Innovation in Software

No, not Common Gateway Interface (although that is a powerful and mighty beast that created a new economy), I mean Computer Generated Imagery. Specifically, the tricks a creative person can get up to with a few days in Normandy, a camera, some friends, and a truck load of software.

Watch:

See? Clever, no?

Tonight, the BBC finally got around to airing the RTS Huw Weldon Memorial Lecture recorded in September. The speaker this year was Anthony Lilley talking on issues relating to social media and ironically given the subject of his talk, no online archive of the talk appears to be available. For all the embracing of “The Me in Media” – as the talk was titled – and the power of the network, we on the network are not allowed to see it.

No matter. The point, the thesis, the element, is quite communicable: we the audience are now in charge. What’s more, Lilley makes a compelling argument that this isn’t a sudden and new development, but something that happened the moment the audience started to appear on screen from quiz shows to our scribbles being sent to Tony Hart.

The power of networked media is considerable, and it’s pretty odd to see a bunch of network TV executives try and grasp the content that they, their ideas, their employers and their money don’t matter much any more. Within 10 years, Lilley hinted that networks like UKTV which mostly show repeats will essentially be pointless with the advent of VoD and PVR systems being widespread. Within 20 years the people being asked to pay the license fee will have no real memory of broadcast media. Within 30 years… who knows?

I was minded of a certain cartoon and then thought about how the BBC Innovation Labs is on again this year. I wonder how daring the BBC and others want us to be. Personally, I think they’re just outright scared.

I don’t know if I’m one of the lucky few first people to get access, but I’ve just received my PIN number for the BBC Archive Trial which places some of the content of the BBC Archives online.

Right now, there are around 1,000 pieces of content up in the site, which the BBC approximate to be around “0.01% of the total material available” in their archives. They’ve provided a mixture of video and audio content, and obviously focused on some of the more memorable items. The abdication of King Edward VIII is in there, as is British coverage of the Apollo moon landings.

The good news is that it all works with OS X, and the layout is pretty straight-forward and simple. These screen shots were done in Firefox on OS X, and the video playback on my machine was using Flip4Mac WMV codec for Quicktime, but Real Player was an option if you wanted it.

It really would be better for most people though if they embedded a Flash player in there – it’s how people understand video on the web these days, and they’re going to get confused with codecs and plug-ins.

A few years ago I was talking around about what would happen when archivists at the TV networks got to grips with Video on Demand (VoD), and I think this is an important first baby-step in the right direction. I personally think the Freeview switch-over debate is a load of noise, given nobody will want to watch TV coming over an aerial 20 years from now: VoD is the future, and the networks need to work out how they are going to serve that World if they want to justify continued existence.

Interestingly, they’re already dealing with some of the more complex issues – they have included content that some people may find offensive, because they believe that this should be as much about the historical value as it is the entertainment value. Personally I’m not interested in seeing a guy black-up and do a minstrel routine, but I’m glad that if I wanted to grab that out of the archive for historical research purposes, I could.

This might be a weakness though. For a lot of the Web 2.0 crowd, this might all be a bit “dated” and “fuddy-duddy”. I’m fascinated by it, but I’m also fascinated by Enlightenment-era art, 16th-century choral music, Rosseau and theology – I’m not a mass audience kind of guy. I listen to Radio 3 & 4, I read Steinbeck for fun and not because I have to. The BBC might have made an error in asking me for my opinion here…

There is also the question of how things have been organised. For 1,000 pieces of content, ‘Programmes’, ‘People’ and ‘Collections’ combined with a search box might be enough for people to find what they need. What happens after the trial when they want to put 100,000 pieces of content in or even 1 million? They’re going to need to start working now on tag clouds, collaborative filtering and other technologies “long tail” websites use to help people help themselves.

The fact you can save programmes to “your page” is handy, but the power of that needs strengthening, and is a good place to start around classification, the social aspects and even collaborative filtering of content (i.e. “People who liked this, also liked…”).

It might be nice to rate content, review it and discuss it as well. Right now it feels a bit like a PVR with a small playback screen loaded with old content – they need to get the web parts of it right in the long term.

What this trial should allow the BBC to do is work out how the underlying technology works, then work out how to use the power of it being a website and then get the other 99.99% of the content up and online – if they use this trial just to look at how people view the content, rather than try and work out how to get people to interact with the content in new ways, it’ll be a waste of time in my opinion.

I received an invitation to Hack Day in London this weekend. I’ve been mulling it over since I applied, and I’ve made the decision I won’t be making the trip to London. I thought I’d explain here what those reasons are. I’m not suggesting anybody else not go, I just thought I’d like to explain my own reasons: if you’re going, I hope you have a great time and I can’t wait to see what you produce.

