From the Mailing list,
Personally I'm waiting for the time when we can pause a program and scroll over the items on-screen and it'll tell us what they are and where we can buy them, like when Ed Norton describes his apartment at the beginning of Fight Club.
Is there some kind of organisational structure of prototypes and ideas similar to sourceforge or 43things.com that can create more of a group around specific projects? Could there be?
Following the Clock which was created by the guys at NHK. I thought it would be a really good idea if we did some kind of clock based on the old BBC school clocks which most of remember. Jem actually found a site which has a load of old BBC clocks in Flash form. I'm sure it wouldn't be too difficult to repurpose one of the clocks or build one using SVG or something else.
Anyone interested in building one?
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...
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 http://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 BBC 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: http://kswindells.34sp.com/bbc.phpi
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.
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 BBC 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 BBC 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.
It is beyond me but could someone do a Yahoo widget for BBC Radio Now and Next.
The URL points to a widget for the five terrestrial TV Channels using puretelly.com data which is perfect.
I have tried various RSS feeds in some RSS readers but it does not seem to work for me.
Some sort of ability to select the radio stations displayed would be a good feature.....
Instead of the BBC sharing its information, how about doing it the other way around. Create an application that will save local weather conditions back to the BBC centre, based on data gathering equipment at the users home/office. For example Maplin used to do a small kit that had a wind speed, wind direction and temperature sensors, that connected to a standard PC, and there are other companies that produce similar hardware. It could become a BBC school project and given that many people now have broadband and computers that stay on for much of the day (eg Media Centre PC's), it could become a really massive & worldwide project, as the only input a local user would need to provide would be a location. Enough sensors within a given location would allow for errors & mistakes.
I'm an ICT Coordinator without the time to develop many ideas. Heres my main ones:
Link up - countryfile - bbc local websites - google maps - gardeners world and add photos of local wild flowers to a google map, with flower information such as name, flowering date, herbal uses e.t.c have a sub group of experts to check details and build up a national database of wildflowers and their distribution. Link up with wildflower charities for the experts - should all be driven by ease of use for public
to add their own photos.
Idea 2 - i'm sure there's been plenty of suggestions like this. But i would like radio shows available as podcasts across the board. i.e any show on any bbc network, The podcast would be signed up rss, bbc can promote email feedback on program as part of the package. This gives you detailed information about your programs and thier reception and the listeners and license payers : accessability to your archived radio content away from a computer! yes why not let the rest of the world have it too, for free?, it would promote your brand in all the right ways!
G.Wilkinson@Valence.kent.sch.uk
ICT Coordinator Valence school
Any body else think it would be a good idea for the bbc to have an RSS feed for the UK Singles chart (Top 40) or if any body wants to build an aggregator for the radio 1 webpage to produce a feed???
I haven't actually got any firm details on this idea yet but just wanted to [git mode] put it in the bath and see if it floats [/end git mode].
In principle every section of every BBC Where I Live site (specifically the England ones) could output an rss feed.
With masses of content on everything from faith events to band profiles would it be possible to combine this with geo positioning to create some kind of rich app giving you information on all sorts of things happening in your location on a map?
Or something along those lines?
Forgot to add (and improved on the idea within seconds of clicking submit).
I mentioned band profiles - one of the biggest parts of a Where I Live site is the Unsigned Band section.
If you could take an RSS feed of the band profiles, the gig reviews and gig previews you could create a really sexy rich app that takes a google map, overlays it with flickr images, the data from the unsigned bands section on the Where I Live site and info on gigs in the area from sites like Radio 1, 6music and other music services - could even take in audio clips of gigs recorded by radio one or the local station.
It would be nice if a feed was available to see all the current football fixtures for eg. the upcoming week but based on leagues rather than individual clubs. Currently there doesn't seem to be a feed available for this from the fixtures page, but rather you have to go on a per-club basis...
i'm pretty fed up with constant BAD NEWS! however there is a simple solution, "GOOD NEWS".
i think that the bbc should dedicate 5 minutes at least to a short news feed at an appropriate time for max audience, showing the days good news. Its very simple and could easily be done on a lopw budget. I'm sure it would givew everyone a lift. please contact me for the full concept.
thankyou.
I integrated Wordnet, AIML, openNLP parser to write a simple Chatbot at MSN. But the Chatbot just wait for conversation, if I can automatic send some News title when one news happen. This will be more interesting!
I had a idea about BBC News's channel using these feeds... The link is a prototype. It only works with IE and Windows (for the correct fonts).
I was watching BBC News 24 this week and there was a feature about sudden snow on Bodmin Moor, Cornwall. One woman said "there was nothing on the news about it", and it occurred to me that if she was watching News 24, she was probably right.
News 24 has a variety of Astons (graphics), but I was thinking about the scrolling bar at the bottom of the screen. I don't know how integrated News 24 and BBC Online are I don't know if the "scroller" is driven from one of the backstage RSS feeds, but it should be!
This grey/blue visual bar with white text is added somewhere to the studio output by some box of tricks - usually a PC.
News 24 doesn't have the regional variations that BBC ONE does - it has always been distributed identically to satellite, cable and Freeview.
Sadly, as all dishes point at the same satellite, regionalisation is unfeasible.
On Freeview, the channel's programs are transmitted in the same digital terrestrial multiplex that has a national or regional versions of BBC ONE on Freeview. It the similar on cable.
So, my idea is to program a "box of tricks" to overlay a customized RSS-fed scroller for each of the nations (Wales, Scotland, NI) and English regional variations (for Birmingham, Manchester, Hull, Leeds, Nottingham, Norwich, Cambridge, Bristol, Tunbridge Wells, Southampton, Plymouth, Newcastle, Oxford, London and the Channel Islands).
So you would see your own local news, sport and weather in vision. Then follow with the current headlines, sport etc.
So the 6 million Freeview homes could get their local news first - with snow
warnings where necessary!
