The BBC News Sidebar Gadget and BBC Weather Sidebar Gadget are hopefully the last ever gadgets that you will need to view news and weather on your desktop, according to Fraser who created these great looking Vista gadgets.
This is perfect while the snowy weather grips the UK in a blanket of white.
Inspired by this tweet from MP Tom Watson and enabled by the excellent BBC Backstage's travel feeds, this prototype service tweets disruption alerts for 25 UK train operators. The original data is processed and shortened to less than 140 characters (in most cases) by Yahoo Pipes and tweeted via Twitterfeed which also adds a short-link back to the original BBC report. Tweetlater provides the automated welcome DM.
This IM bot comes from a BBC member of staff Duncan Robertson...
I have been playing with ejabberd, Jabber, XMPP and the various client libraries, specifically the rather wonderfully simple Jabber::Simple and Jabber:Bot.It all started because I was doing a Fireeagle integration job with a product at work, and was getting frustrated with the fact that it is still not super simple to update my location. It struck me as I stared at my desktop, that I always have Adium running. Wouldn’t it be great if I had a Fireeagle contact that I could just tell my location, and it would go off and update, letting me know when they’re done. Now that part is midway done (post to come), but before I started that, I wanted to research more the workings of a Chatterbot, a computer program that pretends to be a human and can answer basic commands. They have been around for a long time, I remember playing with an IRC bot a while back, getting it to display the last commit messages from Subversion.
So that research turned into a BBC Programmes bot. As I worked on BBC Programmes, I have good knowledge of the site and the data within, and building a bot that integrated with that data seemed a good example of using the restful API available.
If you just want to try this thing out, here are the details of what you need to do.
- You need a Gmail or Jabber compatible IM account
- You need a Jabber enabled client, I’ve listed a few:
- You need to add a new contact: im.bbcprogrammes@gmail.com
This should be it. You should have a new contact appear in your list (They have a BBC logo as an avatar). You can now begin a conversation with this contact. It’s probably best to start with: HELP
Infused is a concept paper by Richard, who combines Flickr photos with Youtube videos and BBC articles. Its a mashup for papers.
Infused Entertainment brings the News idea and recreates it for the BBC entertainment feeds. It actually works slightly better as the music and media is more likely to be found on the sources I use. The idea behind it is the supplements you now get in most newspapers - this is the entertainment section.
Andy explains what iplayerlist is and how it works.
I scrape bbc.co.uk/iplayer for all the current TV shows (a-z atom feeds help).Then I extract the synopsis from /programmes for each episode.I then throw the episode synopsis at the Beta Open Calais API. This API will extract a ton of concepts, including some geographical information that it thinks the synopsis relates to (don't ask me how, I assume some sort of magic elf reads it).This geographical information (states, countries, towns etc) now includes longitudes and latitude info thanks to Open Calais chatting to Freebase. It works best with the larger synopsis.
I'm still questioning if this is any use to an non techy user. Would my dad like to see a map showing TV shows which relate to them? Anyway, in the future I might add a bit of colour coding on the markers for program type
(childrens, factual, comedy etc).
Because you can do it doesn't always make it useful but its the point of Backstage. To explorer the useful, artistic, clever, serious, etc. Keep on submitting...
Chris has been hacking about with the code for his previous prototype trackplaying recently.
Now there's a few different interfaces/stylesheet changes per machine type,
iPhone
But thats only the start, in response to feedback. Chris has added integration with the BBC's Radio Pop beta, using the Radio Pop API. So now you can Pop your trackplaying habits to Radiopop. Chris is using OAuth to pass the users information back and forth smoothly.
Chris evening are pretty full because he's also trying to add Last.FM support, so like Radiopop, you can add tracksplaying to your audio-scobbling and Instant messenger support via imified.com.
Chris is still welcoming feedback.
Following from the previous prototype Adam has launched his twitter bot which will recommend you other artists based on one you send it. It was first demoed at Mashed 08 but has now gone live for anyone using twitter to use. Just send a message using @recomme or direct message recomme with a single artist name and it will search through last.fm and other sources like /programmes for other artists it thinks you might like. Simple but clever.
A new Mashup from Chris Riley, this time it shows as much information about a playing track as it can on one screen and updates in real time with the last.fm feed. The interesting part is, where you can put in your last.fm username and it will look and see if you will like the current track. Awesome stuff
I've written a new mashup - http://www.trackplaying.com - it displays information about the track currently playing on the radio. It takes data from BBC Music (beta), Last.fm and Amazon, and is hosted on Google App Engine. Mashup heaven! It is based on my previous attempt that some of you may recall.
A beautifully done start page by Fraser,
For the past 6 or 7 years I have run http://www.dailysnooze.com - mainly because I wanted a quick loading simple homepage for my browser, which included the BBC headlines and weather. Long gone are the days of screen scraping the bbc news pages and now luckily we have access to some nice feeds!
Things have moved on a little and we now have a few extras based on backstage feeds:
- dailysnooze.com browser homepage (BBC News and Weather)
- BBC News Vista Sidebar Gadget
- BBC Weather Vista Sidebar Gadget
I only just released the gadgets so thought I should share them a bit further. They are also available from the website itself.For the homepage the brief I have always stuck to is "quick loading and simple", and I like to think I have a good balance in my slightly biased opinion.
From the tech side of things the gadgets/homepage get their data from my
hosted DB and associated web services. I have an app running at home which
updates the server DB regularly with the feed information.
Infused news was created as part of an Internet Computing degree at the University of Hull, Scarborough Campus named "An investigation into the need for user-submitted, multimedia content when delivering news". The aim was to integrate user-submitted, multimedia elements into existing news stories and evaluate whether or not this augmented version of the news not only makes the story more compelling, action provoking and understandable for the user, but to investigate whether the use of multiple sources gives the news story a more balanced, honest and up-to-date view of the news story.
The application takes an rss feed of BBC data provided at http://dev.barnesdmd.co.uk/ff/?ffid=2. Keywords are extracted using the Yahoo Term extractor and these are used to retrive data from YouTube and Flickr, the phpFlickr classes were used to acheive this (http://phpflickr.com/).
The mix of media (Imagery, Sound and Video) often enhanced the story being presented. The keywords used often return media isn't relevant due to keywords not being given enough context, or media being tagged incorrectly. If more time or the funding was made available I would look further into utilising Ambient Interface technology so that the application could deliver the information in an engaing way.
BBC News Algorithmic Sorter an attempt to try and work out what the British public are finding important. The main BBC News website offers a glimpse of what’s popular, but as with all things that’s limited to the audience of the BBC. While this gives a somewhat true to form view of what people are interested in, I wanted to expand it, and thus came up with the BNAS site. The main site isn’t that impressive as the main focus was on the backend.
The script uses several external APIs from blogging communities, search engines and social networking sites to work out what people are talking about. Then using the last 50 Data from the BBC it compiles a list in order of the interest the British public has on the subject. At the time of writing this Lock keepers' cottage sale halted is the least interesting story, and Oil price up despite Saudi pledge the most. It’s not 100%, and sometimes odd results show. The system works like a automated Digg.com.
Continue reading "BBC News Algorithmic Sorter"
BBC Programmes RDF over XMPP pubsub at XTech 2008 from Patrick Sinclair on Vimeo.
The guys at the BBC Radio Labs have been up late again. This time while at Xtech, they have transformed the BBC Radio's programme schedule into RDF and many other types of data. Of course this is all RESTful using a API but they have taken it one step further and decided to play with XMPP (jabber) so they can create notifications of things your interested in complete with data from DBpedia.
A new prototype based on Radio 1's now playing data but this time from a BBC member of staff working in their 10% project. Simon goes into details.
We're working on a new 10% time project over here at FM&T Audio and Music - and we thought we'd give you guys a super sneak preview. There's a few of us involved here, including Yasser Rashid, Cathy Bartlet and Ramon Dodd.Its around visualizing now playing information by pulling in data from across the web.
The plan for this is to eventually build a flash version which is full-screenable to provide a visual companion while listening in the office, or on the web etc. Future data sources we hope to build on include Musicbrainz, Wikipedia, YouTube, song lyrics,Yahoo Music and loads more. At the moment, we've just got as far as last.fm, flickr and the webcam, but its a start!
New Prototype from Chris Riley, instead of rating how in touch is the BBC, he's scratching his own itch about the music playing over Radio 1, Radio 2, 1Xtra and 6 Music.
I've coded a hopefully useful, if not idea stimulating web page. It is called Now Playing http://cgriley.com/nowplaying/ and shows you information about the artist currently being played on BBC Radio 1, BBC 1xtra, BBC Radio 2 and BBC 6 Music. It is based on some BBC data released at hack day, with Yahoo Pipes and JQuery thrown in.
I made it because when I'm listening to the radio I like to know a bit more about the artist. Have I heard some of their tracks or albums before? If I've no idea who they are what have they done in the past? How much can I buy their albums for, what has been released? What is on their website, do they have a website? Which artists are they like?
All those questions are answered by this new page. It is designed to update itself in real time with the current artist being played, and seems to work quite well. As always the best way to see what it does is to give it a go, and if you want more info about how it works, data sources, known issues etc. then there is an obligatory about page. http://cgriley.com/nowplaying/about.aspx
Facebook applications are hot at the moment and this one is even on my very tight list of application. Great work Ben Smith, but I'm sure the entries above are certainly not for me. Anyway Ben has more details...
Find friends (or, currently, name-sakes of your friends) that have been on BBC TV, what programmes and when they were aired. Currently, this finds the first TV programme's 'contributor' to match your friend's name, through the BBC Programme Catalogue (http://catalogue.bbc.co.uk).Future developments will involve giving you the choice of all possible matches to identify from and integration with IMDB (http://www.imdb.com).
Anomalous uses the BBC's news feeds to create a metaverse or stories arranged in a 3D space according to the time they were released and their relevance to the user.
By applying aspects of time and space the stories take on a representational structure creating a spiral of news and information.
