeners send in text messages from their mobile phones the cloud shows the incoming words waxing and waning throughout the day. It's particularly exciting because it's the first time that my R&D team at R&Mi have taken something all the way from idea to prototype to live.

Not only the SMS clouds but Radio 1 have launched a new set of RSS feeds with blog, message board, podcast and genre feeds.

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Mario has been doing more development work in Second Life and decided to show the popularity of certain TV shows on Technorati in Second Life. His feeling would be that you could glance at what's getting the most amount of buzz on Technorati and then watch it in Second Life with your friends.

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What would be really handy for people like myself with newish mobile phones (or PDAs) that have RSS readers onboard (Sony Ericsson K800i in my case) if for there to be RSS feeds linking to the PDA and Low Resolution pages as well as the "Hi" ones. Ideally these would be included in the regular pages as the normal application/rss links. In the meantime there is a quick demo at https://kswindells.34sp.com/bbc.php/X/Y Where X is "n" for UK News or "s" for Sport and Y is the category - e.g. rugby_league or motorsport__formula_one (the / between motorsport and formula_one is replaced by two underscores) This simply takes the 大象传媒 RSS feeds and reparses them for the low res versions. Ideally this would also work for the PDA version but the URLs are structured differently. Source Code: https://kswindells.34sp.com/bbc.phpi

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Hello, It would be great to have the day's weather (temperature and forecast) sent to my mobile early in the morning as I'm getting ready for work. At the moment I tend to look outside of my 6th floor flat window to see how I should dress for the day (rain, snow, sun, etc). Unfortunately I leave rather early and it's already dark out, so I can't see what the weather is like until I walk out the door and it's too late to change on days when it's raining, for example! Or sometimes it looks nice and sunny, but it's actually rather breezy as well and then I'm cold all day! With this idea, if I received my text message in the morning when I woke up, I could be better prepared for the day.

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A page that tells people what's on in their favourite radio slots this week.

Problem
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My favourite programs are broadcast in 大象传媒 Radio 4's Monday-Friday 8pm slot. When I lived in Europe, all I had to do was tune in to Radio 4 at 8pm and chances are I'd hear something good. Super-easy. Now I live in a different time zone that doesn't let me tune in to Radio 4 at 8pm GMT. So I listen via the Radio 4 website. But the concept of 'slots' isn't reflected in the organisation of 大象传媒 Radio websites; nowhere on the Radio 4 website is there a link to "listen to the 8pm slot". The audio file is on the website somewhere, but I have to dig around to find it.

Solution
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It envisage a simple search interface where you define your slots and are given a (bookmarkable) search results page that lists this week's programing for those slots, with links to the audio file when available. This would make me happy! I think it would make other people happy too, because radio stations have this concept of 'slots' that isn't replicated in the online world. It would make it easier for people to "tune in" to their favourite slot, at the time that suits them.

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This widget was born out of frustration with travel delays in the UK. Now, there is a quick and easy way to help solve that problem. Built for Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger, our widget uses data supplied from backstage.bbc.co.uk and allows you to see the travel problems in either your region or by your mode of transport (road, rail, sea, air and cycling). The list you see is sorted by severity and can be filtered, so the most important travel news for you is at the top. To see more information on an item, just click it.

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This script is a mash-up of the Google maps API and 大象传媒 travel news RSS feeds to create a live online map of traffic and travel news in the UK. If you click on the map markers it shows you the travel problem. I may improve it by changing the marker colour codes for severity of traffic problem. The page uses php to read the feeds and then dynamically produce the javascript for the map.

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Matthew Somerville has worked on a few prototypes for navigating the huge archive of 大象传媒 News Stories over the past few months.

Matthew also has a massive archive of all the 大象传媒 News stories and there changes going back over a year which he keeps offline because of the amount of disk space it requires. But he uses subsets of it to create these prototypes.

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Another Second Life prototype this time by Kosso.

In his own words.