There are many databases on the internet with lists of what songs are on what CD, which we can download when we rip to MP3's. However, these days we are moving away from the idea of albums and getting back to listening to personalised playlists of individual songs. Since the BBC must have one of the best music libraries in the world, it would be possible for the BBC to host a master index of every song ever published, and give it a unique number like an ISBN number on a book. If everyone used the same index, it would become much easier to find and buy a recording of a specific track. It would become the music equivilant of the British Library and the Congressional Library.
I would like to be able to use the listen again function through the windows media center front end
Is it possible to get a feed for all enviromental news. Or perhaps just a feed of http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/default.stm
A lot of the time I would just like to quickly view what it online NOW and what's going to be on next, at a glance. Like the teletext service.
An RSS feed would be perfect for this, particularly if I could integrate it with my personal google homepage.
Example:
BBC1: Now: 20:00 - 21:00 - The News
BBC1 Next: 21:00 - 23:00 - Film: A Random Film
BBC2: Now:
BBC2: Next:
etc...
The BBC regularly advertise free tickets for audiences to attend recordings of various TV and radio shows. These are currently advertised at http://www.bbc.co.uk/whatson/tickets/ - a page which I'm always forgetting to visit.
What's more, once word of a popular show gets around, tickets get snapped up quickly. Apparently some Little Britain tickets recently went in as little as 4 hours.
There are also seperate pages for the 3 BBC Nations (Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland) listing other recordings. These are linked to from the main page in the What's On section.
The idea? A pretty simple one. RSS feeds of the above, listing each recording as a seperate item. The feed would then contain a link to more information about the show, and details of how to apply for tickets.
There are so many dictionaries out there on the net - all giving you the meaning of a word.
My idea is to use the BBC data to show people how the word they search is used in conversation or writing. You can even group this by years to see how the meaning of the word has changed over time - context and grammer.
This will be a more useful service for people using dictionaries - e.g. I like the word, but how and where can I use it correctly.
I hope i finish my prototype in time ... I doubt it - just finished the dictionary ;)
If there were an easy way to find out CRIDs, such as a bookmarklet that generated a popup search screen, then this would enable them to be freely spread around in the same way that URIs are.
This is the scenario. I want to blog about last night's Spooks. I click on the button in my browser toolbar and up pops a dialog with fields for programme title and a rough timeframe ("in the last week"). It returns a URI which is copied to the clipboard.
I can then paste this in my blog post. I can make it a link to del.icio.us or Technorati so that I can tag the programme. Blog search tools could find who else is talking about the same series or programme.
It would also facilitate the linking of programme/series websites to the episodes. The page for last night's Spooks could embed it's CRID so that it takes ownership of that programme.
If I had the time I'd do a bit of Perl to do the searching. Once you've got the CRID then the rest is up to the public.
Why not have links to Google Earth from news stories, the weather etc? I know there are real-time Weather forecasts available already but they tend to be radar overlays of rain or dodgy graphics - not an isobar in sight :0)
If I had the time and money I would put myself on a course which would give me the technical skills to actually build any ideas I had...
I have had a fantastic idea, which may help to re-engage people with politics.
The BBC NEWS website should provide a section in its Politics area to explain in plain, simple, and easily understandable english, each new Act of Parliament as and when it is given Royal Assent.
This would help the general british public to look up and understand what new laws mean for them, their businesses and the country as a whole.
I think it would be immensely popular, and helpful for lots of people!
I just read an article on the wired website about the boom in people downloading audio only versions of tv programs. The BBC already provides audio description for many programmes, wouldn't this provide a wider use of this useful resource.
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,68503,00.html
As documented in my blog post (see the idea URL), I would like to see a TV/Radio programme planner where a user selects 'favourite' programmes to produce a personalised schedule.
The schedule could then be accessible from the web site or syndicated using the iCalendar standard into Apple's iCal, Mozilla Sunbird or other compatible calendars (Outlook?).
When subscribing to an entire TV series, the iCalendar event can be configured with the correct recurrence for future planning. Additionally, last-minute changes to the schedule would be reflected in the calendar application.
I've looked briefly into the schedule feeds recently made available, and they appear to suffice for an implementation along these lines. In my brief look, I wasn't able to tell if it provides enough information to properly represent the entire runs of a series of programmes.
I'd love to have a crack at this myself, but finding time for off-the-cuff ideas like this is something I'm terrible at, so if someone else fancies having a crack, you'll have my eternal respect!
Cheers,
Ben
If I want to go out in NE London, as I live there I'd like to see what's on near to where I live as I cycle everywhere and I'm lazy! So how about listing the different strands of the bbc site on a google map by date and post code. So I can look up theatre, on 6th August and see what's on where. Or acoustic music on 25th December in Dartford, when I see my parents at Crimbo. Or political/spiritual/environmental meetings in October, plotting where and when. So basically making a screen like http://www.bbc.co.uk/london/content/articles/2005/05/31/yourmanor_hackney_feature.shtml
more usable, plotting their locations, what's on and when.
Even though I've just been looking for the BBC What's On Events pages only to find out it's been closed down. So I thought I'd pop it up here to see if anyone else would like to pick this up and run with it! Cheers.
I'm looking at using the BBC TV feeds to provide an enhanced Freeview EPG.
I use the Topfield 5800 Freeview PVR which has the ability for the user to add files to it. Using a custom EPG display app (one of many) I can upload data in the correct format to enhance or enrich the Freeview EPG.
In it's most basic form, my idea is a converter from the XML to the format the Toppy takes for it's EPG.
On top of that, with more time, a Web based app could also be made to provide browsing of the listings and timer setting on any web browser at any time. With the right setup, these could then be transferred automatically. Effectively allowing you to program the PVR remotely from anywhere in the world.
We would like to add BBC news to our free GlobeAssistant. With the GlobeAssistant we can show data, photos etc at the right location when surfing over the GoogleGlobe site. It would be easy for us to also interpret your RSS feeds and join these messages with the other data
Introduction/Background:
As an accessibility consultant, I tried to tackle the BBC Backstage competition from an access viewpoint. The idea being for a visually impaired user (who may struggle with BBC news stories) to be able to have podcasts of the BBC News stories on his/her MP3 player.