Allows searching of the BBC Travel News RSS feeds for certain roads (using a special way of searching to ensure you only get, for example, problems on the M5, as opposed to problems on the M6 near the junction with the M5) or certain places. Is rather crude at the moment, but works - and I use it at work before starting the journey home. As for improvements - well see the todo page on the site - but the UI could do with a lot of improvements, and a way to select which feed to search would be good.
Basically I wrote this to deal with a personal niggle (that of having to use the IE search function to search for traffic problems that might affect me) and thought others might find it useful too.
If anyone's interested, then it's written using eRuby and runs on my apache webserver, which sits in my bedroom (that's why it's slow!).
A very simple yahoo pipe to track your favourite sports team (or any sports news)
You can get your own rss feed to paste into your news reader by entering a query and then subscribing to that feed. My default is Cardiff City (its all bad news at the moment), but you can enter any term to search the bbc sports section.
Starting with the BBC's lovely, tightly-written and edited news headlines and descriptions, Multi-Search uses Yahoo!'s term extraction API, Google's blog search, and Yahoo!'s Web search--run through Pipes when necessary--to retrieve current stories plus the associated buzz from the blogosphere.
An Opera widget that overlays the BBC Traffic tpegML files onto Google Maps, and sits on the desktop. An entry into the current Opera Software widgets competition (http://widgets.opera.com).
It features a continuous news ticker, a browseable list and a details view, all of which link into the interactive map.
I hope to improve the display of the details, perhaps a useful icon and colour scheme for quick reference.
Mojiti.com is a free online video annotation service that allows users to add comments and information directly onto online video via our overlay technology. Without changing the underlying video content, users can now add text, shapes, flash art and multimedia onto the video screen.
With more and more video content becoming available online, our goal is to continue to make online video a more interactive and engaging experience. Using Mojiti's RSS feed annotation, I have very easily taken an online BBC news clip and a BBC weather report and added the relevant live RSS feed to the screen. Now as users watch the video, the latest news can also stream across via the RSS feed.
News clip: http://mojiti.com/kan/3937/10619 (On this video, I also happen to add a BBC logo and made it clickable so that viewers can get redirected to the BBC website.) Weather clip: http://mojiti.com/kan/3930/10597 (These videos can also be directly embedded onto backstage.bbc.co.uk if you think viewers would be interested to see these examples.)
Watch "Britain's most watched news channel" BBC News 24 in the Vista sidebar.
There are no controls, just right click to stop and restart, doubleclick to go full screen.
In the past I had a greasemonkey script that no longer works, and building on my previous prototype
and because google maps now supports geoRss, and the backstage feeds dont do geoRss (something to work on?) I decided to do it myself.
You can now display the traffic data direct on the google maps site. This might be more handy for people who want the geoRss data, but i thought putting it on google was the best way to display it.
Direct google link is http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=http://bbc.blueghost.co.uk/travel_data/locations.rss
My Yahoo Widget is written to provide local traffic information direct to your desktop. The idea started, as there doesn't appear to be an easy way to find any road incidents within 5/10/15/etc miles of your current location.
The widget currently accepts a postcode and a range set in the preferences and retrieves the all incidents within the range from the specified postcode.
The server is updating its database from the Backstage Traffic Data feeds and then providing the information via a simple xml feed that is then used for both the Widget and the Google map on the site.
I just need to find some time to add the additional information in the Traffic feeds to the Widget and improve the quality and presentation of the information provided.
Not precisely a BBC hack, Badger will take any RSS feed and package it up nicely into a proxy-free Web badge, via Yahoo's new Pipes beta. Here's the BBC's World News feed, all badged up and ready to go.
A regional traffic incident site featuring road accidents, roadworks, petrol stations, fuel pricing and user-customisable driving route overlays.
Created as a personal project, using Google Maps API v2 and AJAX techniques, to greatly improve upon BBC's own traffic incident update page.
Possible improvements include UK-wide fuel station locations, pricing and timeline recording of feed state for later replay.
This is a Google Maps application showing live and historic traffic data from the BBC TPEG road traffic data. Also includes an 'Accident Blackspots' section which is created by analysing traffic data collected over the last 4 months (and growing).
This has been built as part of a project for my degree course in Engineering. To improve it, I have several ideas which may involve the BBC weather data as well (perhaps using some machine learning algorithms to find patterns in the relationship between weather and traffic incidents).
This modules uses the Mood News data from my other prototype to give you a daily dose of the selected 'Good News'. Have fun!
In the past I had a grease monkey script that no longer works, and building on my previous prototype
and because google maps now supports geoRss, and the backstage feeds dont do geoRss (something to work on? - maybe) I decided to do it myself. You can now display the traffic data direct on the google maps site. This might be more handy for people who want the geoRss data, but i thought putting it on google was the best way to display it. Direct google link is http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=http://bbc.blueghost.co.uk/travel_data/locations.rss
Another Twitter hack - someone in the ideas stream wanted the weather on their mobile every morning, so I hooked up a bot to send the day's BBC London weather to a twitter account every morning at 4am.
It uses Yahoo pipes to strip out a lot of extraneous info from the feed to make it easier for Twitter to read.
The twitter feed is here: http://twitter.com/londonweather/
A neat improvement would be if the BBC's weather feed split out the different data - temperature, visibility etc. into different pieces of tagged data within the feed, rather than just a description, date, link - although if I had more time I'd do something interesting with the geodata in there.
The page includes links to all the tools I used, so anyone should be able to hook one of these up for where they live.
Subscribe to iCalendar versions of the BBC television and radio schedules. Radio programmes have links to the listen again data where available.
With time, I would like to provide a customizable calendar and better integration with the BBC's video and radio streaming services.
Martin Kamara, has started working on a Twitter bot which reads TV Anytime data. He plans to release the source back into the public under a GPL licence.
Tv_twitter is a twitter bot I wrote in perl that reads tv-anytime data and broadcasts it using the twitter network. I wrote it with BBC’s tv and radio content in mind, inspired by backstage.bbc.co.uk. The bot is currently updating http://twitter.com/bbcone with the current program on BBC ONE and a short synopsis of it. It is still in pre_release state but if you are interested in running it or doing something else with it the source code available from the repository. A stable version should be out within a week.
A Google Gadget for the Google Personalized homepage which lift the top stories thingy on the BBC News Frontpage.
I believe I need to improve the appearance in IE6. It looks nice in FireFox though. Given the time I would implement the whole stats thing which is available on the BBC site i.e. top story by hour and location.
I have cobbled real fast a prototype that reads the BBC RSS Weather feed and sends it to my NabazTag wireless Bunny. It is ROUGH but it works.
Sorry ! yet another google maps related project. Because the BBC weather feed uses a somewhat user unfriendly "weather ID" number for it's query of a city location I had to screen scrape all 7-8 thousand into a Mysql database. This maked it possible to query a whole country's weather. When I get around to it I hope to open up my database for POST / GET weather requests to RSS 2. Keep an eye on the page for details.
Mario has been playing with the Twitter API and created a user for BBC News, which twitter's Breaking news to other users following it. Some what like a IM bot but for the twitter network. To subscribe you just need to add bbcnews to your friends or follow bbcnews.
Just came across this map (as I was looking for a Technorati tags plugin for WordPress) built by Ben O'Neill. It's clever, I particularly like the way it loads the last 12 hours of stories, rather than just the live feeds at the moment. It's probably just a few clicks from becoming a widget too.
http://benedictoneill.com/content/newsmap/
Trafficeye was spotted in the wild by Alistair. It uses Microsoft Virtual Earth and plots BBC traffic data on top of the map. The creators describe trafficeye as your fast reference point for real-time UK traffic information.
The reason why i built this vista sidebar gadget is so i could have easy access to the bbc radio stations it was build using good old notepad ;) using javascript and html
An Apple dashboard widget that plays almost all listen again radio streams that are usually available via the BBC Radio player.
I wrote this widget a few months ago, it has been a big success and I notice it has even been mentioned a few times on these pages - looks like I'm a few days late for the competition though :-(
Anyway, the way the widget works at the moment is by scraping the radio player web pages looking for the radio stream links - this makes it very fragile to changes in the BBC web site. I would love to update it to use a xml feed instead.
Searches close to 300,000 video clips on www.bbc.co.uk and serves them up in the BBC media selector.
Its seems to be indexing the Beta BBC AV RSS feeds and looking at other sources. The HTML is very simple and the URL syntax nice enough. There is also support for simple Boolean searches.
Version 2.0 of website gTraffic.info has gone online. The site has been completely rewritten using Google Web Toolkit (GWT). This site takes traffic data, including BBC data, and plots it on a Google map. Highlights of the new site include
New look and feel.
Zebra list style with sortable columns.
Selection menu indicates which dataset is currently active.
All event categories are now listed in traffic view.
Map 'overview' button will take you back to dataset overview zoom level.
Some help pages (working on improving this).
'Busy' indicator.
Permalink feature.
I have gradually been making improvements to this site since it's initial launch in June 2005. I hope everyone likes the changes.
This is a Flash-based widget that shows the latest world headlines on a revolving 3D map. For each item in the XML feed, it shows the headline, the short summary and an indicator showing where in the world the item originated. Mouseover the map to pause and click to view that whole story. The headlines are refreshed every 15 minutes.
+ How it works
The Flash movie is built with two main subroutines - one that displays a 3D map of the world that turns automatically and can be triggered to move to a different location, and one that gathers the news feed (via a proxy php page to get around the Flash cross domain security issue), works out where each story belongs, and then triggers the map accordingly.
+ Improvements
At the moment it's pretty processor-intensive - doing all those 3D calculations takes its toll, but hey, it's just a prototype. If I had more time then I'd work on optimizing the routines to make it less demanding on the CPU. It would be nice to able to make the map far more detailed too.
This Google Gadget takes your favourite bands from the RSS feed off last.fm and then searches the BBC for both news about them and TV and Radio appearances they are making.
