What was on TV the day you were born?

I’m not sure whether to be impressed by the BBC’s new online Programme Catalogue. On the surface, and a pretty ugly surface it is too, it’s just a web front-end on an impressive database. If there’s something worth celebrating, it’s the fact that people have been doing such sterling work maintaining the database in the first place. (One interesting aside, though: according to ex-BBCer Tom Coates, it’s built using Ruby On Rails. I haven’t seen that mentioned widely.)

Dig a little deeper, though, and there’s a gem of a function struggling to get out. Ever wondered what was on TV the day you were born? Take this example – http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/infax/on_this_day/1985/7/13 (Live Aid day, not the day I was born) – and change the year, month and day at the end. Cool. But I wonder how many visitors to the site will have spotted it?

England manager farce

The homepage of England's Football Association includes news feeds from both the Press Association and the BBC. The top story on the PA feed: 'FA offers England job to Scolari'. The top story on the BBC feed: 'FA chiefs offer Scolari England job'. Guess what… no mention whatsoever among the FA's own choice of lead stories. Ridiculous.

Sky brings the web to your TV (again)

Sky is back in the internet-via-set-top-box game, with the launch of its Sky Net service. There’s plenty of information about it in Tracy Swedlow’s interview with its boss, Ian Valentine. He claims to have 600 sites ‘registered’ with the new service, which uses WTVML (oh great, another markup standard) to deliver a web-like experience to your telly. Yes, we have heard most of this before, with the ill-fated ‘Open…’. But Valentine reckons that Sky Net is different:

The thing about Open… was that it tried to compete with the Internet rather than work with it, and as such it wasn’t open at all. Open… wanted to build and host a service for you…  basically, they created your storefront, and charged a lot of money to do so. It just wasn’t competitive with the Internet. What we’re doing now costs very little, and allows companies to leverage their existing e-commerce offerings.

The ‘launch services’ aren’t especially inspiring at first glance, offering a web-lite kind of experience – driven, for now at least, by a dial-up internet connection, and charged at local-call rate. I just don’t accept that tech-savvy ‘early adopters’ will appreciate the convenience of surfing the internet from the living room sofa; certainly not at dial-up speed.

This is what Sky Digital probably should have done five or perhaps even ten years ago. But they didn’t, and both the market and user expectations have moved on. I’m not even sure there’s room at the bottom of the market for this. You can have a perfectly good Dell PC, including a flat LCD screen, delivered to your door for under £300; and Carphone Warehouse will give you ‘free’ broadband. Who needs this?

BBC plans: 'oh dear, oh dear'

Everyone’s getting very excited about Ashley Highfield‘s latest pronouncement about turning the BBC website into Myspace – ‘We are looking to a world where you could share BBC programmes, your own thoughts, your own blogs and your own home videos. It allows you to create your own space and to build bbc.co.uk around you.’

Well, everyone except Euan Semple, who – up until a few weeks ago – would have been the BBC’s guru on web-based community-building. ‘I am struggling with how to respond,’ he writes in his post on the subject… but the title rather betrays his true feelings.

Eating your own dogfood

Robert Scoble’s moonshot thesis has attracted a lot of attention. In it, Microsoft’s most famous blogger talks about ‘the angst that surrounds Microsoft’. Among his five ideas to revitalise the company: ‘buy every employee a top-of-the-line Dell machine with dual monitors running Windows Vista. And do it now.’ There’s some sense in this; how can your own people evangelise your products (at their reputed best) when they don’t get to use them for themselves?
(Microsoft has its own language. They talk about ‘eating your own dogfood’ – which is the perfectly laudable principle of using your own products before forcing them on other people. It works fine inside the company – but not outside. There’s simply no context in which dogfood can be made to sound appetising.)
Then you see something like this: statistics which suggest that 90% of search traffic coming out of Microsoft’s headquarters is to Google. (Certainly that would tally with my experience of Microsoft’s UK HQ.) So, taking Robert’s logic one step further… it’s time for Microsoft to block access to Google from its internal network. Force people to use MSN Search, or Live.com, or Windows Live Search, or whatever it’s called these days. And if they don’t like it, well, they’re in the right place to offer some very direct (and literally in-your-face) feedback. 😉

UK government's new CIO

Government IT has a new boss: John Suffolk, the current head of Criminal Justice IT. Apparently, ‘he has a background of over 25 years’ experience in IT and major transformation programmes. John has worked in the financial service industries and has extensive experience in delivering IT–enabled change.’ Let’s see how long the smile stays on his ‘“face”‘. (I don’t know why the Cabinet Office felt it needed three inverted commas.)

