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Backstage is in Dublin this week for the Xtech 2008 conference. As usual I'll be filming as much as possible from the conference including talks and interviews from people. Just keep an eye on http://cubicgarden.blip.tv for videos everyday.

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David Johnson the man behind the BBC iplayer Xbox media centre script was invited into the BBC to give a talk about his work by BBC Backstage recently. There are a few snaps of David Johnson showing the experience on Flickr. The internal session was well received and lots of questions were answered by David, myself (Ian Forrester) and (Anthony Rose). There was also lots of talk about the ipod Touch, Wii and Playstation3 offering too.

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Over the Air promised to be a festival of fun centered around Mobile and Wireless development, and delivered so much more.

The eager crowd surprised us all with their competition prototypes. But the winners panned out to the following list.

* Audience Favorite - Capture the Flag by the Pink Pirates

* Overall Best Prototype - Mr. Tomm (Future Platforms)
* Best Mobile Widget - Auto Widget Configurator (Owen)
* Best Hardware hack - Phone Fight (lastminute.com labs)
* Best Use of Multimedia - 21st Century Fridge Door (Orange Pirate)
* Best Use of Wireless, Bluetooth or RFID - Bluetooth FOAF (Owend)
* Most elegant solution - Twitter Client for Windows (Dale Lane)
* Most over engineered - Clever Social Tool (Alex squared)
* Most practical / ready for market - Social Network Open Butler (SNOB)
* Best mobile web application - Browser Sync
* Best design / user experience prototype - Phone Fight (lastminute.com labs)
* Best Location Aware Award - Capture the Flag (Location based games)

And the winners in the unofficial categories were:

* Fun Award - Phone Fight (lastminute.com labs)
* Most likely the succeed with the CIA - (Social Tracker)

One of the weirdest ummm... prototypes/sweeds was that of Torchwood Sweded by a group at Over the Air. The whole thing was done recorded in HD and took less that 24hours to make.

Click To Play

The coverage of Over the Air was great, with online stories from The Guardian and many bloggers.Some of the best coverage however came from Mark Kramer with his videos on the popular video site Qik. There were also plenty of photos on flickr which are still being added.

There has been a range of comments and blog posts about Over the Air including,

Then there was the hacking in the evening. I wasn’t as hardcore as some, and did have a nap for an hour or two at about 5am before finishing my stuff off after breakfast. Most of what I wrote was in C++ but I also got to hack together a little Javascript - not a language I often use.

What did I learn there and was it relevant for my project? Well, first, it was an opportunity for me to get a brief overview of current developing technology for the mobile platform.There are many and a lot of different technology to learn which I am not familiar with. Of particular interest was a presentation by Brian Fling from flingmedia.com on developing web apps and native apps for the iPhone and mobile applications.

Alex Craxton of Mobile Monday created a slideshare

We went to the excellent overtheair event over the weekend, with an amazing concentration of mobile developers (and gadgets). Our entry to the 24-hour hack development contest was a bit of fun dreamt up by Richard Jones and Russ Anderson. Disappointed that someone had beaten them to it by working out how to connect a Wiimote to a phone handset via bluetooth, they decided to go one better and do away with the need for the Wiimote at all.

Everyone enjoyed the event and is now looking forward to Mashed which had its dates officially announced - June Saturday 21st - Sunday 22nd.

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Over the Air is a special event being organised by Mobile Monday London, hosted by Imperial College and supported by the BBC. 48 hours of mobile and wireless development by and for the leading lights in the industry. At the core its a mobile development event that is part conference, part un-conference all in a 48 hour open hackathon format. It will be the world’s largest non vendor specific mobile developer event to date and aims to embrace all aspects of mobile/wireless development and design.

This is one that you won't want to miss, so signup now, and watch out for the big announcements that will be coming soon. To get the latest news on Over the Air developments as they roll out hot off the press, simply subscribe to our over the air feed at www.overtheair.org, which also has lots more information about the event.