Process:
I'm no techie, and don't really do jargon, and so I'll keep this simple. (If I was a techie I'd be making this - not describing it.)
An assumption has been made that the user has an MP3 player and podcasting software. Here goes:
The feed is provided ready-made in podcast form This is done by grabbing the original RSS feed and processing it with a text-to-voice software package.
The voice data (in Podcast form) is then placed back into a feed ready for the user.
The user selects his/her feed type (what news he/she wants)
The news is then 'read out' to the user using their MP3 player.
Simple! The user signs up once and can access news aurally everyday on the way to work etc.
Options:
Varying voices?
Randomising news?
Pros:
Easy once set up (setup shouldn't be difficult anyway)
Gives another option for impaired users to access BBC News.
Cons:
Could it compete with radio?
Voice software would need to be sourced.
(backstage.bbc.co.uk editor: This sounds very similar to an existing prototype, Rebotocast)
My idea is so simple that it does not need a long description. Though, when implemented it might give you valuable information about your viewers' watching habits.
Simply make a Java or Flash applet looking like an ordinary program chart of a TV channel. But, let the viewer drag 'n drop different programmes to different time slots to create their most optimal programming - suited to their lifestyle and personal schedule. It should just be made simple enough so that it would be simple drag 'n drops - few minutes and you're done.
Viewers could be motivated to use the applet by making it as 'game-like' as possible or by offering prizes. Also the sole fact that giving out their opinion might affect how the programming is made in the future might be enough of a motivator. Many people would love an opportunity to even possibly affect to the TV programming of their favourite channel. The applet is also positive in matter of company image as it gives out the image of the channel really listening to their viewers.
Benefit to BBC? Well, another piece of code could interpret the statistics and find patterns to create simple information about your viewers and how they see the programming to suit their personal schedule. This would create enormous amounts of practically free, useful information. Just ask for the viewer's age and zip code for example, and there you go.
I live in Finland and have had this idea for some time now, but your competition was the first one to actually write it down to a sensible forum. Hope you find it useful as well.
Regards,
Erik Lyden
Surely I must not be the only person reading BBC Backstage on a Windows computer? I've used Konfabulator for some time now, and it might be very useful to make widgets for this platform, in order to reach a wider audience. The kind of widgets I am thinking of are 1 Traffic Widgets - using the BBC JamCams and Traffic feeds 2 News Feeds - just like the very neat one for Dashboard 3 Radio Player - again, like the one for Dashboard 4 Weather - easy to use as Konfabulator's one is, I like others would prefer to see something in the vein of the BBC Weather service, espescially as I see the new system as a vast improvement.
The thing to bear in mind is that over 90% of the world's computers run Windows, and therefore Dashboard Widgets are irrelevant to the majority of users.
I'm learning about widget-creation as I write this, so some time this summer I might give it a go.
A map UI for sports weather information.
E.g. Sailing: For known weather station locations/Tidal locations have map pointers with graphical tidal and weather information.
With known weather and location preferences, this could extend to highlighting optimal conditions.
The basic concept is to turn everyone into a news gatherer even down to the local street level. News is mostly dominated by a few media organisations and there are few truly independent agencies as they all have share holders or other outside influences.
Google searches of news sites, searchs of bbc sites with location search terms eg village would show official stories for that area. Residents could submit news stories and they could be added into the feeds. News stories could be parsed for similarity so once there are at least 2 independent versions of an event then it starts to have some truth to it. The end product would be a community site with local news produced by the bbc and local news produced by the local people which could include local tales and local comment about events in the area.
How often do you think, "Oh, there's an interesting development. I should follow that thread!" but if you have not got the time to scan the News thoroughly everyday, you miss follow-up articles. 'Follow That Story' enables users to track the development of a story that caught their attention. It aims in a similar direction as "Story of a Story" and "No News?" in this section.
All articles on BBC News have links to related articles, but these (naturally) only point to older articles. When you stumble on an older article it is very difficult to see how that story developed. The idea is to use the existing 'backward' links harvested from the new articles in the RSS feed to build a tree or network of related articles extending into the future. For each article, 'forward' links would be displayed, leading the user to articles that link to the current article.
Places are emotional, but how can this emotion be represented?
One way is to consider the sum of news articles relating to an area as an indication of a places current emotion.
So for this idea to work, news articles would need to be rated as either good or bad and be associated with a particular area, perhaps a county. Obviously there are certain problems with such a classification.
However ideally, a google map overlay could be created to indicate the current emotional state of, say, each individual county.
This would lead to stats such as the happiest county today or the saddest county this year etc etc.
In this sense the UK could be described by an emotional landscape, represented by a map.
Not only news but weather reports could also contribute to the emotional state of an area.
other problem - each good or bad news report would need to be measured for severity or importance etc to give a good measure of emotional state of an area.
Its a bit of a gimmick idea, but might be cool.
anyway im enjoying reading all the ideas and prototypes, this is a great site. Keep it up.