It is set by default to Radio 1's last.fm account, but you can change this to any account you want by pressing the edit button.
I made it so that I know where and when I can see my favourite bands on TV/Radio since I always seem to miss it somehow (plus the chance to win a 'well known music player':) ) If I had unlimited time/money I would like to figure out a way to distinguish between different things on BBC News/listings searchs (e.g. Keane the band, Roy Keane, Robbie Keane all turn up if you like Keane) and a way to make the listings look like links to call up the synopsis (they do work but they just don't look like links).
My Yahoo Widget is written to provide local traffic information direct to your desktop. The idea started, as there doesn't appear to be an easy way to find any road incidents within 5/10/15/etc miles of your current location.
The widget currently accepts a postcode and a range set in the preferences and retrieves the all incidents within the range from the specified postcode.
The server is updating its database from the Backstage Traffic Data feeds and then providing the information via a simple xml feed that is then used for both the Widget and the Google map on the site.
I just need to find some time to add the additional information in the Traffic feeds to the Widget and improve the quality and presentation of the information provided.
A simple dashboard widget to display the main BBC Radio 1 RSS feed for Mac OS X Tiger users.
It'll be nice to include the other feeds from the BBC Radio 1 site - if only they validated like the main feed did.
On the 23 May 2005 I submitted an 'Ajax RSS News Reader' prototype to the backstage website.
Following a comment about my News Reader, I've finally got round to building a Mac OS X 'Tiger' Dashboard widget version to enter in the widget competition.
Live'n'ByNet is a player widget for the live bbc radio feeds as listed by the programmes API. The widget uses the Zeepe framework - a web browser application/widget framework.
Why was it built?
Because I wanted a player that can be minimised to the tray and one that doesn't have hard coded urls to streams. It also lists the programmes via the API so you can set 'alarms' where it tunes to programmes when they start.
Improvements?
Access to an API that lists the listen again streams. It would be great to be able to choose favourites for the repeating programmes and in combination with the timings from the live streams then enable 'drag and drop personal channel' creation. Other improvements would be the programmes API becoming standardised and used by commercial radio as well - the player then becomes just like its real world equivalent.
The Chris Moyles Widget is a Dashboard widget for Mac OS X Tiger. The widget reads the Chris Moyles Blog RSS feed and displays it in a nice fashion. The widget also includes the links back to the main Chris Moyles Radio 1 web site.
As of right now, the widget does the job. I might add information to display if the next podcast is available or not. If there any suggestions for extra features please let me know.
I built the widget so that I could quickly and easily see when the blog was updated. What would be nice, is if there was a way to see who wrote the blog entry, as a different member of the team writes each day. It'll be nice to be able to display who wrote the blog entry in the widget.
Taken from Chris About page
This site shows how “in touch” the BBC News editorial team are with the general public using a simple percentage figure (see below), determined by comparing the top 10 headlines on the BBC News front page with the 10 most popular (most read) stories on the BBC News web site. Whilst the BBC editorial team should never strive to match the two lists and achieve 100% (as they are employed after all to decide what they think is most newsworthy) it is an interesting way to look at the data and see what really interests the general public. Having an overarching figure for this data means we can track how in touch the BBC are over time very easily.
Having started with a simple RSS importer for Second Life I've now put together a scrolling RSS and text display. This first one has 10 "character" elements, with each element supporting the characters A-Z,0-9 and about a dozen common symbols. Scroll rate is user configurable, but running at about 0.5 second per move works well. There is currently an LED or Arial font, I may do others - but users can upload their own. Text message or URL of RSS feed are set by chat commands.
To coincide with the release of Firefox 2, I've taken advantage of the new 'Live Text' Microsummaries feature, to show what's on air on BBC Radio Stations. I hope this will lead people to find other uses for this technology to grab info off the BBC website. Of course, it would be great ultimately; if this were to encourage the BBC to offer their own Microsummaries and save us all 'chasing the goalpoasts.' Enjoy!
Using Mike's location OPML (see http://mike260.dyndns.org/~mikef/countries.opml) and the BBC weather feeds, the following experimental IM bots should now be running:
MSN: bbcweather@hotmail.co.uk
AIM: bbcweather
Jabber/GTalk: bbcweather@menti.net
They're very simple - add them as a new contact and say hello, and take it from there...
It's done in Perl, using an open-source framework ( http://www.duncanlamb.com/sdba/) and the various CPAN modules that provide connectivity to the individual IM protocols.
With all this talk of widgets I thought you might like a sneak peek of our BBC Radio Player + Last.fm Yahoo! widget
Last.fm is a social network around your listening habits. By creating and updating your profile with the songs you have listened to, Last.fm holds a record of your listening and offers musical and social recommendations. There are plugins to help you keep your profile up-to-date as you listen to iTunes, Winamp etc. but you can't update your profile while listening to the radio… until now.
Our experimental / prototype / beta (sorry, but we can't guarantee the quality of service) widget asks you to sign in to your Last.fm account and choose a BBC Radio station (only Radio 1, Radio 2, 6 Music and 1Xtra are available at the moment). The currently playing song is retrieved and is added to your profile (unless you decide to add songs manually) and other recommended artists are displayed.
Matthew is the first person to put the newly released BBC Weather feeds on a Google map. The ideas like it have come up quite a few times.
These are subscribable iCals, built from the BBCs 7day schedule data. They're organised up by channel/radio-station, grouping, and genre.
They're only tested with Apple's iCal, and are quite likely broken for other apps.
Notes:
- When you subscribe, please don't tell iCal to refresh more than once per day
- Try changing the 'Show X hours at a time' in your iCal preferences for a clearer view
- The genre information is a bit patchy, and the grouping info is *really* patchy, so don't expect these cals to be comprehensive.
- iCal events show up in spotlight, so you can use it to search the tv/radio schedules
Stuff I would like to fix:
- Check and fix compatability with apps other than iCal
- Basic support for non-BBC channels
- Allow users to define and subscribe to customised cals containing their choice of programs and series.
I've noticed a lot of interest in the discussion groups about SMS applications. This script converts an SMS (text message) to a valid RSS 2.0 feed. It's developed using a free textback service offered by www.aql.co.uk .
A properly formatted SMS(see instructions) sent to 07766 40 41 42 is read by the aql server. It's then converted to a HTTP $_GET request which sends the phone number and message to a MySQL database via a PHP script on my server. You can then call an RSS feed to see the message at http://www.blears.net/vox/feed/rss.php
There are loads of possible developer uses for this including, blogs, message boards and voting type aps.
Mario has been doing more development work in Second Life and decided to show the popularity of certain TV shows on Technorati in Second Life. His feeling would be that you could glance at what's getting the most amount of buzz on Technorati and then watch it in Second Life with your friends.
This widget was born out of frustration with travel delays in the UK. Now, there is a quick and easy way to help solve that problem. Built for Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger, our widget uses data supplied from backstage.bbc.co.uk and allows you to see the travel problems in either your region or by your mode of transport (road, rail, sea, air and cycling). The list you see is sorted by severity and can be filtered, so the most important travel news for you is at the top. To see more information on an item, just click it.
This script is a mash-up of the Google maps API and BBC travel news RSS feeds to create a live online map of traffic and travel news in the UK. If you click on the map markers it shows you the travel problem. I may improve it by changing the marker colour codes for severity of traffic problem. The page uses php to read the feeds and then dynamically produce the javascript for the map.
Matthew Somerville has worked on a few prototypes for navigating the huge archive of BBC News Stories over the past few months.
Matthew also has a massive archive of all the BBC News stories and there changes going back over a year which he keeps offline because of the amount of disk space it requires. But he uses subsets of it to create these prototypes.
Another Second Life prototype this time by Kosso.
In his own words.
Using old skool Flash version 5 actionscript and Quicktime's abillity to embed Flash that old, I was able to pull togther something I had been meaning to try for a long time. PHP on the server side reads the RSS feeds then throws back old skool flashvars to the Flash.I was amazed to see the typer effect also working, but I had to use old methods there too. NO interactivity is available through Flash in SL. But it's a start. It reminds me of the huge 'Maiden' newsscreens I built for BBC News when I still worked there.
Mario Menti has created a Now and Next Google gadget which you can stick on your own site now Google has added the functionality to embed their gadgets in your own site. It displays not only whats on TV and Next, but also what's also on the Radio.
News ToolBar is a button for IE that takes in the latest RSS feeds from the BBC and updates in real-time. It could be improved with the addition of graphics. I've tried to avoid "tickers" which can distract, but it would be nice to be able to highlight a new article since they last looked.
Mood Memories is built using BBC's beta The Time When and attempts to classify People's Memories as good, bad or neutral.
Its written using Python and is the same concept as his mood news but applied to memories.
TV-Browser is is a free electronic program guide. We offer Data for over 140 Channels. It has everything you need: reminder, create favorites (e.g. based on title or actor), search imdb, create a blog-entry and more.
TV-Browser is written in Java and easily extendible through plugins.
I used the BBC Backstage Data and the TV Anytime Java API offered by BBC to create a Plugin that is able to convert the Data in our Format.
The Webpage of TV-Browser in German, but we will translate it in the next few weeks. The Application is already translated.
Hi
Using some of the BBC backstage services we have created a free service for users to consolidate internet features into a personalized home page for their phone.
E.g. Users can add and personalize the following data to their phone:
- Add own RSS feeds
- Over 50 BBC RSS Feeds
- Enter keywords and display relevant BBC Feeds
- Search RSS Feeds
- Transfer Notes from your PC
- Weather Reports
- Traffic Reports
- Daily Horoscope
The service only works with phones that support WAP 2.0. The majority of phones sold in the last 2 years support WAP 2.0
We intially built the service for the USA market however Geoff Lynn from your mobile division pointed me towards the BBC Backstage.
Using the BBC backstage service we have now brought the service to UK users.
