Visiting Roly Keating, and the wonders of Twitter

I’ll admit things have been a bit quite around here for a week or so but lots has been going on in the background and I’ve got some interesting blog posts queued up: one delayed while I wait for approval from its subject, which I suppose is the kind of thing you get at a [...]

Twittering the Shadow Culture Minister

Here’s a quick note to log the speech on public service broadcasting made by shadow culture minister Jeremy Hunt that I attended yesterday morning at the LSE.
I twittered throughout. I like twittering live events but mostly like to provide a comic commentary (“get a load of that syrup” kind of thing) because Twiitter obviously doesn’t [...]

Handling Ross/Brand in an open way

How should the BBC have handled this incident? As your semi-official BBC openness monitor I think it appropriate that I chip in with some practical tips for dealing with maverick multi-million pound talent.
1. Let people listen to the show: Some people think the Daily Mail waited nearly a week to go large on the Ross/Brand [...]

Mark Friend, Controller A&Mi

In a really interesting hour with Mark last week we covered a lot of ground but two really important issues, both of which I think are pretty newsworthy: access to attention data and the BBC’s speech radio archive.
Attention data
The BBC is a lot like Tesco: continually accumulating useful data about you and your habits. And, like [...]

Electric Proms – some questions

I’ve been watching the Electric Proms on the TV (click play above to see one of them). The whole thing turns out to be a very fine thing: another example of what you get when you crunch together the BBC’s guaranteed audience with unparalleled cultural clout and production values to die for: would any artist [...]

Writing up a fascinating chat …

 
…with Mark Friend about attention data, syndication and opening the BBC’s huge archive of speech radio.

Ryan Morrison, a BBC new media…

…producer based in Jersey suggests on the internal Yammer system that the corporation’s libel course be published on the web site. He’s weary of deleting comments from the general public that are potentially libelous and thinks that encouraging people to read the BBC’s staff libel course might help…

Quick accidental chat with Sophie Walpole…

…about cataloguing the BBC’s efforts at openness—using something like the ‘programmes ontology‘ developed by Tom Scott? I want to leave behind something that might have some formal value: an organised catalogue of assets, content, code and activities that have been explicitly shared with the outside world would be handy wouldn’t it?

What is this Common Platform then?

Interesting chat in the Broadcast Centre cafeteria with Lucy Hooberman from BBC Research & Innovation (which is part of Future Media & Technology). She’s not an engineer: she’s one of the people in the organisation responsible for stimulating innovation and change. We talked about Common Platform. She’s been wondering what it is. Specifically, is it:

A [...]

Now to rescue the print media

Emily Bell in yesterday’s Media Guardian wonders why the print media should expect to escape the present unpleasantness unscathed, what with banks falling around our ears and all that. She thinks it’s quite likely we’ll lose a handful of national papers: The Mirror and The Express both being vulnerable.
A conversation in a corridor here at [...]