In the current security situation in UK (and abroad) an indirect consequence of each attack is that millions of people call or text each other to ask if their friends or family are ok, and to reassure that they're ok themselves. Some mobile networks have proved to be vulnerable to such increased traffic. Furthermore it's a hassle calling round. The obvious solution to this increasingly frequent hour or two of anxiety is to centralise these call cascades. In outline the idea is that users create circles of friends and family online via a facility provided by BBC. Each user creates in effect an alerts account, within which is depicted the status of each of their chosen friends and family. When a security incident is signalled then the system goes live. Each user only has to txt either a predetermined ok signal, or might write a special message which could appear online too. This txt goes to the central alert centre, which updates the status of this caller in all the us! er accounts in which he/she is featured. The reassurance requirement for those who can not / don't want to get online is supplied by a programme (perhaps user defined) that first of all alerts the user themselves by txt if they have not responded within 30 mins; secondly, between hours +1-3, txts a (designated) set of users (friends and family) that X is not yet 'OK' on the system; finally, perhaps, (again user defined) hour +4, the system notifies the police incident team. The idea might, with mobile company support, be restricted to within a certain area of an incident, city-wide for example “ i.e. only users whose phones are registering on mobile systems with an affected area will go live on the alerts system. With their cooperation too all monies from txts going out on the system could be donated toward victims of such violence. BBC's role would be to provide up to the minute news coverage alongside the user's alert account page showing the status of all the! ir designated friends and family. The BBC could also perhaps i! nclude b rief alert summaries with the 'reminder' txts at +30mins, and +1hour. A button on all BBC webpages would appear as soon as an alert was declared. This button, and indeed the server support required, could indeed be supported by any number of large news outlets. Hope that's clear. Ideally this kind of service would not be necessary, nor would you hope it will be needed again: but... It is also appropriate to answer any kind of large scale public alert / event, and could even be adapted for public convenience at large events etc. Such a service would gain widespread subscription if it had at least the initial support of an organisation like BBC.
It's good that you can listen to music online, such as Mixing
It, Jazz on 3 and Booby Friction and Nihal etc. but these are
long programmes and cover much content. It would be good if
separate tracks could be catergorized - including the
relevant talking - into something that means the listener
could listen to excerpts from several programmes in one go.
For instance I heard a wonderful 4 year old track from
Panjabi MC, which would go with some of the acoustic tracks
on Mixing It, aswell as some of the singer/songwriter
influenced house heard on Peter Tong's programme and the more
ambient influenced stuff on Jazz On 3. Obviously Late
Junction covers a wide range as do the various Radio1 and 2
programmes on Saturday and Sunday. Afterall who has got time
to listen to every programme that may include tracks you may
like. If you could, for example, choose from the previous
week's BBC radio something like : acoustic guitar/dance
beats/singer/songwriter ; all these stylistically si! milar
tracks could come up. This means you could have a web BBC
radio compilation radio show along the lines of the numerous
compilations people buy (such as 'Cafe Del Mar').
What would I do to improve it? I have plenty of time but no
money so the question is hyperthetical.
A background application which alerts the user to the appearance of any programs in the schedule which match a set of criteria that they have previously defined e.g.
- All Westerns starring Clint Eastwood.
- Any program concerning parenting
Once alerted to the matching program the user can choose to schedule a recording which is set up via a message sent to their IP-connected PVR.
How about a rolling archive of the 7 day listing data including URLs to the listen again content? Then a program/webapp offering the next 7 days' schedule could also offer historic schedules with a link to listen again to any available program. I'm forever narrowly missing programmes, so direct access to listen again from the schedule on my desktop would be great.
When listing the election results (either on BBCi online or interactive TV), the results could be listed in order declared on the same page. For instance, sub page 1 would have Sunderland South, sub page 2 Sunderland North, sub page 3 Houghton and so on
how about a OSX widget for ball by ball cricket updates
If the feed
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/sport1/shared/bsp/hi/cricket/in_vision/html/in_vision1.stm
stays the same I'm sure someone with some programming skill could make a cool one, maybe in the shape of the ashes urn :-)
I think Douglas Adams' vision of H2G2 is great, but it doesn't do any more than Wikipedia. With the BBC running the site there is a real opportunity for the next generation of search engine/encyclopedia. The BBC has vast archives on a whole host of topics - nature, holidays, food, documentaries etc., all of which are increadibly well researched and presented. Either edit them down or use them straight as i-Podcasts for people who want to look things up! It would be a fantastic use of the BBCs resources.
Many people use a media player with a library that can handle both streaming content and local media (windows media player or winamp being good examples).
Unfortunately, it's difficult to integrate the BBC's content into those libraries because much of it is streamed in the proprietary real player format.
How about streaming in mp3 and creating plugins for the major players so that we can browse and search the BBC's (excellent) content from within our preferred players? It would make a change from the American stuff that's bundled with most of the players.
(If anyone is interested, my own workaround is to use the BBC urls published on http://dave.org.uk/streams/ oaste them into winamp and then bookmark them- a pain, but it works)
The BBC makes use of numerous Skinkers 'desktop' applications, most notably to provide BBC Radio information to viewers.
We would like to make this more widely available to non-Windows users based on the feeds provided on the BBC site. We feel this is best served by making a browser-based viewer and alert system for the information. This would work cross-platform and remove the need to install software on machines (such as work PCs).
The work for this prototype has already been completed, and was launched on chrismoyles.co.uk to provide access to the Radio One feed, however it was removed at the request of the BBC.
I think it's an application that fits in well with the thinking behind backstage, and it's a real shame that we are not able to show our work.
Thanks,
Chris Harris.
Is there an easy way to collect names (e.g. Aceh, Depp, Wonka,), new words (e.g. PDA, blog), etc., used on the BBC website, and repackage them as a "Lexicon Update" for commonly used word processing and email software?
By using a combination of (i) the "See Also's" sidebar on BBC News stories and (ii) "link:" searches in Google, build a tool to navigate the story of a story.
Imlement it by adding a top frame that gives navigation in time. See how a story forks into several as you go forward in time and (this is icing on the cake) display this graphically.
This should be useful to researchers of all sorts
Just taking a look at the new TV listing RSS feed based on the TV anytime format.
Seems pretty detailed but I would like to see as much information as possible rather than a basic overview, what I would be looking for is to implement a system not dissimilar to TiVo in the US. Users are able to enter actors/actresses that they are interested in (TiVo then records any programs it finds them in) .
I was thinking more along the lines of desktop alerts. This information can be matched to any level of extraction allowed by the bbc. (genres, even year etc)
It would be great to apply some of the 'ethnoclassification' (dreadful term) ideas that flickr and del.icio.us use to BBC News. The only way I can see this working is if you give the users a reason to bother: by providing them with a personal page containing the news articles they've collected, suggestions for new ones based on the tags they've used before, and any contributions they've made to Have Your Say.