If you require further information please contact me
Thanks
Sanj
One of the things I frequently want to do is find out when a programme is on TV, and more importantly, when it is repeated (especially given that I live with 10 other students, and we have one TV in the kitchen).
However, there is basically no service available that lets you easily do this, with the exception of our TV listings site that we made for the backstage.bbc.co.uk competition a while ago.
That is the basis behind the idea of this prototype. Something that lets you easily find when something is on TV.
Its been almost 10 months since I first posted about my first backstage project, and 7 months since I updated it, but I've made a major update to the UI, hopefully for the better. It works best in Firefox, but does work in Explorer. The update only took me a few days this weekend, so there's probably a few bugs.
Couldn't think of a better title so named it Backstage on Google?
You can view the old copy at http://bbc.blueghost.co.uk/site34.php for comparison
BBC's UK Top 40 Chart in XML
24 Hour weather forecast for London
5 Day weather forecast for London
Since I had done a Web Based TV Guide in PHP (http://www.blueghosttv.co.uk/), and I was going to start work doing .net 2.0 stuff I thought I would develop a c# 2.0 PC App version to help me learn the language. It's very much a work in progress, and doesn't compare to DigiGuide (yet), but the basics are there. Please email me any comments or suggestions via my email address found on the website
mtraffic.org is a web service for handheld-friendly traffic reports, using data from the TPEG feed for UK road travel. mtraffic is designed to be
* Fast: A parsed representation of the feed is cached on the server; the minimum information is sent to the client
* Accessible: Simple, compliant XHTML renders correctly on all recent mobile browsers
* Convenient: Bookmark or remember short URLs - e.g. http://mtraffic.org/m25 - to check on frequent journeys; no need to download a client.
mtraffic is written in Python, and runs on Apache + mod_python. I'd be happy to share the source code, and I welcome any suggestions for its improvement.
This is a variation of my previous Mood News prototype. This is a page of the (hopefully!) Good News. Have a positive view of the news! I hope to have a podcast and RSS of this version soon.
Someone suggested off-line it would be nice to have an IM bot that pushes news to them automatically, without you having to request it. So I sat down last night and implemented something like this (pretty raw in its current state):
- you contact the bot to register you interest
- the bot sends out the latest 5 headlines from the BBC news page every hour (on the hour) to all those registered
- and of course, you can contact the bot again to remove yourself from the list
If anyone wants to try it out and let me know what they think, here's the details:
Google Talk and Jabber users, contact "bbcnewsflash@menti.name"
MSN users contact " bbcnewsflash@hotmail.co.uk"
AIM users contact "bbcnewsflash"
As I said, this is still very experimental, so don't be too surprised if it doesn't always work... but I'd be interested in people's feelings in general, whether something like this is useful (or just annoying..).
A summary of suggestions received/ next steps includes...
- only showing headlines once (the current format is showing the news items most recently updated, so the same stories may re-appear if they've been updated, a little like hourly network news I guess)
- being able to select news categories/keywords you're interested in
- being able to specify the times you want to receive the news flashes, not just hourly
In addition, I found some weirdnesses with Google Talk, but am not sure if anyone else has. It doesn't always seem to deliver the news, while delivery to a more "standard" Jabber client/account seems to work as planned.
Actually not something that speaks this time!
TENBot converts RSS/ATOM/RDF feeds to the Text Electronic Newsletter standard which is gaining ground amongst visually impaired users as a preferred format for email newsletters. Applied to RSS feeds it lets them quickly find out what's in the feed and then navigate around it. The users uses their own screen-reader or magnifier.
Next stage will be to add a directory of TENBot enabled feeds, and maybe strike a deal within someone like Feedster...
Python script to extract from traffic, only problems on the M4 motorway.
I've written it in Python because my Nokia phone can run Python, allowing me to check the state of the M4 before I get in the car.
I wrote it partly out of interest in using Backstage, and partly out of an interest in running programs on my phone.
Given time, I would add:-
1) an easy way to customize roads to choose.
2) make it a proper Nokia SIS installer.
This is a prototype to demostrate the full power of RSS and AJAX. Please visit the prototype website for more information.
The this is a protoype it shows write/read functions to a database and remote content fetching.
This is a port of the live.com gadget, for use with Google's personalised homepage.
If Google accept it, it will eventually appear in their directory, in the meantime if you're interested you can install it by adding the developer module from the google.com/ig page (click Add Content > Create a Section and enter "developer.xml" in the text field), then add my module from the url http://backstage.menti.name/google/nownext.xml
Functionality-wise it does exactly the same as the live.com gadget:
* hover with your mouse over the programme title to see programme synopsis
* auto-refreshes every 10 minutes, or refresh manually using the refresh button
Sorry to those that are fed up with the "now/next" stuff, but since I'm producing these feeds, I've been thinking of other ways to use them. I haven't seen too many mobile-oriented prototypes here, so thought this may be useful:
Text the name of a BBC TV station (no radio stations - yet) to 07781 488578.
This will send you back a text message with what's on now/next on the TV channel you selected. It also contains a link to a xhtml-basic page that shows you the programme information (synposis), so if your phone supports clickable SMS messages you can click straight through to the programme details. At the moment the pages are xhtml only, so it won't work on old WAP1.0/wml-only phones (but it wouldn't be hard to add this capability, as the pages as ultra-simple..).
Finally, a shortcode instead of the long number would be nice, but I don't have that kind of spare cash at the moment :-). By the same token, I am paying for the outgoing SMS messages myself, so no guarantees that my hosted MSISDN isn't going to run out of credit at some point.
If you're interested have a go, let me know what you think, and how do you think it could be improved..
Please be aware that this link may not be 100% stable.
This is a little program that I wrote (and still writing at this time) that plays BBC Podcasts, the next version will allow downloads of any selected Podcasts in the BBC Radio download trials. I will be adding the download component within days, and also a minimize to system tray function. Any other suggestions will be appreciated but due to my level of programming, I may not be able to implement the feature (only time will tell!). This program was written in Delphi (7) and uses PHP for information requests that is needed by this POD player. I have used BBC logo's (please dont strike me down for this, if required, they will be removed) but I do not disclose in anyway that this program is/has been made by the BBC or any linked companies! I just used the BBC logo's as it is only BBC content that is used. ANY feedback will be taken, even if I like it or not! My homepage is still under construction at this time, but hopefully by 2006 there should be something that you guys can p!
lay with.
I wrote a little Microsoft gadget for their live.com beta site. You can install it and get the source from above URL.
live.com still seems rather experimental, I had various problems with Firefox, but for now on IE (after adding live.com and gadgets.start.com as trusted sites, see below), it seems to work reasonably well.
Summary:
A gadget that shows you what's currently showing on all UK BBC channels, and what's showing next.
Currently supported features:
- hover with your mouse over the programme title to see programme synopsis
- auto-refreshes every 10 minutes, or refresh manually using the refresh button
Important: due to some timeout setting/bug(?) with the live.com proxy when using Web.Network.createRequest, I had to use XmlHttpRequest, which means you will get permission errors if you don't add live.com and (after today's iframe change on the live.com site) gadgets.start.com to your list of trusted sites.
Fast search tool for BBC RSS news feeds.
Buliding on my previous Greasemonkey script/web site (http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/prototypes/archives/2005/07/google_maps_uk.html)
I have now put the data into Google Earth Format.
This is my first attempt at a Google Earth file so it isn't perfect. Please email me any suggestions/comments/problems (see site for email address).
It includes data from the BBC Travel Feeds for roads and rail/rube delays. It also includes links to Live Departure Boards for railway stations.
Charlotte is a natural language interface to the TVAnytime scheduling information. You can ask her in plain english questions like "when is spooks on", "what is on tomorrow night" and so on. For added impact we've given her an avatar and text-to-speech system - but these aren't essential to her function.
Further work will include more patterns for her AIML matching system, better handling of tag searches ("eg what gritty dramas are on this week"), more natural presentation of results, and conversely, a list mode when you just want a blow by blow schedule.
Charlotte currently focusses on BBC1 and 2 only.
I listen to Radio Four a lot. For me - and I suspect many others who share my addiction - the schedule has a dual purpose. It tells me what's on, but also how far through the day we are. This clock is for everyone who leaves the house by 'Thought for the Day' and feeds the cat at quarter-past 'Front Row'.
You need an SVG viewer (such as http://www.adobe.com/svg/viewer/install). Some viewers may have difficulty with the javascript - there's a tick box at the bottom to turn it off. You can also adjust the time zone and choose a different station to view.
It's built in Java with JSP. A daily cron task on my server downloads and unzips the feed. The JSP page that produces the clock refreshes its cache of programme details each day. I use the open source TVAnytime parser to handle the XML, creating simple 'programme' objects with title, date, summary and url fields to manipulate. Positioning the titles on the SVG needed just a little trigonometry, as did the initial angle of the three hands. The rotation uses the animateTransform tag with varying durations.
With more time, I'd like to
- avoid the javascript issue
- look at colour coding programmes by genre
- write the summaries in interesting ways (round the clock face?)
- offer a range of configurable designs
- offer direct 'listen again' links where possible
A prototype to take the BBC backstage 7-day schedule data, convert it to RDF and use it to build a dynamic and personalised web view. Our aim is to meet the BBC aspiration for a "cool, original and innovative [utility]"
WHY? To learn something about the use of RDF for open data storage and query; to build an AJAX application; to provide a useful and fun service.
HOW? the schedule data is provided as XML, so an XSLT transform turns this into RDF, which is served using Joseki. The client application uses the AJAX approach, using a standard Javascript library.
WHAT NEXT: Performance! appears to be largely javascript (client) rather than Joseki (server). Collect user feedback. We've a list of wish-list features about a mile long to prioritise. Oh, and it'd be polite to get it working on Microsoft IE :)
CREDITS: Chief Hackers were Paolo Castagna, Richard Cyganiak and Damian Steer. Ideas and encouragement from Steve Cayzer, Mark Butler and others in HP Labs Bristol.
