Archive for 'bbc'
How can a website cost £35m? Easily.
The BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones clearly doesn't read this blog. His big story this morning is on the cost associated with the BusinessLink website: much as I predicted in my immediate analysis of the COI data a fortnight ago. Rory was casting around on Twitter yesterday for interviewees: I know my name was put forward by [...] read on »
Oi BBC, don’t you dare diss my legacy
The BBC published a very nicely balanced, sober article yesterday by Brian Wheeler, noting the 'web revolution sweeping Whitehall'. It's been widely retweeted around the e-gov community, and is being seen as highly complimentary of civil service efficiency. Which makes it all the more curious to see the pictures they've chosen to illustrate the story: [...] read on »
Code your own BBC News homepage
The BBC has announced plans to switch off its low-graphic websites: The low graphics version of the site was designed as a low bandwidth alternative to the full website at a time when most users of the site were using slow dial-up connections. Now, most of our users are on much faster broadband connections and [...] read on »
BBC sounds death-knell for left-hand nav
There's a fascinating (and lengthy) post on the BBC's internet blog, setting the scene for a forthcoming 'post-2.0' redesign of its web presence. It's a design geek's paradise - global visual languages, grid systems, typography and colour palettes. Intriguingly, they start their potted history of the BBC website with a screenshot from December 1997. My [...] read on »
BBC iPlayer back on Wii: a tipping point?
The BBC's new iPlayer 'app' for the Wii is now available for download: and it has the potential to do amazing things to UK viewing habits. Thus far, if you wanted to watch iPlayer via your Nintendo Wii (and your wireless broadband connection), there was a web-based interface, not dissimilar to iplayer/bigscreen - which was [...] read on »
Why the fork does the BBC need its own jQuery?
Of course it's good news that the BBC's in-house Javascript library, Glow has been released as open source. It's a very respectable chunk of code, with some quite nice built-in widgetry. But why on earth should the BBC have its own Javascript library in the first place? Its 'lead product manager' - itself a worrying [...] read on »
Our top story: government web video
It isn't every evening that a video clip from a government website features prominently on the main evening news. Except this week. Last night, it was the Treasury's YouTube clip of Alastair Darling preparing for tomorrow's Budget: nothing too spectacular, nice visual wallpaper for the story. Tonight, the PM's announcement of changes to MPs' expenses [...] read on »
David Lammy, Twitter expert
It came as a bit of a shock this evening, when BBC1's The One Show started talking about Twitter, that reporter Gyles Brandreth's first port of call was Kingsgate House on Victoria Street, home of DIUS and minister David Lammy. With traffic up by a factor of three this year already, Twitter's certainly a hot [...] read on »
BBC anger at DCSF data formats
BBC News website editor Steve Herrmann is not happy. In previous years, the Beeb site has carried full school league table data, as soon as the embargo is lifted at 09:30am. But not this year. 'This is because the government has tightened up on the media's pre-release access to official statistics,' he explains. 'In the [...] read on »
Home Of The Future at High St prices
Never has a nail been hit more squarely on its head than when Charles Arthur wrote his Guardian piece last week about how 'The digital home hub is finally happening': [Gates and Jobs's] vision is coming true. Except that it's not the computer they thought which is at the hub. It's a rather different one [...] read on »