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They say a picture is equal to a thousand words, well seeing Ashley join the Uk's 600 Linux users was priceless and he was very willing to learn more. More photos here and other blog posts here. Who knows maybe Ashley might join the growing open source movement and dump his windows install in the future...

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It’s very early days yet, but so far we know that it’s going to be late June, venue to be decided and we’re looking for other people to work with. Obviously we worked with Yahoo! last year (who’s idea Hack Day is) - and this year we want to work with as many people as possible.

I think the only major change will be that we plan to run some kind of conference on the Friday before the weekend event and that we wont be having a massive band on the Sunday night - rather we’ll be doing something (and this is soooo cool) on the Saturday night.

Oh… one last thing… we’re changing the name this year to avoid any confusion… henceforth it’ll be called Mashed.

More news as the planning progresses.

• Submitted by: Matthew Cashmore
• Link: http://backstage.bbc.co.uk

The focus is on the BBC website's 'Where I Live' section, and the aim
is to allow users to choose a balance of News and Local Features, as
well as varying the geographical mix. The slider may have wider
applicability depending on how useful and intuitive it proves to be.
We'd like your feedback.

Two sliders are used, the first to mix two pairs of feeds into two
lists, and the second to mix the two lists together. Stories are
given a value based on their order within the feed, and as the slider
moves across, low value stories from one list drop off, to be
replaced by high value stories from the new list.

The application is in two parts:

* a Perl script which consumes RSS feeds (using XML::FeedPP) and
generates an embedded JSON array containing the stories from all four
sources and their rank.
* a Javascript function which combines and generates the list(s)
visible on the page.

Since the timescales of 'News' and 'Local Features' differ so widely
(news changing by the minute, features dating back weeks) it was not
possible to elegantly rank the lists strictly on their publication
date -- instead we chose to simply score them according to their rank
position in the original feed.

In this prototype the source feeds are hard-coded into the script,
but this could easily be changed. Unfortunately the BBC does not have
a very RESTful interface to their 'Local Features' XML, and with no
consistency in the URL format there is no simple programatic way to
access all the BBC regions.

The slider is very basically styled, but is it intuitive? Does the
data shift as you might expect? Are two sliders too complex? Is a
slider appropriate here, or should something else be used? Is the
sorting algorithm right? What should we do about duplicate entries?
We're interested to know what you think.

http://projects.hinterland.nu/bbc/sliders

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Later in the night, once the Santa's had left by the front door instead of the Chimney it was time for the Free bar which was sponsored by our partners Dopplr.com and Moo.com.

During this time, our other partners for the night the Open Rights Group setup their now famous mini-step ladder to recreate the speakers corner event, copyfighters.

Matthew kicked it off with a discussion about DRM followed by Cory Doctorow who gave a very good talk.

Many others joined and everyone enjoyed the slighly drunken talks. To finish off the already impressive night, on the very top floor Ryan kicked off two games of Werewolf. Some people prefer to watch or go downstairs and socialise. By 1:30am, there were a hardcore who just hung around till about 2:30am. But at 3am it was time to call it a night.

Thanks to everyone who turned up and enjoyed the night, we had a great time! And of course we at Backstage wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year in 2008. There are many exciting things being planned for the next year but I think you will agree with us that 2007 between the barcamps, hackday and other events was great.

• Submitted by: Matthew Cashmore
• Link: http://backstage.bbc.co.uk

So..... What we’ve done is create a dedicated blip.tv channel for the backstage podcasts (and other associated media).

You can subscribe to the podcasts via this RSS feed

http://bbcbackstage.blip.tv/rss

Alternatively you can subscribe to it via iTunes

itpc://bbcbackstage.blip.tv/rss/itunes/

(yes I know that wont work for everyone)

I hope this will make things easier for everyone :-)

• Submitted by: Matthew Cashmore
• Link: http://backstage.bbc.co.uk

We managed to talk for several minutes before DRM was mentioned, but this is a great listen if you want to know a little about the man behind the future strategy and tech delivery of the BBC's iPlayer project.

http://blip.tv/file/539117

Or direct download at

http://blip.tv/file/get/Matthewcashmore-backstagebbccoukPodcastWithAnthonyRose192.mp3

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As participatory culture expands, we're finding more and more uses of mashups in places we'd never expected. BBC Radio 4 is not exactly the place you would expect mashups but recently Eddie Mair asked his listeners to send in their postcodes, so he could plot them on a Google Map for all to see.