This program displays a grid showing "what's on" on the freeview channel lineup (TV & Radio). The difference is that it also shows how much it expects you to like the show, on a scale from -9 (my idea of hell is being forced to watch 5 minutes of this show) to +9 (I would kill to be able to see 5 minutes of this show). It does this by allowing you to rate shows, and using a vector-search algorithm to see how similar each show is to the totality of shows that you have rated.
If I had more time, I'd optimize the site more, tune the weightings of the vector search, possibly add phrases instead of treating every word of the description sepperately, and perhaps most importatly provide documentation and missing polish.
This prototype is, to put it simply, a TV listings system. It is based on a PHP backend, but uses AJAX to display all the data onto a grid similar to the one used by programs such as Digiguide.
The actual grid is fully scrollable, and it only gets the relevant information when needed (scroll to the end and it gets the next results). This is obviously limited by the data that is in the database.
If you click on a television or radio programme, you get the description of it, information about the genre and when it is repeated, as well as some extra information that may be relevant to a few people (aspect ratio, etc).
If I had the time (it has been a busy few months), there would be many other features in it, such as the ability to search by genre and search for a specific show, and add your own favourites into it so that you know what is on on a specific day that you want to watch or listen to.
I do plan to actually use this myself, so most of those features will end up in it sometime.
(More about this entry can be found at http://backstage.min-data.co.uk/tv/brief.htm)
Using the BBC schedule data this program allows the schedule to be searched and links each program by their group and genre. All 19 TV and Radio channels are included.
The data is displayed in a simple list format with the short synopsis displayed when the mouse is moved over the item, the more detailed information from the feed is displayed when an item is selected, example subtitles, audio description, widescreen, closedcaption & sign language. this also includes alternate schedule information if the program is repeated within the 7 day window.
Future ideas to be developed would be to allow users to add programs, groups and genre's to their favourites and to be sent reminders when certain programs are due to be broadcast.
Presenting the TVMap: mixing up the BBC's TV listings (and Bleb's feeds for other channels) with Google Maps, to produce a map that shows what locations will be on TV soon. Interested in all programs about Abu Dhabi? No problem, it'll email you about them. Want to know if there's anything about Canada on today? Sure, not a problem.
This first prototype version is showing a static display for October 3rd, but in the next day or so it'll get features like showing up to six days ahead, and email and RSS location-based alerts ("let me know when there's a program within 50 miles of Vienna").
It works by parsing out all proper names from the descriptions of programs and running them against a subset of world GNIS data -- it won't pick up every reference, and right now a couple of things have to be cleaned by hand (for example, Chucklevision doesn't take place *in* Barry...), but some quick filters should sort that out in the next couple of days.
Whew. Talk about cutting it fine. 40 minutes until the competition deadline, but I've just managed to finish the first prototype! Tomorrow - the good stuff gets added!
Cheers,
Tom
mightyv (http://www.mightyv.com/) lets you find and rate your television programs, rearrange your schedule, find recommendations, fetch RSS feeds for your series or schedule and more.
Find out more at http://www.mightyv.com/about/
My idea started with looking at making TV Listings accessible. This is why I came up with the combination of using Web, SMS and Phone services to provide the information.
I've created a simple web site that allows you to browse the TV and Radio listings for the next week. This allows you to create your own personal listings that you can receive alerts on via either email or SMS. This web site is written in PHP accessing a MySQL database. The database is populated using the Perl TV-Anytime module once a day.
If you phone 01483 604620 you will be provided with a menu system that will allow you to navigate the programs on any of the BBC TV Channels. This information is updated every 10 minutes by process that discovers which programs are running by accessing the database and this text is then used to generate voice using Cepstral software. When required the Asterisk phone system plays these sound files back to anyone phoning that number.
The SMS service accepts messages on 07914 229975 and will then respond with the information you require. Eg. Sms 'TV BBC1' and after a few minutes you will get a response with the next few programs on that channel. This is using gnokii over Bluetooth to connect to the phone and Perl script are handling the processing and sending of the text messages.
There are numerous improvements. As this is only a prototype a more reliable service for sending SMS would be required and the VOIP services is only running on a ADSL connection, so the sound quality can be poor. See http://bbc.ask-adders.com/contact.php for more information and ideas.
From the guy who brought you "Rebotcast reads BBC News | World | UK Edition", I now bring you "Rebotcast Reads BBC Tv Anytime Listings". This is a speech-synthesized reading of the listings. For my prototype, I have limited my scope to the "Documentary" genre in the radio listings.
This code owes a sincere debt to Leon Brocard, who wrote a series of Perl modules to parse TV Anytime listings.
The podcast is updated every day by downloading the last listings, using a "cron" job. There are some obvious improvements to make, such as including the times of each radio program. I just wanted to get a placeholder up there before the deadline.
Another improvement, more long term, would be to give users the ability to design their own feeds, by inputting parameters in a web form.
Installing the Prototype:
This prototype has been written in Java so you’ll need the java Runtime environment to run the application. You can get this at http://www.java.com
To install this prototype just download the .rar file and unpack it to any folder. After unpacking go to the BBC folder and run "start epg.bata".
In this show case the EPG information included is from 26-9-2005 to 4-10-2005. If you want to see the TVguide after this date, you should add the new files which you can find at http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/feeds/tvradio/
Just download the latest file, unpack and copy them into the BBC\xml directory
The Prototype:
Because of the large amount of available channels these days, there has to be a selection to adjust the number of your favourite TV and radio channels shown in the EPG on your TV. It gives the viewer the option to make a selection of his favourite BBC channels which can be altered at any time. In the environment of BBCi it is possible to create your own Personalised BBCi- EPG.
This application is a prototype of a personalised EPG; you can choose whether you want to see the entire guide, or just a guide which shows the channels you selected. This prototype demonstrates the concept working into the BBCi environment; the final idea is to get the application working on OpenTV-and MHP set-top-boxes.
Further there is an option to activate alerts. These alerts will be covering a selection of genres. While it's not fully functional yet, this option gives a good idea of how it should work. Just like the personal channel selection the viewer can select the genres he is most interested in. When viewing the personal or full EPG the EPG will highlight the programmes in those genres. the viewer will be able to see at a glance which programmes are within his interests.
The application uses the TV-Anytime API made available by the BBC and the Listings in the TV-Anytime format also made available by the BBC.
Future Ideas:
Since the alert function is not fully functional at this moment this should off course be finished. At this moment the personalisation is at channel level. But with some more advanced filtering it should be able to filter at programme level, or even segment level. The meta data of TV anytime gives a lot of opportunities for alerts in your own Personalised BBCi EPG.
The next step will be to create your private profile. On basis of your profile you will get TV programme suggestions.
The EPG data is now downloaded manually, but for a future version it should be possible to download them over the Internet automatically. In the end the entire application should be ported to MHP and OpenTV.
The Unofficial BBC 7 Day TV and Radio Listing is a online radio and TV listings that uses the BBC TV and Radio feeds provided by backstage.bbc.co.uk. A Java program parses the backstage XML data and inserts it into a mySQL database each day and a PHP based website displays all of the information.
The website displays full 7 day listing for each channel. I f you choose a specific program it display all of the information for that program as well as links to the BBC's information for that program. If it is a movie links to IMDB and Google also appear. Movies also have a simple 5 star ranking system associated with them so that users can rate the movie.
You can add favourite programs so that they are highlighted on the listings.
You can search by keyword, genre, or actor name to find any programmes that match your criteria. The search can also be narrowed down by selecting a specific date or date range and a channel.
There is a basic forum for programmes that allows users to talk to each other about programmes.
When a user starts adding favourites recmmendations will start being generated for them based upon what other people that have the same favourites as you also watch.
Therre are a few things on the site that need to berefined still. The CSS needs a bit of work to be fully compatiable with IE and also for smaller screen resolutions. The advanced search also has a few minor bugs to be ironed out.
In the future I would like to output statistics about the kind of programs that different people like (eg. Favourite programs for men and woman, and also for age renge etc..). I would also like to write a desktop client that uses the favourites data and alerts a user when their favourite program is about to start. I would enhance the forum section to include BBCode and a word censor to hide swear words. I have also toyed with the idea of letting users tag programs and then adding a search option for tags.
Using the schedule and programme data, this prototype allows a user to locate programmes which are similar to one another and presents this in an easy to understand and interactive visual form.
At present, the algorithm for determining similarity is pretty rudimentary, simply comparing the genres of each programme. In the future, a more intelligent system could be put in place which could consider identifying comparable keywords in the synopses and also the target audience for the programmes, based on the time of day at which they are broadcast. Also, for now, it just searches BBC One, Two, Three and Four; but there is no reason that the user couldn't have the option to choose which services to include.
Comments and suggestions are very welcome.
A mobile phone application for road traffic news. The user is presented with information based on the UK road system (e.g. the current problems on the A10). The user can determine which roads they are interested in, to avoid unnecessary information being sent to the mobile.
TravelSync uses a custom server in order to optimise the BBC feed and reduce network traffic. This is to reduce the cost of bandwidth and improve network performance when using mobile devices.
The client is simple to use and designed to be as portable as Java/J2ME (MIDP1) will allow. The next steps include taking advantage of MIDP2 features.
I built the application because I wanted a cheap, quick and reliable means of accessing traffic news whilst on the move. In car navigation systems are too expensive, the radio is too infrequent and unreliable.
Given more resource....
1) Build a more sophisticated user interface using (e.g) speech.
2) Develop a 'push' facility so the mobile automatically receives updates.
3) Integrate GPS for traffic news base on location.
4) Develop the capability for other queries (e.g. What's up in Cambridge?) [Perhaps a simple interface back to BBC Mobile here]
5) Anything else that comes from user feedback
Built using the Microsoft .Net Framework, BBC Schedule has been designed to be compatible with all devices running the latest Microsoft Operating System with .Net capabilities. This means that you can view an entire 7 day BBC schedule on XDAs, PDAs, mobile phones and of course a standard desktop or laptop PC. The dynamic interface allows you to view the BBC Schedule in the same way on any device, even with a screen resolution as low as 320 x 240.