Using old skool Flash version 5 actionscript and Quicktime's abillity to embed Flash that old, I was able to pull togther something I had been meaning to try for a long time. PHP on the server side reads the RSS feeds then throws back old skool flashvars to the Flash.

I was amazed to see the typer effect also working, but I had to use old methods there too. NO interactivity is available through Flash in SL. But it's a start. It reminds me of the huge 'Maiden' newsscreens I built for 大象传媒 News when I still worked there.

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Having rebooted the backstage.bbc.co.uk server, we are keen to see some more prototypes and ideas.

So we feel its time for a backstage.bbc.co.uk competition, we are offering you the opportunity to get very creative and build prototypes that blow us all away. But this time we are going to set the final output type to be a . Plus we have arguably the best "geek gadget" prizes for the creator of the winning prototype.

The winner of the competition will receive a super geeky but ever-so cool . The winner will also be invited to the 大象传媒 to discuss their widget and take a tour of Television Centre and the Media Village as guests of the backstage.bbc.co.uk team.

We also have a , a well known media player and a few mystery prizes to give away as runners-up and special prizes.

You must include a in the widget, but your welcome to mix our content with anyone else's under the . There is also no restriction on widget, gadget engine.

We are looking for widgets that break the box. Things which may not be the most stylish or polished but are creative and do clever things. Here's some widgets we have running on our machines or we like the idea of...

The competition closes on Wednesday 1st of November, and the winners will be announced at a special winter backstage.bbc.co.uk event which will happen on Monday 6th November. More details about that event to follow soon... But please do start submitting your and we will start putting them up on the site.

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Mario Menti has created a Now and Next Google gadget which you can stick on your own site now Google has added the functionality to embed their gadgets in . It displays not only whats on TV and Next, but also what's also on the Radio.

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is a button for IE that takes in the latest RSS feeds from the 大象传媒 and updates in real-time. It could be improved with the addition of graphics. I've tried to avoid "tickers" which can distract, but it would be nice to be able to highlight a new article since they last looked.

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Mood Memories is built using and attempts to classify People's Memories as good, bad or neutral.

Its written using Python and is the same concept as his but applied to memories.

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has created a rolling ticker for 大象传媒 News in Second Life. The display basically cycles through the latest 10 news items.

Good stuff, we're looking forward to seeing more Second Life mashups in the future.

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The good ship Backstage is back on course and setting a new path forward into uncharter lands. We know the good ship has holes which need attention, but we are on board now and looking at some needed changes.

This is a good time to talk about who we are...

Matthew Cashmore - Development Producer

Matthew re-joins the 大象传媒 from UBC Media, where he worked as the Interactive Content Manager - launching and selling, amongst other things Podcasts left right and centre! As such he developed a working commercial model for podcasting, and produced the podcasts for The Times, The Sun, The Telegraph and the major record labels, in fact his MySpace page still says he does (he likes the emails he get's from the girls I think). He's spoken at many conferences about the benefits of podcasting, and a more open community.

Before that he was the Development Producer for 大象传媒 English Regions - launching the Where I Live sites, and before that the Client Side Developer for English Regions, primarily dealing with the launch and coding of the Travel News site, the England homepages and the 大象传媒 Local Radio sites.

Ian Forrester - Senior Producer

I've moved from the 大象传媒 World Service New Media team to Backstage where I was a software engineer mainly working with XML technologies like XSL. In the past I have launched RSS feeds across the World Service language sites, helped the World Service to start blogging and make sense of things like Semantic Mark-up, Podcasting, Social Media.

My past includes working in the fields of information design, interaction design and even teaching at degree and post degree levels. I have a keen interest in transparency and openness across everything which technology touches. But I'm mostly known for all those social events in London like Geekdinners, BarCampLondon and hopefully Backstage with time.

We have many great things planned for backstage and the wider 大象传媒 community. We aim to keep you all informed with our decisions and plans, so look out for announcements soon.

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