Octoshape – P2P video streaming

Ireland's ice hockey team is currently competing in the world championships. The international game is separated into graded groups, and Ireland are in the basement batch with the likes of Luxembourg, Iceland and Turkey. Understandably since there isn't actually an ice rink in (the Republic of) Ireland.
The games, taking place in Reykjavik, are being broadcast live in video, using a technology I hadn't come across before. Octoshape is a plugin for Windows Media Player (and others), which brings peer-to-peer distribution to media streaming. And the results are impressive – as long as your machine can handle the memory impact (up to 40MB in my experience).
As the Danish company claims, it stands to make video streaming affordable for small-scale broadcasters and producers… like, in this case, 'minority' sports. Forget all the coverage of Ashley Highfield's latest 'BBC 2.0' vision statement: this is where the real cutting edge lies.
Things aren't looking good for the Irish, having lost 6-0 to the (previously) bottom-ranked Armenia – come on you boys in green! You can see their remaining games, or test out the technology, from this IIHA page or Octoshape's site. The tournament continues until Saturday.

Tony Blair's PowerPoint palaver

I wonder what Presentation Zen would make of Tony Blair's PowerPoint use. I half-watched the PM's monthly press conference this lunchtime, and couldn't help noticing that although he was referring to presentation slides describing NHS reform, the TV cameras refused to include them in frame. Helpfully, Downing St posted the slides as a PDF file… and suddenly, I'm grateful to the TV galleries. Ouch.
A few hints for those in charge of the country:

  • Be Consistent In what you give capital Letters To. Otherwise It Looks really Odd. I mean, 'Department of health'?
  • Grids of numbers, even small grids, and especially when projected on big screens, can't be quickly digested. Just don't do it.
  • If your slides have full sentences on them – they shouldn't. Ever. It's a presentation, not a document.
  • Sixteen lines of text per slide is too many. Some , like Seth Godin, would even say: 'No more than six words on a slide. EVER.' (See his free PDF book, or this interview with fellow PPT guru Cliff Atkinson.)
  • What's happening at the bottom of slide #9? 'baseli…Progress…arget'?

The best slides in the set – by far – are the two dominated by charts – particularly #3, showing the drop in 'Number of Patients Waiting more than 6 months' (not my capitalisation). I can barely read the Y-axis, and I can't see any of the underlying figures – but that's the point. Slides are there for their visual effect. They are at their best when conveying one single message… in this case, 'down down down'. In a split second, I get the message of this slide. The same simply can't be said of (most of) the rest.

A decade of disintermediation

Dave Winer quotes a piece by Scott Karp: “But what happens if big company brands realize that they no longer need a media middleman to connect with consumers?” Well, forget the ‘if’. Some of us already did realise – a decade ago.

I was lucky enough to begin my career in new media with a ‘big company brand’: namely, Her Britannic Majesty’s Government, and specifically its Diplomatic Service. Think of it as a big company brand, backed by nuclear weapons. 🙂 As far back as 1996 (or thereabouts), I remember giving presentations to diplomats heading overseas to do press and communication work, in which I would describe how the internet would ‘cut out the middle man’ (my exact words) in terms of getting political messages from government to government.

Working in government actually does have certain advantages. There’s no (direct) pressure over commercial targets, or cashflow. And with virtually all the material from UK government sources being Crown Copyright – allowing (nearly) unlimited re-use – we didn’t have the same psychological or financial hurdles to overcome. ‘Let’s get it out there.’ And we did.

So, as one might say: bing. A full ten years ago. Oh yeah, and remind me to tell the story one day of how I (co-)invented blogging back in 1998.

Govt tells the positive side of ID cards – finally!

Is it any wonder that the whole debate around ID cards is entirely negative, when the justification is entirely negative? We need ID cards to stop terrorist attacks happening, or to stop fraud, or stop illegal immigration. Stop, stop, stop. All negative. So I’m actually quite encouraged to see this piece on silicon.com quoting a written Commons statement by Des Browne, chief secretary to the Treasury:

The IPS should be responsible for developing the national identity register (NIR) as an adult population database. Over time public sector systems, business processes and culture should be adapted to use the NIR as the definitive source of contact details in the longer term.

Wouldn’t that be a great thing? If you ever need to fill in an official form, or if you move house, all you would have to worry about is your ‘unique ID reference number’. Wait a minute… it gets better.

Until the NIR is up and running the Treasury said it should be a priority for HM Revenue and Customs and the Department for Work and Pensions to look at short-term arrangements for wider use of the National Insurance number and ways to better share personal information.

YES! Finally someone notices that we already have a (more or less) comprehensive system of unique ID numbers, which would provide a head start at the very least.

Disclosure: I lobbied pretty hard in favour of this whilst working for the Office for National Statistics a few years ago. I’d love to take credit for this, but.. 🙂