BBC Trust Blows It

The bad news:

we recognise and share the strength of feeling on platform neutrality. We do not consider it practicable to offer catch-up television over the internet on a platform neutral basis immediately. We consider it preferable to allow the BBC to provide value to a majority of users now rather than to wait until full platform neutrality can be achieved before providing catch-up television. We still require platform neutrality for seven-day catch-up television over the internet within a reasonable timeframe, but we have decided not to specify a deadline for achieving this. To counter-balance this, the Trust will take a more active role in holding the Executive to account on the issue by auditing its progress every six months.

Six-monthly audit, eh? Heavy - that's really going to make a difference.

The good news:

In our consultation, members of the public expressed strong feeling in large numbers that seven-day catch-up television over the internet should be available to consumers who are not using Microsoft software. 81 per cent (5,804) said this was very important and a further 5 per cent (355) said it was important. Such was the strength of feeling that respondents did not appreciate, or did not consider it relevant, that the Trust was proposing that the BBC achieves platform neutrality within a specified period. Any period of excluding other operating systems was apparently considered unacceptable by our public respondents.

OK, we lost, but it looks like a lot of us cared enough to act: that's good, not least for the future.

La vida es una lucha.

Last Chance to Save the BBC from DRM

Today is the deadline for submitting a response to the BBC's plans for on-demand services. Full story here.

BBC Gets Some Things - Like YouTube

Elsewhere, I've criticised the BBC for its all-too eager embrace of Windows DRM. But in some respects, some of its top people understand the new dynamics:

The BBC has struck a content deal with YouTube, the web's most popular video sharing website, owned by Google.

...

Mr Highfield said the BBC would not be hunting down all BBC-copyrighted clips already uploaded by YouTube members - although it would reserve the right to swap poor quality clips with the real thing, or to have content removed that infringed other people's copyright, like sport, or that had been edited or altered in a way that would damage the BBC's brand.

"We don't want to be overzealous, a lot of the material on YouTube is good promotional content for us," he said.

Help the Fight for an Open BBC

I seem to be writing lots of posts asking people for help with petitions and wotnot: sorry, here's another one. This time its about the BBC’s on-demand proposals.

I've only skim-read through the documents - the full proposals and the provisional conclusions - but it's clear there are two very important issues of openness involved. One is the obvious problem of DRM, the other, related, is support for non-Microsoft platforms. I suspect that it will be impossible to get people to do without the former at the moment, but I'm reasonably optimistic we can get them to commit to support for other platforms.

I urge anyone eligible - which essentially means fee-paying Brits - to comment before the deadline of March 28.

The BBC's Other Virtual World

You could argue that radio is already a particular kind of virtual world - one created by the wetware between your ears on the basis of the code downloaded by your radio (television clearly isn't a virtual world, because there's little processing or no degrees of freedom involved). But not content with that, the BBC is apparently launching another one:

A virtual world which children can inhabit and interact with is being planned by the BBC.

CBBC, the channel for 7-12 year olds, said it would allow digitally literate children the access to characters and resources they had come to expect.

Users would be able to build an online presence, known as an avatar, then create and share content.

The youth of today....

Open-Mouthed...

...I am, if this "sea-change" turns out to be true (a sceptic of the UK Government writes):

The way the government makes its vast amounts of data available to the public could be about to change.

It has decided to make access to a database of UK laws completely free for the public to access and re-use.

It marks a "sea-change" in the way government information becomes available to the public, a senior civil servant has told the BBC News website.

Please, please, please, please, please.

BBC + MS = DRM?

Bad, bad BBC:

The BBC has signed an agreement with Microsoft to explore ways of developing its digital services.

The only thing that Microsoft understands is control; if the BBC teams up with Bill Gates' company in any way, we can kiss goodbye to our televisual heritage.

CNN's Citizen Media is the Message

The news that CNN is now soliciting user-generated stories and content - rather as the BBC has been doing for a while - is important not so much for what will result, but for the message it sends. Even if the user-generated content turns out to be nugatory, the fact that CNN is jumping on this bandwagon gives the latter more impetus, which can't be a bad thing in terms of re-inventing media.

A Time There Was

I've noted before how mashups depend upon the existence of some kind of mesh; typically this is geographical (which is why so many mashups draw on Google Earth), but time is another obvious option. A good example of how that might be applied can be seen in the new site The Time When.

The idea is beautifully simple: anyone can write short descriptions of why certain dates are important to them. Alongside the entries, there is information about what happened that day, who the monarch was and so on. But as Antony Mayfield astutely observes, you could go much further:

the application could be used in all sorts of ways - I guess some bright spark there is already mashing it up with Google Earth or some such so the memories can start to hang out in space as well as time, as it were

adding extra dimensions to the mesh.

It's worth pointing out that this idea comes from the BBC, which is fast emerging as a real hotbed of creativity when it comes to applying Web 2.0-ish technologies. And if you want to see want kind of stuff people put in their entries, you could always try this.

A Quantum Mechanic Writes

How could anyone fail to love a project called Dirac? It's named after one of the most modest of quantum mechanics' pioneers. He once said that he was fortunate enough to have found himself amidst the Golden Age of quantum mechanics, when even second-rate minds could make first-rate discoveries.

If you're uncertain what this all means in practice, try this:
Dirac is a video codec that provides general-purpose video compression and decompression tools comparable with state-of-the-art systems.

All distributed under an open source licence by those kind people at the BBC.

More "Piracy" Poppycock

The Business Software Alliance has published another of its misleading propaganda efforts directed against the threat of so-called "piracy". It claims that a quarter of the software used in the UK is pirated. Now, I'd be willing to bet that this "research" doesn't take into account the growing use of free software, which can't be pirated, by definition. There are two ways in which this would affect the the 25% figure.

