Innovation in Software

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.

It’s taken a while to get there, but the move is now done and dusted. Even better the blog (which you’re reading right now), actually looks like a blog all of a sudden. I never really got on with the Hemingway theme I’d used since starting this site with its 2-stories-side-by-side-on-the-front-page, so it’s nice to be using my own cut/variation on ‘Simpla’ credited in the site footer.

I’ve thrown up an article or two into each of the main sections in the main site to test the platform more than anything else. The goal of course is to get people out there interested in throwing articles up, but I’ll be putting up about 2-3 articles a day for the next two or three months until it starts getting a bit full. Please, if you want to get involved at any point, you can register and dive in – it’s an open Wiki and it’s meant to be used by anybody interested in software development. The Research and WEBINT areas will develop a Wikipedia-esque tone about them, and virtually no software topic or company is out of scope, so it should be easy to get started: if you’re not into the Development side of things, I don’t want to leave you out.

I’m also really pleased that I can now start writing ‘proper’ articles here again without the underlying niggles bothering me. The plan is to write 10-15 short articles a week, and 1-2 longer more ‘in-depth’ articles for the next month or two. The focus is going to be on innovation going on within the industry, providing updates on how the ‘experiment’ at the main site develops and the creative process when trying to come up with new ideas for software.

It strikes me that these days every software product people think of – whether open source or not – is effectively a business in its own right. I’m very tempted to do a series of articles on entrepreneurship but I think that given my own business is so highly experimental at this stage it may be I’m not the best person to hand out advice.

I’ve still got to decide how I’m going to handle conversations better within all this. The comments section on this blog is not sufficient for the variety of content I’m dealing with on the wiki, and commenting on wikis has always sucked. I think in the next week or three it’ll be time to look at the issue of dedicated forums or a mailing list.

This is a new beginning for Vagueware and it really feels like I’m starting from scratch all over again in a lot of ways, so I’m feeling a bit nervous about everything – it’s going to take a lot of work to get to where I’m aiming.

If you have any thoughts, please feel free to leave them in the comments.