May 2004 Archives
May 28, 2004
BBC Upfront for existing staff
So this week I spent three days being re-baptised by the BBC. As part of Greg's "Making It Happen" initiative within the BBC, it became apparent that staff felt they hadn't been sufficiently inducted into the organisation. The outcome was the "Upfront" scheme. Every new joiner (apparently including Michael Grade) at the BBC gets to spend one of their first weeks in a four day residential induction programme in London or Glasgow, which covers TV, Radio and Online. All new...
May 20, 2004
Martin Belam talk at ASLIB KIMNET Meeting
or "How To Talk The Hind Legs Off A Donkey" - I did go on a bit today. Today I gave a talk about "Classification & Taxonomy Within BBC New Media" for the ASLIB KIMNET special interest group, at their May meeting - held at the Patent Office. The first part of my presentation consisted of an updated 'greatest hits' version of several of my presentations, covering the majority of the projects I have worked on or paid attention...
Lazy Evening Standard Internet journalism (Number #36 in a seemingly never-ending series)
There was a great Evening Standard 'Internet' feature splashed over page 3 of the paper today. Revolution online will change way we buy music It is the hi-tech music revolution about to take Britain by storm. And it could mean the end of the record shops and change the way we buy music forever. Napster, the company that pioneered illegal music downloading, today launched a service in Britain that will operate inside the law. That's right, a legal Napster...
Andy is back...and blogging?
Someone has set up an "Andy Kaufman Returns" blog - and Yahoo! News are reporting the content as fact: "Twenty years ago, on May 16, 1984, most of the world believed that we had lost a comedic legend forever. This has turned out to be what will inevitably be known as the greatest comic prank ever conceived. Andy Kaufman, by all accounts, is alive and well at age 55 and is now living in New York City on the...
May 17, 2004
Radio Five Live Veteran's Vote
"Over the weekend it became clear that the vote on the website was being attacked, and the sheer volume of fictitious votes meant it had to be taken down to protect the rest of the BBC website." And with those words this morning, Radio Five Live Breakfast presenter Shelagh Fogarty explained how my weekend had turned from a planned quiet one taking in the Eurovision Song Contest, a film and a relaxed braai, to one where I was on...
Spam Poison in my logfiles
Is it just me, or is the irony of advertising your anti-spam product "spam poison" by spamming my logfiles lost on the makers of this email harvester tar-pit?Apparently not, as a bit of digging around shows I'm not the only one to have suspicions about Spam Poision...
May 16, 2004
Andy Kaufman - dead or alive?
20 years to the day after his 'death', Comic Relief are tonight staging a tribute to Andy. The rules of the event are pretty stict: "This is a non-televised event. No cameras or recording devices will be permitted. Tickets are non-transferable and photo I.D. is required. Audience members will not be allowed to enter or leave the theater during the last 30 minutes of Andy Kaufman - Dead or Alive?". Tony Clifton is singing, but will Andy himself appear?...
May 15, 2004
Another one bites the dust
First Greg, and now Piers. Another Editor-in-Chief in the UK loses their jobs for allowing allegations of mis-doings in the "War-in-Iraq-affair" to be broadcast or published without sufficient fact checking to prove the stories are correct. Without wanting to rake up old ground, it's just a shame the same standard of fact checking doesn't seem to apply if you publish front page stories supporting the official line on the war. For example, The Evening Standard on 24 September 2002...
May 14, 2004
Adobe? Never heard of them says Google
Just a small, and mostly fixed glitch, but it looks like some bright spark webmasters found a way to exploit an overly-trusting Google to automatically remove someone from the search results if you search for their domain. If the site in question doesn't have have an index.html or index.htm page at the root level, asking for these pages to be removed results in the domain getting the dread PageRank 0 penalty on its homepage, and a null results page...
May 13, 2004
Six Apart at the BBC
Today at BBC Television Centre we had a visit from a coterie of people from, or connected to, Six Apart, the company behind Movable Type & Typepad. They gave an overview of their products and future strategy to an audience of people who were mostly active bloggers who happened to be BBC staff - most of whom were later on going to the London Bloggers meet-up doo-dah. The presentation was led by Loic Le Meur with Heiko Hebig and consultant...
May 11, 2004
London Elects - thumbs up
Wow! e-government is usually pretty damn shonky - but London Elects is impressive. It actually does a good job of explaining how to cope with the fact that as a Londoner I have five different things to vote for on June 10th, and what the different electoral systems are. Plus it gives information in 20 languages - 19 in PDF format, 14 in HTML. Just a shame I expect we'll still see the lowest turnout in history - and...
May 9, 2004
Walthamstow Stadium on the BBC.co.uk homepage
It must be my lucky week, but after the promotion for Eurostars, now I see my home town is getting the promo slot on the BBC.co.uk homepage. (Well, it is in the background anyway) Behind James Nesbitt is the neon light fascia of the local dog track, one of the landmarks of E17. You can get a better view in this Murphy's Law desktop wallpaper image....
May 6, 2004
BBC.co.uk arrives
The BBCi website became bbc.co.uk today. I'm dead chuffed that the last old-style BBCi promo, and first BBC.co.uk promo, was for the Eurostars vote - which closes at 2pm tomorrow - the results will be broadcast on May 31st....
Googling for ever
Metro today had an tiny article about the KnowItAll search engine project. The item opened: "Googling could become a thing of the past if an all-powerful search engine under construction becomes reality." I'm not so sure myself - I think 'Googling' is here to stay - after all, we still Hoover our houses with our Dyson Vacuum Cleaners....