Just thought it would be neat if there was access to calendaring information in the form of say an iCalendar ics file and/or an RSS feed of what was happening when.
This would be especially useful for sporting/news events. i.e. Wimbledon starts then, Honours list published then, Jackson trial to end then etc.
Perhaps this already exists in some form and I missed it but it'd be neat to have an idea of what might clash when planning events and also to encourage people to view/use BBC sites at the appropriate time so they don't miss things they want to watch/listen to/find out about.
Simon
Just a thought, lots of cool stuff with maps flying around and i'm loving them. I've recently become addicted to geotagging my flickr pictures http://www.geobloggers.com/ and thought this could be a smart way to geo tag the news as an experiment. I've seen conversations about extracting data from feeds to do this or getting journo's to add the info but what about letting the public have a stab at this? (well the public who can add greasemonkey scripts to firefox...)
So.
Take stories from BBC News and let people tag the news to locations on a google map. A story can appear in multiple areas of the country and a tagger can add a simple description when tagging a story to a location eg. "first stabbing took place here" or "Cheese rolling here".
Not sure how the passing of time would work and what to do when stories die but hey it's an idea, could be intresting?
I get bored with TV news, constantly repeating the same blurb over and over - but only certain stories make the headlines, and then only if they are dramatic, such as Iraq. I am very keen to keep up with modern history & current affairs by following these stories - after the "News" hubbub has died down.
Like, what is happening in Chechen? Liberia? Afghanistan? Georgia? Now.
I'm fed up with personal details about celebs & pop stars. I want to understand how stories evolve after the press has lost interest.
Can this be done on a webfeed?
Access to the TV/radio schedules would be great. I'm thinking of a firefox side panel (or WAP/mobile viewer for tonights tv) with what's on / next for my channel selection from RT. A url returning xml with various levels of detail (now / next, next 3 hours, links etc) would be ideal.
The RT website is much better than I used to be, but the content wants to be set free..
Figure out a way to use the technology in touchgraph to visualize the news and other content connected with the news. Allow searches to reshape/enrich the visualization.
I think the "listen again" part of the website is great (apart from the restricted bandwidth on the audio). I think what would be even better is to present all the audio on a single page. You could have a timeline along the top, going from 12 am to 12 am and all the channels down the side. Each programme could be represented as divisions on the bars going across the page, similar to the listings pages at radiotimes.com.
Continue reading "Listen Again at a glance"
My idea: less generic RSS, more domain-specific XML (as with the travel feeds). This would open up worlds of potential for more impressive apps.
Not as high-tech as most of the other ideas on here, but how about utilising the white space down the right of my monitor? I can't be the only one running at 1280x1024, and using it for more content, as I mocked up, or even an integrated video player would be great!
It would be nice if fresh stories could be highlighted. The effect would be subtle and possibly fade out after one or two seconds.
I check the news a couple times during the day. If a new story is added in the afternoon - drawing attention to it would be good. Link color changes already let me know which stories I have seen. This highlighting method would direct my eye to things that are fresh. The very reason I am visitng a second time during the day.
To enhance the sense of community, and allow BBC News readers to guage story quality and relevance before they even click the link - you might want to track unique page views and make the information visible.
You could show popularity by highlighting the story links. If a story is more popular, it is more intensely marked. These highlight marks...
Continue reading "Page View Popularity"
The first stage of this process would allow users to make a story, topic, writer, or celebrity a favorite. This favored status would be tracked to allow a reader to find the story again (boring). In the future, stories that relate to the users favorites would be highlighted for just a few seconds when a page is loaded. If a second related story is given the favorite status, a more active form of highlighting is used for future related stories.
If the user wants to share their favorites with the community great things begin to happen. At the end of an article...
Continue reading "Like Minded Linking"
This idea mixes in a little Flickr and del.icio.us functionality.
News images within a series of stories are related. Either the images were taken by a single photographer over the course of several days, or several different photographers take images of a single event. This idea is about the viewpoint of image takers and how the user/reader decides to classify images.
Continue reading "News Photo Networking"
Can bbc.co.uk make a calendar of upcoming news events, sports events, State events, government & parliamentary events e.t.c. for online users to see what to look forward to on the BBC. This should include events as far into the future as possible.
Nokia smartphones now ship with a Real Audio player and 3G is easily fast enough to support audio streaming but currently no bbc .ram files play on these phones. So currently I can't catch up on my favourite shows on my way home from work which would be fantastic.
Continue reading "Streaming radio to 3G phones"
I think we should develop a way for people to customize the pages and rss feeds with search strings. The page/feed displays only what the user has selected.
I suppose we could store the search queries in a cookie instead of on a server. This is a very simple project which I might try to do. If you have seen the Google News customization you will see what I mean... but this is a little different.
I'd like to see BBC offer keyword-enabled RSS feeds for the best customization, which is the same thing that Yahoo already does for their news aggregate, but I'd like to get content from just BBC news feeds based on keywords.
For example, a RSS feed for "cricket" would show only those stories that relate to that keyword.
If you'd like to go one up on Yahoo, you could offer simple parameters to modify the RSS feed to make it even more personal.
For example, you could enable users to get just those stories that mention the keyword in the title, or x times in content, or have the keyword in title + content, and so on and so forth.
Also, there could be something like a "~" parameter, which could give feeds on related fields, if there would be no news stories based on the original keyword.
How about an Opensearch compatible query and results API from the Beeb, so I can add a BBC news tab to my A9 (or alternative) syndicated/federated search page?
Using the travel feeds, give it a route to/from home/work (or use two postcodes and maps.google.co.uk) and it gives you RSS/SMS/email alerts when there are traffic issues on the route at specified times of day.
Today Programme Listen Again page as an RSS feed - shortened titles ("Jack Straw on Attorney General's memo"?) linking to clip. Is that technically doable?
I myself find that the bbc news website has a mass of information and stories available - but this is a common theme where we are being overloaded with information.