This week, on our sister programme PM we're launching a brand new experiment.
All you need to know is the postcode you're in when you listen to PM. If you're travelling when we're on the air, we'll happily accept your best guess as to your postcode, or the rough location. If you're overseas, try the local postcode or zipcode.
You're probably wondering what we're going to do with this information. Well, on iPM on Saturday we're going to start to build a map showing where people are listening to PM.
Then just email your postcode to this address: ipm@bbc.co.uk Please put POSTCODE in the subject line.

After Eddie and the team start work on their mashup, they will be releasing the same data (more that 10,000 postcodes) under the backstage license for all you backstagers to create even better mashups, widgets or even visualisations. Who knows what could be done with a GPS, Radio 4 stream and this audience aggregated Geodata?

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One of the lesser talked about issues recently has been accessibility. The web has moved on quite a bit in recent years but it seems like we may be making some of the same mistakes we made back in 1999. This Backstage podcast includes Julie Howell, Andy Budd, Katherine Moonan, Gareth Ford Williams, Nick Holmes and Jonathan Chetwynd. Thanks to them for making this very difficult area of web development/design lively and positive.

You can download the podcast in mpeg3 here or ogg vorbis here. There is also high quality versions and embed options on bliptv. The podcast is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial, so your welcome to make derivative versions which includes subtitled versions or even full text transcripts. If you do, please let us know about the version

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But also its time for a knees up and to get together. This year is no different. After much messing around with venue owners and many false promises, We're happy to announce the BBC Backstage Christmas Party.

This time it's at the Ye Olde Cock Tavern, 22 Fleet Street, London on Saturday 15th December. Things kick off nice and early at 7pm and we run through till 2am for the hardcore.

Obviously we want to make sure you all get in, so we're reserved 100+ tickets for backstagers. You can sign up for the event here. There is a special promocode, which can only be found on the mailing list.

We expect to have quite a few treats on the nights including Werewolf and the Open Rights Group are going to help us to recreate the speakers corner experience live for a drinking crowd

Its going to be a cracking night and we look forward to seeing you all there

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Premasagar & Annesley of Dharmafly have been working with the BBC World Service on the Bangladesh River Journey project. They've created an API to access the open content.

The Bangladesh River Journey is a mashup of posts from the World Service trip to track climate change in Bangladesh.

During the trip, photos are being posted to Flickr, messages sent to Twitter and diary entries sent to the World Service site. The mashup puts all of these on a map, letting you navigate around and follow the reports.

The journalists have a GPS navigation device and post their coordinates to Twitter each time they reach a new location (e.g. this post). The mashup system then uses the coordinates to map each photo, tweet and diary entry.

Go ahead and use the API to create something new. There are many options available and there's also a Greasemonkey API to directly interact with the World Service site.

The World Service mashup includes microformats and other technologies and contains a wealth of hidden data, which can be seen here in full.

Do you have any ideas for innovative ways to remix and mashup the data? Share your thoughts and questions on the Backstage mailing list.

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Fresh from the previous years Innovation Labs, James and Rob from Rattle Research have created a special service which hopefully will make its way on to our live servers. The guys are looking for feedback so hit the mailing list if you have a comment or want to know more.

This idea uses Commons i.e. Publicly created data from Wikipedia and del.icio.us to augment the BBC's metadata so we can do more interesting things with BBC content like provide useful external links, dynamically. The latter is the example we chose to use in creating a 'service' because of the huge cost of providing such links manually [and the paucity of links across the BBC as a whole] but there are a number of other uses such as creating first and second level internal relationships across BBC content [to be able to provide say a link between a Christina Aguillera piece of content or aggregated page and say content on Justin Timberlake] relationships which would not otherwise exist.