This is the base version of BBC Schedule on which all other features can be built. With more time I would look at adding the following features:
> Allow users to click on a programme (in the programme listing) to see
> more information about that programme and links its website. There can
> also be an internal media player to allow explanations of the
> programme through audio and or video
Settings to allow for local area, ensuring the user sees information related to their area, eg local channels etc.
> Setting to allow user to add 'favorite' programmes and to add alarms
> so that they will be alerted when a chosen programme is about to
> start, these can be set to be one-offs, daily, weekly or continuous
> depending on the nature of the programme
> 'Whats on now' option in channel listing which displays what is on at
> the current moment in time. This could also be expanded so that
> hovering over the icon in the system tray will show this information
Currently BBC Schedule stands as a good computer based schedule viewer. However, with the time to make improvements BBC Schedule could be made into a fully integrated solution allowing people to plan what they want to watch and/or listen to without worrying about missing a programme.
A Flash file which, when downloaded and run locally, either in a browser window or in a stand-alone Flash player, can be used as a TV guide, allowing search by genre, channel, or keyword, or viewing in the standard grid, with programs listed by time, for any date in the next two weeks.
It also pulls in working relevant ads (usually!) from Google, although this functionality needs some work - particularly when using the grid view.
It could do with some decent design to make it somewhat more visually appealing, and also seems to have problems getting data through some corporate firewalls. However, if this is the case, it suggests the user redirects their browser to a webpage which does pretty much the same job. (And again, needs design work!)
Ideally, later versions of the Flash movie will allow registration for email alerts of forthcoming programmes of interest.
It's about an 80k download, so there's no excuse not to give it a try. When new versions or updates are released, you'll be notified by a message in the bottom right of the Flash movie.
Oh - yes, why did I build it..? I got sick of not knowing what was on TV because my Daughter (1 year old on Saturday) had tried to eat the Guardian Guide again...
Offline Traffic News takes the data provided by the travel TPEG feeds and converts this to a map overlay suitable for use in common sat nav systems, such as TomTom.
[Note from Backstage Team: We have been unable to test this as we do not have any SatNav software to hand. Let us know if you have used this successfuly!]
While I was on Work Experience, I used the BBC Desktop Ticker and I quite liked it, but found it had disappeared off the interenet when I got home. So I built my own version, which also has sport headlines, On This Day facts, GMail checking and eBay searching built in, as well as the ability to add any feed you like - sort of like a one stop shop. I built it using Game Maker (www.gamemaker.nl), as it is simple enough to use, but with DLLs can be made to be extremely powerful, and it also has good graphics functions, which make displaying the results easier. In the future, I would like to add a directory of feeds which can be remotely updated and the ability to get five day weather forecasts off the BBC by postcode location.
An instant messaging bot that you can query to get information on the 7-day BBC TV schedules, and ask for programme reminders via SMS (sent 15 minutes before the start of the programme you're interested).
Improvements: lots possible, including smoother navigation and additional 3rd party integrations (essentially anything with a web API). Also, could be expanded to non-TV channels, but have for simplicity's sake limited it to TV.
This prototype downloads some TPEGML feeds and returns the information to the Google Earth client across the Internet.
Google Earth can be downloaded from http://earth.google.com and the travel feed automatically added by typing http://www.agm.me.uk/gps/googleearth/travel.kml in to your browser and clicking "Open".
The national RTM feed is being used in the prototype along with some northern feeds (Tyneside, The North and The North East) and some southern ones (London and The South East). The data is cached for around 10 minutes.
The code is written in PHP using MySQL running on a Linux server.
In theory this could feed the entire travel database in real-time. I would like to enhance the icons so that show what the problem in addition to the severity. I would also like to highlight a stretch of affected roads around an incident instead of just taking the midpoint.
My first attempt to work with the BBC feeds, this allows anyone to create a panel to insert into their own web sites that contains live BBC news headlines. It's a rough design at the moment and needs a little clieaning up but the best part is that all the config data is stored in the URL, no cookies or logins required.
future improvements could include the inclusion of sports and other categories.
A platform independent and highly configurable desktop RSS ticker.
12KB Jar application.
Specify one to many feeds, request BBC Breaking news alerts, color schemes, sizing, delays and much more.
All configurable through a single XML preferences file.
Tested and working under JRE 1.5 using Mac, Linux and Windows.
Source is provided under GNU General Public Lic.
Mood News - BBC News Headlines Auto-Classified as Good, Bad or Neutral.
Mood News started as an idea to represent the day's news as a sad or happy face. The current version provides a fresh view of the news with a dynamic interface. The ratings are based on keyword scoring from a vocabulary of 160 words and phrases.
With Mood News I have enjoyed reading more news from broader range of topics. It is also nice to reliably find some good news in these times!
Future plans are a regular schedule, increased vocabulary, regular updates and a short podcast created using a TTS engine. Also I plan to open up the mood score data for sharing
NewsGlobe takes the BBC World News RSS feeds, geocodes
country names in the title, and maps each story onto the
Google Earth globe. You will need to install Google Earth (at
http://earth.google.com/) before you can click on the link. If I can work out how to do it I'll try and put the relevant photos against each item as well. (by the way if there's an Iraq story try zooming right into ground level)
Open it up, leave it, and get snowed under by the News!
I created Accidental News at the beginning of this year for an exhibition at the Duncan of Jordanstone Collage of Art and Design's Interaction Design Lab, Dundee.
Based around the theme of the accidental, it's a comment on the News headlines that we see everyday all around, how we meet with them and how they engages us. Some can grip us; others can pass us by. The headlines have different meaning to everyone they cross. We don't engage with headlines from far away like that of ones close to home, often, even hard to imagine them in the context of our own society and culture.
The BBC - 'Updated every minute of every day'. Well, Accidental News works it's way around the world, displaying its news, returning to each location, every minute of every day!
It was displayed on different screens at the exhibition, each one with it's own element of randomness. It's not functional really, more a quick experiment. If I get the time, I would love to explore (or see) ways in which this form of presentation could be made into a functional News Reader.
Any comments would be very much appreciated! Thanks.
Flash & BBC RSS XML feeds....
I decided to experiment with using RSS feeds going into Flash, basically to extend my portfolio (i'm a recent graduate of BA (Hons) Interactive Multimedia). I wanted to make a simple web based and downloadable application that gives a 'roundup' of the BBC news in different categories. (It was only recently I was told about the BBC backstage site).
I wanted to make it look 'pretty' as Flash is obviously useful for this, but at the same time to keep it simple and quick to load, something that will appeal to a large cross section of people.
For further developments I would allow a 'save' function to let the user save their feed preference. Image feature to show images from the news items. And a lot more feeds, with the option to perhaps allows feeds from other news sources. A multi language section, and so on. Well there are many future developments which could be incorporated if I had the time!!!
I have been creating a new tv show format that blends together the familiar talk-show/hosted program with numerous high-tech methods to interact with the show in real-time.
The host would start the program "rolling" and seed the topic or content, but from then on the viewers begin shaping the program.
Not just viewers at home logging sending email, chatting with the host, etc. This should would superimpose users' session content onto the screen. Different parts of the screen are used for various content/functions. Users could show a video they like in the corner, have a chat with multiple viewers on the left side, start/end subtopics at any time.
The host would try to pull all the various inputs & displays from viewers into a somewhat coherent or at least understandable show.
The thrill and interest in the show is the real-time interactivity between not only, the host & viewer, but between viewers as well. The show would almost be a interactive meeting place and serve only as a common location with the technology to allow everyone to interact together.
In short, the show would be a controlled chaotic multimedia experiment with the outcome completely unknown before the show really ends..A type of stream-of-consciousness and group-expression...
Interested in this? I have more details along with specifics on how the display, sets and technology would look and work together.
Contact me via my email address. If your network would sponsor the airspace and related equipment, I will volunteer my time and effort to experiment with this idea. At the very least, it could spawn other ideas or grab some headlines for your network.
Take care,
Robert Carr
I originally built a Google Maps page using Road + Rail (from bbc) + Weather (from weather.com) data. This is located @ http://bbc.blueghost.co.uk/ (you can use this page in Internet Explorer as well as Firefox).
I then started developing Greasemonkey scripts for Mozilla Firefox. An extension of my original project was to have an optional overlay of traffic data on the actual Google Maps page, and this is the result so far.
I thought it might be useful if used in conjunction with Google Maps journey planning features.
Further plans include adding all UK locations available ( i am manually adding them at the moment); adding rail delays as an optional overlay; and also fixing a few bugs.
Feel free to email using the address shown on my web page
I thought you might be interested in my hack of Google Earth to show all Premiership clubs with club news (pulled from BBC RSS feeds) being overlaid onto the popup balloon.
More info at the URL given for the Prototype URL.
SMS news alerts allow you to receive news notification from various feeds of backstage data.
You can subscribe to multiple news feeds, create keyword based filters allowing you to only receive the information that you are interested in. Aswell as SMS alerts, you can also receive email based alerts with links to the full content on the BBC.
Over the coming weeks I will be adding the ability to specify delivery options including time based rules (eg. don't send me messages at night).
Following on the from the excellent BBC News Front Page Archive, this prototype does the same - but for the main bbc.co.uk homepage.
It checks for changes every minute, and also displays the differences in a nice format, so you can scroll back and see how the BBC homepage has changed over the course of a day.
This widget was born out of frustration with travel delays in the UK. Now, there is a quick and easy way to help solve that problem. Built for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Dashboard, my widget uses data supplied from backstage.bbc.co.uk and allows you to see the travel problems in either your region or by your mode of transport. The list you see is sorted by severity, so the most important travel news is at the top. To see more information on an item, just click it.