I do not know about other people, but I tend to just read the news in a few specific narrow areas - but sifting through what interests me and what I find is irrelevant is time consuming.
Continue reading "Interest Specific Feed"
I would like to use the increasing integration of SatNav technologies, linked to BBC News to enable people to find the latest news about places they were travelling to or through. Imagine, you go away for the weekend to a town in the country and you get a news story about the places you pass; or you walk past Parliament and pick up the latest politics news, or walk through Leicester Square and get the latest film reviews. The best way to do this would be to have a tag on news stories that identified the GPS co-ordinates of the area they should cover, plus the distance they should 'radiate' from that point. In city centres, news wouldn't radiate far (to avoid overload) but in villages, it could cover 5 or 10 square miles.
I'd love to enrich my experiences of travelling (worldwide) by getting the latest football news when I went into a stadium or Spanish news when I went to Madrid for the weekend.
I have RDS in my car that knows the stations which maybe broadcasting useful information to my locallity, I'm suggesting RDS for the Web updating every set amount of minutes.
Continue reading "RDS for the Web"
It used to be the practise, at least during the eighties when I worked at one of the BBCs Newspaper Cuttings Libraries, to classify all stories according to subject. Is there any attempt to classify BBC web content in this way?
If someone comes to our site (coursefinder.org.uk) looking for a GCSE in German on Tyneside, I would like to point them at all the 'BBC Learning' resources pertaining to GCSEs and German. I spend a lot of time looking for links :) If content were classified or tagged...
One idea would be that you could use the learndirect subject classification system, which has a fairly long pedigree, to classify BBC Learning Content. So content on German Language would be coded "FK.335" German Language or just 'FK" Language
Course Subject Classifications can be found at :- http://www.learndirect-advice.co.uk/provider/standardsandclassifications/classpage/
Build a fully customisable RSS news reader - similar to the idea by Charlie Pinder that allows a constantly updating set of news, weather, sport, business, travel, etc. This could be done by content specific devices - or by using a postcode style search for regional news and weather.
Combine the functionality of the BBC Road News with a route planner to get the traffic problems along your specific route.
A reader for digital TV on Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005.
(see http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/mediacenter/default.mspx)
The interface works with the remote control input of XPMCE to read BBC News stories. It needs more work to correctly show the full text of the story. It would be great if there were RSS feeds to BBC radio player and BBC news video feeds so they could be selected from MCE directly. A Radio interface would be very useful as XPMCE doesn't support DAB or DTT radio.
Whilst it is possible to view the score of cricket matches in real time, it is very difficult to get at this data programatically.
Providing a customisable RSS feed, or XML-RPC server access to real-time scores would allow us to write small apps to display the data in customised ways.
It would be great with OS X widgets!
I would like to see a BBC News overlay for Google Maps. This would also interact with the directions facility so tha tyou could see various events, problems etc in the area you intend to visit. The possibilities are endless.
For the search API, I would encourage the BBC to consider the SRW/U information retrieval standard, as a way of making their service as interoperable as possible.
Create a 'live forum', discussing the days news events, like the web equivalent of a radio phone in. Here's how you could do it: Have a page where the news is updated by RSS. Each story could then have a link to its own discussion page.
In which create a SQL database submission form (in Ruby or PHP
for example) this would mean you could delete any offensive messages. The submission form would use SAJAX to automatically post to, and update the discussion page, giving the appearance of a live discussion, and the postings will be saved.
There are hundreds of football related websites, many of which have copies of results and/or league tables.
Continue reading "League Tables"
I think it would be a fabulous idea to make the 3 minute BBC NEWS update available to project onto cinema screens so that people at the cinema (especially youngsters) who dont normally consume news & information will get the latest News from the BBC.
As a football fanatic I often find myself constantly refreshing the Premiership scores on my WAP mobile desperately trying to get an update. Often it will be several minutes before the WAP page refreshes. Even the live text commentary lags a few minutes behind real time.
Continue reading "Football Text Commentary via RSS / XML"
How about a widget on mac that based on an a set of user preferences can display topics of interest - weather/ stocks / news stories on a widget. If there is a pointer to how to gain acess to the API that the BBC exposes I reckon I could probably write it in a weekend. Afterall widgets are just hml and css pages.
I know you used to have a bbc ticker that fell out of fashion because it had a few problems and does not work well on XP ? How is this project going - surely this is a project that would fit perfectly in this model. I also think you could expand this concept to use screensavers as the bbc ticker and display stories and pictures. The screensaver bit is not too hard to write but would probably need your help to test it on xp as most of my dev is NT2K or Mac these days.
The BBC News RSS feeds have made it much easier to keep track of areas of the news that you're interested in. But it would be good if you could keep track of individual news stories, that is, news items which form part of a story (such as a trial, or controversy, or election).
This could be done by just having even more specific RSS feeds, and then using a news-reader to keep track of them.
Currently BBC NEWS provides news in over 40 languages. Why not make that news available in all 3000+ languages around the world on the internet for any person anywhere to be able to learn any language by trying to read the news from the BBC.
I think it would be really interesting if people were able to attach short (i.e. 30s or thereabouts) MP3s to news items, which could then get farmed into a podcast. For example, someone who is present at the location of a event, or someone who is an authority on the topic.
Essentially it would be an add-on to 'have your say', but with the added benefit of being customizable into a personal newscast.
RSS Traits is an 2.0 module that enriches individual feed entries characteristics that can be leveraged by consuming clients and applications. Within a typical channel feed's XML payload, channel providers can define one or more taxonomies and the potential values within each and apply those values to the individual entries within that feed. Optionally, channel providers can describe to consuming clients what those taxonomies mean and how they should be presented to users.
Take a look at the provided URL for potential applications.
I thought this up a while back, but it's worth repeating in this arena.
Basically, bloggers tend to reference BBC News all the time. It would be good to be able to track all these references, and then be able to see what bloggers are saying about any one BBC news article.
Continue reading "BBC News to Accept Trackback Pings"
This is a request - can someone please make a weather Widget for Mac OS X Tiger based on the BBC's weather feeds rather than having to rely on the heavily US-centric example that ships?