1. It’s a marketing event

   I made this comment on a mailing list the other week, and one correspondent expressed surprise at this statement. In his own words it was “just a chance to hang out with other geeks”. I know where he is coming from, but the thing is, it’s not. They are shoving Yahoo! and BBC Backstage APIs down people’s throats in return for free food and drink. They’re entitled to do that, of course. However, their terms and conditions (which have to be signed on entry to the hall) state that you may not in any way be “disparaging towards the event sponsors”. They are very clearly keeping the reigns on the event and it belongs to them. It’s like somebody has told a traditional academic conference organiser about Web 2.0 and they’ve got confused…

   Like it or not, this is going to be more about selling APIs to developers than it is developers being able to do what they want. That’s up to the organisers, but I’m not sure I can handle 2 days in Alexandra Palace just for a marketing gig – no matter how cool a marketing gig it is. If they were running something like BarCamp and wanted to run a side-competition, it’d be a different proposition: it’d be the developer’s event, not the sponsor’s. I don’t begrudge them wanting something for their marketing money, I just don’t want – on careful reflection – to let them think I support their business or services just because I attended.

2. Yahoo!

   People who know me well, know I can be a bit of a political animal at times. The simple truth is Yahoo! are doing things that make me feel sick and as I’ve explained before I don’t think they’re doing much to fix the underlying problems.

   Given that I already have a problem with this being a marketing gig, the fact that I now consider it to be a marketing gig for a company doing as much harm in the World as Yahoo! just compounds my objections to being involved. I’ve boycotted all Yahoo! services for two years now: I would be a hypocrite for taking their beer and pizza and telling the World how swell their APIs are (which, incidentally, compared to Google’s they’re not).

   I did consider doing something a tad naughty: I was going to build an application that took a non-Yahoo! API of historical share prices, and show on the dateline of the graph a mapping of news stories from the BBC Backstage News Search API to see correlation. You’d be able to graphically see if certain news stories had an impact on share price, in other words.

   My demo would have been Yahoo’s share price correlated with stories on dissidents being locked up in Chinese jails.

   I expect it would have been a demonstration of depressing indifference however. I might still spend my weekend doing this project, but doing it from the comfort of home and not under fear of that “disparaging towards the sponsors” clause in the T&Cs (section 9, paragraph “c” if you care).

3. It’s in London

   I suspect I’ll get flamed more for this one than I will any other point. However, I want to let you in on a little secret:

   All the interesting web and digital media stuff going on in the UK right now is in the North.

   Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds: they’ve all got interesting people doing interesting things. I know because I’ve met some of the people involved and I’m constantly impressed by the ideas I see coming out of the Northern Quarter and the SMEs in the North in general.

   You know who is going to be at an event in London? Mostly Londoners. That means large, corporate agency types. That’s fine, they’re happy, they’re great at what they do, and it might be interesting to see what their thinking is these days. However I’m thinking they’re going to be somewhere behind where the North is right now – large agencies can’t afford to be right on the edge, because that’s not where their customer base want them to be. The North is small companies doing stuff that is edgier because they have to get noticed. In my book, risk-taking and being prepared to fail gets merit.

   This isn’t just me being North-vs-South-ist here, I watch the industry pretty carefully and I really do think that the leading edge stuff in the UK right now, whilst still behind the US, seems to be happening in my backyard. Most of the cool kids aren’t going to London. I know it takes bravery for Yahoo! UK (London based) and the BBC (still mostly London based – for now at least), to think about running an event “up North”, but I think it would have been a better event.

4. My laptop is fux0red

   And I can’t be bothered getting another one sorted out before Friday. I could have gone out and picked up something from one of the Mancunian resellers tomorrow, and be up and ready for the event, but I’ve got more interesting things to do than try and get a development environment onto fresh hardware for a one-off.

And that’s it really. They might seem like stupid reasons to some people, but they all swing things in favour of staying in Manchester. I was really looking forward to meeting up with people down there and have a laugh, but I’d rather wait until a more interesting and local event happens around here. One friend suggests that by Saturday morning I’ll be regretting not going, but I think I would have regretted going a little more.

UPDATE: I received an e-mail from Tom Coates involved in the organisation of the Hack Day event. The important points are that he’s had the T&C’s changed so you can now disparage the sponsors. Please feel free to do so. He also explained the London location as being because it’s a “pan-European event” and apparently London is a better transport hub. That to me just suggests he doesn’t know a lot about Manchester, alas.

I’m still not going, but he tells me that means the ticket gets opened up for somebody else who might appreciate the huffing and puffing of the Yahoo! UK staff protesting that they’re lovely people really.

Meanwhile, I decided to go to the pub this Saturday and invite some friends. We’re going to call it AntiHackDay and that link takes you to the wiki page where we work out what to do with our afternoon. So, if you’re in Manchester, can’t make it to Hack Day (or weren’t invited), sign up.