I am planning to release and update this widget on a quick and regular basis. I have several ideas of enhancements, but if you want to submit feature requests, please email me.
Inspired by my commute which involves tube and two different train operators, my Commute allows you to pick 'n' mix your public transport tube operators, to a single page covering those companies. There's also an RSS option.
At the minute you select per company/line but in the future, searching by location could be added in as well.
One of the oldest ideas here says: "Grab a copy of bbc.co.uk/news every 5 mins, do a diff, then save the index if there's been a change."
It does exactly that, except it's every minute, and also displays the differences in a nice format, so you can scroll back and see how the BBC News Front Page (UK Edition) has changed over the course of a day.
Among the few dozen (about 60 or so) news feeds I get are the BBC feeds for world, science, and related news. The problem is that I was reading so many feeds that I spent more time sifting through news I have already read in one form only to see it in another. Finding the hot topic at any one time was difficult and almost defeated the purpose of the system.
What I wound up doing was designing a system that will determine the hot topics on the fly and lump related stories together, ranking the whole thing by popularity. It's updated every two hours, and tracks breaking news quite efficiently. By cutting across so many sources from around the world, I get a more complete picture that I would find with only one or two sources, and I can scale to numerous sites with ease. unlike bayesian techniques, there is no training to do, as the approach automatically determines categories.
At this point, monkey news has been running for almost two years without little problem. It needs some more polish, search features, and improve navigability, along with better story correlation through a real scoring function.
This prototype displays the latest road travel news on mobile phones using Flash Lite as the client. Flash Lite is the mobile profile for the Macromedia Flash Player. The travel RSS feeds are loaded into the phone via a GPRS connection.
As I'm using the RSS feeds and not the Tpeg feeds, you only get a title, description and the severity of the report. In the future I'd like to look into using the Tpeg feeds to display more information back to the user.
I'd also like to add a "Report an Incident" section that replicates this page: http://www.bbc.co.uk/travelnews/report/
The application could post data back to the BBC via HTTP or email. This could also be done with SMS as Flash Lite can send a message via the mobile phones existing SMS functionality.
Newsbot takes a BBC RSS feed (or any RSS feed) and turns it into speech read out by an animated avatar.
Ours chatbots can already read RSS feeds to answer questions like "what is the news/weather" but we thought it would be great to shrink-wrap the RSS reading part to create vritual newscasters.
The next stage of development would be to allow users to drill down to individual stories and have those read out too.
Building on some of the previous prototypes using Google Maps, I've built a system that can take almost any geographic data and overlay it on a map.
It currently displays BBC travel news, BBC London traffic cams, local weather, geotagged Flickr photos and UK Gatso speed cameras. But I'll be adding more soon!
I built this site as an experiment is using Google Maps and XMLHttpRequest. It provides maps of traffic, public transport events and London cctv feeds. The data is updated hourly. I would like to fix some of it's shortcomings. My programming skills are stong but my html and design skill are a little basic.
The purpose of this is to show the top news stories from a specified period of time. However, it only has data from 27/05/05 onwards.
It can output in RSS, HTML or plain text formats, and the time period can be easily changed, as well as the number of news articles shown. As an example, the RSS output for the top stories for the past week is at http://backstage.min-data.co.uk/topstories/?o=rss .
One of the troubles with it was working out how to rank the importance of the news articles. In the end I went for a simple system, where each time the url appeared in the top 3 items of the main BBC news feed, it got a certain number of points (5 for being the top item, 3 for the 2nd and 1 for being 3rd). It was pointed out that the urls may change, as well as the titles and descriptions, but working out which one is which really is too much work, so I decided that they were suitably different to be classed as different news items.
It's a prototype for an online version of the 'Missing Word' Round from 'Have I Got News For You'. It takes 100 most recent headlines from the BBC Backstage RSS news feed, updated every 15 minutes. The missing words are selected semi-randomly by the server, so may not have quite the comic potential of the TV version. PHP isn't renowned for its sense of humour.
The feeds are filtered for certain keywords, since death, murder and destruction aren't really that funny. The odd one may still slip through...
Because it is based on an RSS feed, there's the potential for 'guest publications' - just like the show. That is, assuming 'Knitting Machine World', 'Sea Shell Quarterly' or 'Centre Parting Monthly' publish an RSS version of their headlines!
To-Do
Takes the xml data for travel warnings and plots it onto google maps.
This prototype allows a user to centre the map on their home town, or anywhere else in the UK, and find out which local team and which premier league team is closest.
BBC feeds for both teams will then be shown (unless a premiership club is closest, in which case only the one team is shown).
Continue reading "Sport Mapping"
This is basically a way to make it easier to put content on a website from RSS feeds, without vast amounts of technical knowledge.
It uses a PHP backend to output the first items from an RSS feed in JavaScript format.
I have built a mapping/photo project, in which the intent is; Users will browse the map to an exact point at highest zoom level, then get the coordinates. They will then post a photo of theirs for those coordinates, which will then be made public, linked to the location. This will allow any visitor to see places at a glance to find out if they are worth visiting, or just for a browse of some nice photos.
Continue reading "Photo Mapping"
This prototype allows you to browse news headlines from the past. You can navigate to different days, the news articles for which are then listed in the order that they were published throughout the day. This might be useful for someone who has missed a day's worth of news, or who wants to research the events of a particular time period.
The prototype works by storing the contents of the last 50 published articles RSS feed in a database, the web page then allows you to navigate to a particular day, and view the articles.
Continue reading "BBC News Archive Explorer"
Shows the local news on a Google map, split up into each county (the news is obtained using the feeds for each county).
The data is cached on the server, so it may be slightly out of date (especially as it has to be updated manually at the moment).
This uses as Google map to show where the traffic problems and other public transport (trains at least) problems are.
The road data and other data can be viewed either on the same map or on seperate maps, and the pointers can be changed(!).
An interactive map showing the locations of Central London traffic cameras. You can pan and zoom the Google Map, and click on a camera marker to see the live AV feed.
Uses Gmaptrack (which uses Google Maps) to position the camera locations, and give the popup overlays showing the current camera images.
A map of the news. Well that was the plan but it's not as easy as I'd have hoped to work out where a news item comes from.
The system grabs the local feeds and tries to work out where the story came from. It does this by checking for nouns in the description tag of the RSS and scanning its database of places (that map to longitude and latitude).
Uses myGmaps (which uses Google Maps) to draw the news onto the map.
Note, it tends to fail miserably at working out where a news item is from, done as a proof of concept.
Having the BBC traffic information displayed on a interactive map really gives you a great feel for what's going on around the country. I think it would be especially useful if you were planning a long trip.
As a test, I hacked together a simple page which injects live traffic data supplied from the BBC into Google Maps.
Obviously this prototype is lacking many features, but it's a start.
I've developed a ticker style RSS News reader that allows users to load BBC News feeds, without refreshing the current web page.
My browser based web application has been built using Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) and requires no additional plugin. RSS news feeds are downloaded, parsed and fed to the web page's DOM using built in JavaScript functions. It can be embedded as a widget on an existing web page or restyled to fill the browser window.
When I have the time, I would like to add an alternate-style-sheet menu to allow users to change the application's look-and-feel.
I'm the author of a reasonable popular open source app called phplist. My app is capable of handling RSS sources and sending out regular emails. But there's no point setting it up to send BBC news emails, because your email service is already doing that and probably even better. But then I thought, inspired by the Bayesian spam filters of Mozilla mail (that I use) why not have a go at Bayesian news filtering. I am rather impressed with the success rate of my spam filter and all of that only based on a reasonably simple algorithm. So I rather quickly whacked up a prototype site of my system, with some advanced configuration in the emails that allows tagging news stories to be "interesting" or "not interesting" which can then be fed back to the system to update the Bayesian filters, and could be used to personalise the news stories from the BBC. After all, aren't we all receiving too much information anyway.
Continue reading "Bayesian News by Email"
We use rss feeds of the bbc to display news on maps.
We match names of countries to match the feed with locations. We will refine this so that we can do the same on a city level and can produce detailed maps (Britain, Europe Whatever we want.) The cool thing is that you can insert the map you have made on your own site by copy/pasting some HTML/javascript (try this link: http://worldmap66again.notlong.com)
This page let's you choose one of the BBC travel feeds and shows a simplified display of the content. Now, just before you leave work, you can check the area you travel through. This is a first stab at this, just for fun! Comments, ideas etc welcome.
Very simple RSS search. Brings together mutiple feeds into one file, searches for keyword and stores new stories (no repeats) ready for customised feed.
Technically, the feed is read in via java.net and processed as a DOM object. I do think however it would be quicker to process this using an XSLT transform as opposed to DOM iteration.. will test and see.
This is an auto-updating blog that automatically posts an entry each day comprised of:
1. historical metals & ftse data from a back-end database, plus a single "on this day" entry again from a back end database.
2. RSS feeds of Yahoo Business and BBC "On This Day"
3. Autogenerated Wikipedia URL
My blog entry explains and points to 2 prototypes - a tech news tag soup page and a business news tag page.
Both use BBC feeds (amongst others) in combination with the Yahoo Content Analysis service which generates keywords against the content of the BBC feeds.
I then use a bit of php/mysql jiggery-pokery to rank the popularity of certain phrases/keywords in order to present these two tagsoup pages:
http://www.justinflavin.com/tagsoup/tagsouprss.php
http://www.justinflavin.com/tagsoup/tagsoupfinance.php
Both pages are updated every 2 hours with some back-end cronjobs.
I've found that its a different way to browse the news headlines - rather than the headline , you're drawn to keywords.
We have developed a system for the IPB discussion software that will automatically check selected RSS feeds and post them in a specified forum for public discussion. The link above is demonstrating this with BBC feeds on our own site.
In our community forums we found people often posted links/snippets of BBC articles for discussion, so we took this as inspiration and created a system that does it automatically.
The system will work with any valid RSS feed; we have chosen to use several BBC feeds on our own site.