I have not the skills, time or money to create it myself...
Folksonomy is a grass-roots way of classifying content. It's more accessible than using formal taxonomies but it's not really clear whether it would eventually lead to a standardisation of terms.
It seems to me that the BBC might be in an ideal position to assemble tags and create some coherence in all sorts of areas, for example in the categories used for news articles.
Since you have a superb system to help english speakers to learn other languages, could this not be adapted to help foreign language speakers to learn english?. This would be an excellent tool for poor people all over the world. If this could be done for spanish and french speakers, you would already have hundreds of millions of potential customers.
The Radio Times already publishes a nice page of TV Schedule Updates :-
http://www.radiotimes.com/tvscheduleupdates/
But no RSS feed :(
Not an innovative or even very interesting suggestion, I admit.
But too useful and easy not to implement, surely?
Yours hopefully,
Delia
(no, not that one)
How about a screensaver that displays one BIG fullscreen picture every minute and the headline of the corresponding news in big letters. For a prototype use the architecture of
Jon Kossman's In-Pix (BBC News picture gallery viewer).
Harnessing the power of retired complainers everywhere... Why not use weather RSS feeds coupled with a desktop application and a return path to create user-generated, aggregated weather reports that reflect what's coming out of the sky where you live?
I dont really know if web censorship is such a big issue or not to the beeb. There seems to me to be plenty of ways to get around censorship... and here's another. To allow BBC news into places like China. Email a request to a 3rd party that isnt blocked, that grabs news stories from BBC news RSS and sends it back. Navigation by menu driven commands. A bit like ye olde compuserve but via email. The beauty of this is that you can create disposable email addresses to read the news rather than relying on regular newsletters and finding the thought police at your local cybercafe. Would anyone use it?
Play at being Ed: build your newspaper with articles, weather, recipes, gossip, travel news, and more. Sell ads - or not. Obtain readers - or not. Compete with other paper editors for look, feel, awards, etc. Try to stop your journalists from getting drunk/ banged up. Send out your paparazzi and manage their horrific expense accounts and scoops. Build up your front page and watch it come alive with REAL news, articles and travel information! Do lunch with other players in the news canteen online, poach each others' star talent, beccome the greatest - or worst - Ed of all time.
...
Might be a fun way to:
- Play at being a News Editor
- Learn basic economics of running a zine
- Learn basic economics of running accounts and managing talent
- Learn basics of 'self publishing'
- Add in user-generated content and the ability to publish your paper: you build your own (live!) personal zine site (public)
- Break potential feeling of wasting time while playing games (for those puritans out there)
Enable individuals to create their own RSS - e.g. "i want the top 2 stories from china, plus the top technology one, plus the weather headlines for my region".
So this is a bit like Phil's idea to hack BBC search results, but make it more configurable.
Desktop search is becoming important. We're all generating far too much data. One of the ways to look for things when you can't quite recall an exact timestamp or content is to say "Oh I used it around the same time as Foo".
Right now Microsoft and Apple are basing "Foo" around other documents you interacted with.
But what if you could type names, songs heard on the radio, events etc into something and interrogate the BBC site to find out when those things happened and reference that against your own documents?
Context is my take on how making the pages of our site into a personal publishing system could work.
As with many of my ideas, I tend to start out by composing a narrative of how I would see it working.
In the case of this idea - it's as far as I got.
What would I do if I had the time and money?
I'd get access to a chunk of server, find someone who likes scraping web pages and spend some time learning ebough JSON or AJAX to make the front-end smooth enough that users wouldn't feel interupted by using it.
And yes, it's a shockingly bad name but I'm stuck on anything else right now, so I'd change that as well...
The feeds aren't there just yet, and I think this needs more of a web service than a feed. 3rd party web app, scrapes DNA or sends in web service call, gets back all the messages for threads your subscribed to and mails them to you. They arrive in your inbox as normal emails. Full searching/filtering/rules system whatever you use can be brought to bear. The reply to field is straight back to the app that can then just submit stuff into DNA as a normal post.
Why this way? Better organisation and search/filtering tools than on web. Plus you can continue to chat without looking like your messing about on the web. RSS readers dont yet have as rich functionality that mail clients have.
Email on the brain... speaking of which perhaps an email gateway to nethack. Now that would rock.
This would be a screensaver / desktop app.
- User selects geographical areas to be covered (postcoder app / existing WiL preference);
- Geotagged webcam XML feed from bbc.co.uk/webcams displays appropriate BBC travelcams;
- TPEGml feeds from bbc.co.uk/travelnews supply text data;
- RDS signal triggers latest audio travel news capture, encoding and publishing (e.g. www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/whereilive/travelscotland/home/radio/radio_popup.shtml ).
Scrape the listings pages, reformat into links with date/programme name. So that people can easily use that link in their blogs to chat about that nights episode etc.
I want to see the Newsnight technorati cloud, a disucssion online after each programme (or question time) with either linkable transcripts or video streams.
Re-order links in left & right-hand nav bars according to popularity so that the most popular links appear at the top. The least popular links can be turned into promos to push visitors to them. It's like a 'live' extension to the 'go' tracking.
Each link is passed through to a mod_perl script that notes the referring and destination URLs.
* A table is created for each referring URL.
* Entries in that table correspond to links on the referring page.
* Every time a link is clicked, that destination's entry is incremented in the referer's table and a timestamp updated for that destination.
You can now rank the links on a page to show them in order of popularity.
This allows you to create dynamic navigation that updates as users traverse the site. Popular content is easily accesible, and the lowest ranking links could be automatically turned into promos.
This idea can also be turned on its head to allow user-testing of site designs.
Rather than changing the links according to popularity, you leave them as they are, but as the users progress throught the site, they leave an aggregated trail of what they clicked on.
As a site admin you can the toggle the display of the link tracking to see where users went from any particular page.
It would easily lend itself to better visualisation of navigation and usability if you turned the data into a spider-diagram.