One, is that including free software reduces proportionately the share of closed software, which therefore makes the level of "piracy" go down too. Similarly, if any open source software is included in the overall total, so-called "pirate" copies may well include copies of free software that have not been bought - which are therefore perfectly legal, and should not be included in the "piracy" figure.

Aside from these methodological issues, there is an even bigger problem with the BSA document. From the BBC report on the story:

The impact of pirated software was felt very widely, she said, as it took cash out of the UK's technology culture and stunted money available for innovation.

"This is a serious issue. It's not affecting just businesses but everyone down the line," she said.

She added that reducing piracy significantly would mean a boost for the UK economy.

This is of course, complete poppycock and balderdash. Any extra money obtained would go straight into Bill Gates' pockets, and would do very little for the local economy. Indeed, cynics might argue that "piracy" is actually good for the UK's economy, since it reduce imports and hence outflows of cash. Personally, though, I'd just like more people to use free software so that the entire pseudo-issue of "piracy" disappeared.

Google Strives for More Openness...

...says the BBC.

And about bloomin' time too: the cognitive dissonance between what the company enables externally - opening up all kinds of conversations, both human- and machine-based - and what the company enforces internally, like clamping down hard on staff who blog, is becoming downright painful.

Indeed, it will be hard to believe that Google really gets it until it starts to practice what millions of its customers already know: that the future belongs to openness.

Audacious, Adorable Auntie

I've been a big fan of the BBC ever since I first saw Doctor Who - and I mean since I first saw the very first episode of the first Doctor Who (yes, I know, I know). Today, life is inconceivable without the backdrop of Radio 3 from early morning until late at night. And so it's good to see such a fine institution being so, well, good and fine.

Its latest move as it dances on the brink of opening up the vast audio-visual thesaurus hidden in the vaults is to make its Programme Catalogue freely available for searches (and how appropriate that an institution that almost defines Britishness should use two of the words that almost define the British variant of English for this).

It's not complete (it only has one entry for me, but I'm sure I took part in a deeply obscure BBC TV programme about computers several geological time-periods ago); it's not completely free (the licence essentially limits you to personal, non-commercial use). But it's a completely wonderful start, and a magnificent contribution to open knowledge.

Update: Apparently, the dinky little graphics that pepper the results are called sparklines (via Nodalpoint.org).

Music to My Ears

There's a fascinating story over on BBC News, nominally about Madonna, but really about a new commons. It reports on how concerts are becoming ever-more important to rock stars, as sales of their recordings diminish.

The latter fact may be due to the Internet; but whether it is or not, the future seems to be one where the digital stuff - the song - is essentially free, and the stars make their dosh from the analogue side - concerts. So here we have pop songs as a new commons, where the creators of that commons make a more than decent living.

Two quotations in particular are worth noting. One is from Alan Krueger, an economist, who provides the figures to back up this idea:

Only four of the top 35 income-earners made more money from recordings than live concerts. For the top 35 artists as a whole, income from touring exceeded income from record sales by a ratio of 7.5 to one in 2002.

The other is from the ever-perceptive David Bowie:

music itself is going to become like running water or electricity

Now that's music to my ears.

Wikipedia, Science and Peer Review

Last week, Wendy Grossman wrote a wise article about how all those making a fuss over Wikipedia's inaccuracies and lack of accountability forget that precisely the same charges were levelled against the Web when it rose to prominence around ten years ago. (Parenthetically, it's interesting to note more generally how Wikipedia is in some sense a Web 2.0 recapitulation of those early Web 1.0 days - a heady if untidy attempt to encompass great swathes of human knowledge).

It seems to me that another story, on BBC News, which considered the fate of the peer review process in the wake of Dr Hwang Woo-suk's faked stem cell papers, is relevant here.

Many of Wikipedia's critics claim that everything would be fine if only it added some rigorous peer review to the process, just like science does when papers are published. But as the BBC item explains, the peer review process employed by Science magazine (where most of Hwang's apparently ground-breaking papers appeared) signally failed to spot that Hwang's papers were frauds (it also explains why, in any case, this is probably asking too much of peer review).

These recent problems with scientific peer review re-inforce Grossman's point about Wikipedia: that we should stop worrying about the inaccuracies and instead learn how to live with them, just as we do for the Web. Far better to develop a critical sense that submits all results - wherever they come from - to a minimum level of scrutiny.

Open Beats Patent

One of the themes these postings hope to explore is the way in which openness, in all its forms, can function as an antidote to the worst excesses of the current system of intellectual property. In particular, freely-available knowledge is one way to mitigate the patent system, which has problems all around the world, but is in a particularly flawed state in the US.

As an example, BBC News has an interesting story about how India is creating a database of materials relating to traditional medicine in order to stymie attempts by companies (particularly US ones) to patent this age-old knowledge.

What is particularly galling is that patenting derives its name from the requirement to make a novel and undescribed invention "patent"; but in the case of knowledge that has been available to a society for centuries, the idea that someone (particularly an outsider to this society) who makes something already known "patent" in this way suddenly gains exclusive rights to a hitherto common good is profoundly offensive to anyone with any respect for ethics - or logic.

And Here Is The (Open) News...

The BBC has unveiled its long-awaited Open News Archive. Actually, it's made some 80 news reports available - not quite an "open news archive". But to be fair, it's a start, and potentially the beginning of something quite bold.

There are plenty of restrictions, including the fact that the content is only available to Internet users within the UK. But as the BBC itself says, this is just a pilot. Moreover, the issues that need resolving - notably those to do with "rights clearance" - are by no means trivial. Kudos to the BBC for at least trying. Like the open access book project reported below, this is yet another indication of which way the (open) wind is blowing....