We have built a social bookmarking tool just for BBC News that allows logged in users to tag/bookmark stories and view related stories that other users have tagged using similar terms.
Continue reading "BBC Shared tags"
The idea is to turn the BBC World New Feed, or any other BBC feed, for that matter, into a "podcast". Podcasts are about audio content, and. in this case, the content is a speech-synthesized rendering of the original text.
I've been playing around with this idea for almost a year, using Creative Commons licensed feeds. But, as I understand your Terms of Use, you guys are saying it's ok for me to do this.
If so, many thanks!
Description
This is similar to the wiki proxy, but inside out: first it extracts people, places and things from the latest news stories, (using the Lingua::EN::NamedEntity Perl module) and then tells you which news stories refer to them - the result: which people, places and organisations are making the BBC news right now.
Lingua::EN::NamedEntity is far from perfect, and that's pretty much the major weakness in this prototype.
So the Today programme make their archive available, but have you ever tried finding anything in there beyond the latest broadcast? No, because you can't search it.
Well now you can.
[Made by BBC Staff]
I'd wanted to see the goodness of del.icio.us brought to the mainstream bbc.co.uk/news site.
I used a wikiproxy esque approach as displayed on http://wikiproxy.whitelabel.org/
key feature being
- anyone can add del.icio.us tags to any article
which allows me to:
- find news articles (on bbc.co.uk/news), based on my own tagging
- search by tag, to find what other people (or I) tagged
and allows the bbc to aggregate tags across users for a given article, which can then power
- top tags for any given article (metadata, navigation)
- related articles, based on the above
- related links, via del.icio.us based on top (similar) tags
then make it all time sensitive, which leads to a "user built" edition (vs uk/world)
for extra points, extend to any bbc.co.uk page
[Made by BBC Staff]
This demovelopment takes the xml data from the 'Project Storm' system (sample here) and will generate a 5 day forecast, split by continent, country and city.
This could be used to feed (with obvious changes in layout / interface / auto settings etc.) plasma or lcd screens anywhere in the world, providing local information.
As long as the Flash can see the data file either FTPed locally, or to a web server (can be password protected), this could update whenever the data file changes.
This is really just an example to show how the data could be extracted/displayed. A smaller version of this could easily work on the a mobile device like a PocketPC, however, some recipients of the data file may want to make it smaller to then make available for a PocketPC/XDA etc. Another potential use could be to parse the data file on the server (with PHP, Perl, etc) and then actually generate the graphics directly on the server to deliver. This could be Flash (swf), Jpegs, Gifs or Pngs.
Data for this project is supplied by the Met Office via BBC Weather.
[Made by BBC Staff]
Ok, this was submitted as an idea about 1/2 an hour ago, but I don't like hanging around :-P
The synopsis is to 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.
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.
Data can be used to visualise popular paths through bbc.co.uk
[Made by BBC Staff]
Okay, so this is a prototype I built a while ago and doesn't currently use any BBC feeds. However, it could certainly be integrated with postcoder, and just seems to me to be the sort of thing the BBC should be doing.
So, why? Digital photography is hugely popular, and there are already many sites out there that allow you to organise your photos in all sorts of clever ways, but none that I've seen geographically.
On the other hand, there's the Degree Confluence Project, which gives a fascinating picture of the globe, but can only really be contributed to by a few people and all the easy confluence points are long gone.
So the idea was, reduce the scale, remove the need for expensive GPS hardware, and let everyone out there contribute to a photographic portrait of the UK with all those photographs being presented geographically with a fancy zoomable interactive map thingy. The scale would be much finer than shown in the prototype, I was originally thinking you'd need two different scales, one for 'countryside' and another for towns/cities, though this could be a challenge in the interface.
There are different angles that could be taken - an artistic one with photos being rated by users and maybe prizes for the best, or a more practical one, say you wanted to move house, you could explore photos people have taken of the areas you were interested in them to get a flavour before having to actually travel (which is where integration with postcoder could come in very handy). I'm sure there's more.
Of course the main feed needed here is geographic map data which is not something I'm aware of the BBC having. It'd be nice if it did though.
[Made by BBC Staff]
This simple perl script (after all I only write simple perl scripts) scrapes the HTML of the BBC's Complaints site to produce an RSS feed of the BBC's published responses. It also scrapes each article to make the RSS feed a bit richer by including the opening couple of paragraphs of the BBC's response as the
I formatted it to RSS0.91 because that is what News use - however it may not always validate if there is HTML embedded in the articles themselves that I have failed to strip out.
In my short term "to do" list I'd like shoe-horn some sort of date-stamping of the publication date into the RSS, and learn how to cache it so it doesn't have to call all the pages on every request. Because that is dumb. And maybe include the original complaint to give it more context.
In the long term to improve it I'd get it generated automatically by Scoop like the Comedy blog has, but I forgot to specify it during the project :-)
[Made by BBC Staff]
Since the BBC (and everyone else) have a huge and readily updated array of RSS feeds, we should create more Macromedia Flash-based products which can read these feeds very easily. (BBC updated to RSS 2.0 on 14/03/05) these can be desktop products, embedded on webpages, or run on PocketPC devices.
There are many potential ways in which these could be presented. Here are just a few (see url). Also included there is a small application which searches Yahoo! via the Yahoo! Developers API
These products can also be simply turned into desktop applications with increased functionality, for such things as 'enclosure' downloading (a la 'podcatching') and potential for offline consumption of News too (like AvantGo - which has got worse)
http://blugg.com/bbc
SO: I propose a system incorporating ALL the USEFUL feeds/tools available to us from EVERYONE (not just BBC)
but presented in a Flash inteface. This will be available on the web (a la bloglines) and on the desktop (acting as a desktop aggregator)
Also a version would be made available for mobile platforms, primarily the PocketPC (supported by BBC)
ContentAggregation + Content 'organisation' + FEEDBACK TOOLS for live events + content creation/publishing/casting + search + sharing + community/citizen tools. Outlining/notetaking. Chat/shoutboxes etc.
News. Radio. TV. Trails. Shows. Blogs, Podcasts. EPG, ( http://blugg.com/epg ) all in a lovely nice brabded flashy interface, which many people LOVE.
Infotainment, News, Stories, Audio , Video, all in one place..
Customisable for all compatible feeds from external providers/apis
Internal functionality between the web and desktop version do not have to be that different in the Flash file.
It's possible to have the whole shebang in one Flash file, serving both situations (with the desktop version only responding to the desktop specific functions - ie: downloading / syncing to portable players / recording av (though this is possible with Macromedia's FlashCommunication Server over the web)
And lets not forget that we would expose an API for users and developers OF this system, promoting development, thought, understanding, 'system appreciation' with XML/RSS at the heart of the whole system.
Shall I draw a picture? ;)
here's another example of feeds and flash in 'harmony' :
http://www.blugg.com/bbc/LCD1/WSHTON7.html
[Made by BBC STaff]
Since we have a huge and readily updated array of RSS feeds, we should create more Macromedia Flash-based products which can read these feeds very easily. (BBC updated to RSS 2.0 on 14/03/05) these can be desktop products, embedded on webpages, or run on PocketPC devices.
There are many potential ways in which these could be presented. Here are just a few (see url)
Also included there is a small application which searches Yahoo! via the Yahoo! Developers API
These products can also be simply turned into desktop applications with increased functionality, for such things as 'enclosure' downloading (a la 'podcatching')
and potential for offline consumption of News too (like AvantGo - which has got worse)
http://blugg.com/bbc
[Made by BBC Staff]
This rather crude prototype splices the RSS feed of the BBC News World Edition Index page with World 66’s "Visited Countries" map http://www.world66.com/myworld66/visitedCountries to produce a real-time picture of which countries are in the BBC’s news headlines.
The script parses the BBC’s RSS feed, then pattern matches across the headline and description of a story in the feed to look for the names of countries. It then constructs the query string to generate a World 66 Visited Countries map, and pulls that into a frameset so that it can be displayed alongside a list of the headlines from the feed. The headlines link back to BBC News and open the correct story in a new window.
The perl script can be downloaded and the programming mocked at http://www.currybet.net/download/where_is_the_news.pl
In an ideal world the map would be a nice flash-based interface, and would have the headlines of the relevant stories as tool tips if you hovered over them. Instead of simply being green or red it would be nice to have shading so that countries that had more stories written about them would appear darker.
What I would really like to do is make countries with no news about them disappear off the map completely, so that you saw a different outline of the world’s land masses depending on the current news agenda.
(Oh, and someone would solve the problem of semantically understanding that "US Troops Shoot Italian Hostage In Iraq" isn’t set in three different countries. And it would recognize that a news headline about Paris means it is in France)
[made by BBC Staff]
m int i s n ot t ext. (mint is a video bloggers friend.) download, merge and index video clips from a distributed source.. currently the mint prototype runs on a home machine (linux). but needs a bbc box to run on and a license to run commercial encoding software.
[Made by BBC Staff]
This was done by parsing the the BBC News RSS feed for the 'In Pictures' section. Then the actual gallery page is 'scraped' for the block of html which controls the Javascript, and this is then turned into another XML file (well-formed html!) which feeds the Flash slideshow here.
To start, just click on one of the titles and the slideshows will loop from there.
[Made by BBC Staff]
Being the bling bling kinda guy I am, I've got the fancy laptop and I've got the online PDA/Smartphone combo device. I love reading BBC News on both.
But being the slave drivers the BBC are, I find myself travelling home late at night on the tube. There's scary people on there man, people who want to steal "my precious".
So, I decided I wanted to make a script that would produce a printable digest of all of today's news. If someone wants to theive a few pages of A4 from me, they're welcome to it.
I produced BBC News and Sport digest to do this. Yeah, I even included BBC Sport despite the fact I don't use it much (just to keep Chris R and Ben G happy!).
Have a go, let me know what you think.
(Yes, I do know that requesting "-1" number of stories breaks it! What were you expecting??!??)