Did have a demo of this working about 3 months ago, but will have to dig it out as its now in my archive. Watch the comments for updates.
{ok, so i know i'm disqualified from winning, but I want to play!}
Rather than just relying on BBC editors to offer better external links, why not ask users to suggest suitable external links, on a per page basis? (as in, 'Here be Great links from this page, suggested by you!')
Would need to be moderated, of course, but it should scale well, and would be a great feedback loop for BBC search, especially if we allowpeople to input do delicious-style tags in addition to the external urls.
Could then run a 'valued user' network, with a heirarchy based on how many links you've had accepted, how often they're clicked on etc.
Setup a search service (either Autonomy or http://nutch.org/ ) and rather than crawling the site, simply index all the data we have available as a rss/xml feed.
Then embed the results like we do "BBC Recommended/Bestlinks" on the search results, or in a seperate panel on the right of those.
- Rewards projects that setup an RSS feed with extra promotion
- Using RSS feeds as (the only) data source tends to imply the content is recent, thus implicitly filters out the cruft
Rather than indexing stuff for ever and a day, we only index what is in the rss feed. Thus the content remains fresh and topical at all times.
It'd also be a way to build topical pages. Run a search for "chritsmas" against this engine, and build a page using the results. It'd be BBC only content, recent and relevent to the word.
29th March Update: Here is a prototype http://minty.org/rss/
Hack BBC search to return results in RSS 2.0
Here's an idea...
There's so many JamCams now (http://www.bbc.co.uk/travelnews/), that you could easily create a little widget where you can pick a load and show them in a set order - voila, all the jam cams for your journey into work.
Hit a button (or even be stupendously "clever" and do it on a time basis!) and show it in reverse for your journey home :)
Ideally this would have a nice interface and a config system but I never found time so there is an ultra boring, static trip at http://www.bods.me.uk/stuff/backstage/roadtrip/
The journey is fixed and is Southampton to Woolston, down the A3025. There is no reason for this journey, I just thought it would make a change to London ;)
One day I may even get round to making a proper prototype!
* Monitor news RSS feeds for location every 2 hours or so
* Track how many items have changed in that feed since the last check
* Take a map of the UK and draw hotspots on the map to indicate areas of news activity
* Create an animation every day/week/month/year to show news activity around the country
The intensity of the colour is intended to represent the 'activity' of that place, i.e. how many news stories changed or were filed in that period.
The radius of the hotspot could be used to indicate how 'important' that story is, with importance being defined by how many different news indices that story has appeared on in that time period (need some way of cross referencing stories). I.e. a local story that only appears on the local index would be a small radius, but a story that appears on the Wales, UK, Frontpage & World Indices would be huge.
Could use different colours to categorise the story if that data becomes available.
User texts in a search query to a specific shortcode. An aggegator service passes the query on to a script which searches the news search engine, comes back with the most recent match, parses out the story id, looks it up in the relevant wap rss feed and pushes back a link to that story. Haven't built it yet though.
Present news stories in cartoon form.
Combine bbc RSS feeds and Google / Yahoo spellcheck API to automatically send abusive email to BBC feedback whenever the bot thinks it has detected a spelling error.
Use just about all of the News and Sport RSS feeds to watch stories as they are posted to different indexes. Use this to generate extra categorisation information about stories (this story is about 'business' and 'technology')
Although the underlying idea (which is Nico Flores's) - derive categorisation information from the indexes which a story inhabits, and the length of time it stays there - is interesting, this implementation idea (which is mine) stinks. It would (probably) require downloading the RSS feeds far more frequently than the BBC would appreciate, in order to capture enough information. I haven't checked.
This information should really come from News' content production software, but that's not going to happen tomorrow.
description:
Everyone goes on and on about how much better they liked the old blue single column version of the news site. http://web.archive.org/web/19981212031357/http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/
So take the RSS feed, skin it, and party like it's 1998.
Use the Last 100 Hundred Stories published RSS to make a comforting, one-after- the-other list of stories published and their publication date. Mark updated stories differently to new stories. Brazenly steal from, er, build upon, Tom's "Archive News Homepage" idea and include the diff for updated stories.
Ok, it is not my idea. In fact it is Sony's. A few years back they had a small gizmo called an eMarker. They only sold them in the states.
Basically it was a digital knot in a piece of digital string. You heard something on the radio, you hit the button and it creates a timestamp. Get home, upload these timestamps to your computer and view the playlists for the stations you regularly listen too.
You could then find the track you wanted.
I was thinking about it, less in terms of music more in terms of ideas and discussion on the radio (ok, radio 4). If I heard an interesting point being made, or an interesting idea i could tag it, get home in the evening and pull down the programmes that were playing at that time and jump to the spot i wanted (or maybe into a transcript?).
Then I could easily stretch out the time window i was interested in, maybe do more research etc.
just using a digital knot.
Ok, so not really feesible for backstage yet maybe, but if anyone wants to help me hack my eMarker to get the timestamps out (if it still works).
I think of it as being loosely connected, I don't need to be blasting off SMS tags (though a similar system could use SMS, if I send my digital knot 'home' I could easily focus into my time of interest).
[This has now been built as a working prototype]
(Insipired by forthcoming change of commute from one tube, to one tube, two overground trains and a bus)
Personalised travel news for your route to work. Looking at the travel feeds, it seems different overground train routes have different ID codes in the XML, so would just be a case of picking the right bits out of the XML.
Obviously could be modular so your personal details could be made up of overground rail, tube, roads or whatever. If you wanted to be really fancy, you could add in Jamcams in somehow.
Useful and not particularly difficult - just need to work out the different routes from the XML(!) as a basic prototype, and if really keen, scope for a config system and so on. Will build basic prototype if you're /really/ lucky :)
Grab a copy of bbc.co.uk/news every 5 mins, do a diff, then save the index if there's been a change.
Allow navigation by a YYYYMMDDHHMM-based url structure. Return nearest version of News homapage.
