Puffbox

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?

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 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?

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.

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. 😉

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.