Matt Jones is the subject of a long and quite serious interview about information architecture for news at Online Journalism Review. This is all very interesting but the best thing is that they’ve used one of my accidentally distressed photos taken at XCom 2002 to illustrate the piece! I hope this has now become Matt’s standard publicity shot.
Problems with Azeem’s BPL idea
Azeem’s BPL idea will encounter many obstacles on its way to the mainstream:
1. How far downstream does the BPL go? If you require content and app developers to embed the BPL in all derivitive product (as the pure GPL requires), there is no limit. This will alienate businesses who don’t want their work to inherit the BPL. It would be better to allow developers to use BBC material without publishing their own source – a sort of one-way GPL that would permit bigger, more conservative organisations to play.
2. The whole thing is going to be extremely hard to explain to almost anyone, let alone to BBC Governors, management, regulators and media. It’s easy to imagine the project going nowhere if entrenched interests succeed in characterising it as something geeky, something to do with computers – or, worse, as some kind of weirdo collectivism, detached from reality – “meanwhile, back in the real world.” How would it play in The Daily Mail and the rest of the Conservative media, already hostile to the Beeb?
3. Competitors – many badly knocked around by the crash – will only approve if the effect of the BPL is to reduce the BBC’s overall share of audience. The scheme should be engineered to achieve this, not to cement the BBC as the sole source of quality content and code in the UK or as the hub of an emerging content network.
4. As a starting project Digital IDs are tricky. Anyone issuing hard IDs like the ones envisaged by Azeem will be perceived as an arm of government. No one would believe for a minute that there were no Government-mandated back doors. It might be better to stop short of hard authentication and start with credentials: ‘I’m over 18’, ‘I live in the UK so I’m entitled to get BBCi content for nothing’, ‘I’m under 14 so I can enter the CBBC Chat Rooms’… These simpler IDs, if widely adopted, would be a trojan horse for the real thing.
Redefining ‘Public Service’ at BBCi
Azeem thinks we should try to apply open source thinking to the BBC. He thinks the Beeb’s online content and code should be freely published under the GPL – the radical constitution of the copyleft movement. The effect of this – if it worked – would be to bring into being a thriving new ‘creative commons’ downstream of the beeb, built on the BBC’s stock of content and application logic. This might just be the boost that UK Online needs to beat the bust and overcome the natural pessimism produced by nearly three years of market misery. More important, it might also represent the first serious attempt to update the definition of ‘public service’ for the networked era.
So why is this interesting? Isn’t open source just a geek fad? Actually, I think it might help us advance the debate about the BBC in the digital era. Arguments about the BBC’s role – the charter, the license fee, public service vs ratings etc. – are especially dry and boring these days. With Dyke in charge, Labour in power and OfCom barred from regulating the Beeb directly, the corporation is more-or-less bulletproof. Even Rupert Murdoch’s ‘untouchable‘ outburst struck a plaintive note. Open source might short-circuit these old-world arguments and help us get a productive argument about public service in the twenty-first century going again.
Azeem’s idea is focused not on ownership (privatise it, usually – yawn) or on output (cut it back to an explicitly public service core, privatise the rest – double yawn) but on creation. By promising to stimulate the online creative economy in the middle of the nastiest crash in recent history, an Open Source BBCi might bring to life a whole new ecosystem – like the independent TV production sector that rallied around the new Channel 4 in the eighties. If it works, we’ll have ourselves a useful model for the redefinition of public service in other areas of the Beeb’s output and perhaps for Government investment in interactivity – ‘Broadband Britain’, UK Online and so on – in general.
W3C Web Services standards
Werbach links to the W3C’s draft web services standards.
Motorists out of control
Catherine Bennett, in The Guardian, asks “who dares to stand up to the motorists?”
The motoring lobby had been protesting, like so many schoolboys banned from baking their conkers, that concealed speed cameras were a rotten swizz. Or, as the AA put it, “unfair”. The Sun said they were “sneaky”. They did not, drivers complained, give them a “sporting chance” of slowing down, before speeding off again.”
Forty years ago Jane Jacobs showed how speeding traffic destroys street life (in The Death and Life of the Great American Cities) and also how you can win it back by slowing the traffic down. In those forty years we’ve learnt nothing. Worse, we’ve surrendered our streets to the cars entirely and now we have to put up with their owners whinging continually about ‘hidden’ speed cameras while the pedestrians cower, stranded on the pavement.
Making of the Macintosh
I’ve used and owned Macs since 1985. Although they’re pretty hip again these days (after a miserable decade or so of grim, beige things), the core of the Mac userbase is like me: old gits with hair growing out of their ears. We’re stuck in our ways and we can’t change now so that’s that. The nice people at Stanford University Library are attempting a proper history of the machine’s early days (as part of a larger project documenting Silicon Valley itself). There’s some genuinely fascinating material here – memos, early sketches, engineering drawings, first person recollections. Thanks to LinkMachineGo for linking to The Making of Macintosh. Incidentally, I learn that, over the years, I’ve owned five of the Ten Worst Macs Ever. I’m selling two of them: an ugly all-in-one Performa 5320 and a lamentably underpowered IIvx, in case you’re interested.
Bioinformatics links
Proof for posterity
Via warmbrain and Karlin Lillington I learn about a marvelous idea from supporters of Project Gutenberg: Distributed Proofreaders. It’s got to be worth a few minutes of your day to proof a page or two of OCR output for the utterly worthy archive of out-of-copyright literature (whose collection is receding into the past as fast as the US Supreme Court can push it). Incidentally, I remember writing about Project Gutenberg in 3W Magazine about nine years ago.
Mememap
Er… Something tells me I’m a bit slow off the mark here but this mindmap of current memes looks pretty useful. I was just struggling to name the ‘space’ described by the map but, of course, the map pretty much takes care of that itself and, like all good maps, is irreducible. So I won’t bother. I bet you could plan your next business venture/career change using this.
Grocery heroes
The people at Ocado seem to have got it about right. With the help of a substantial investment from Waitrose, they’ve built a home delivery service that doesn’t require you to know exactly how to spell ‘brocolli’, that delivers for nothing if you spend over £75, that allows you to book slots in one hour increments and that delivers at 10 p.m. if you forget about Olly’s football practice and can’t be in when you said you would… If grocery delivery is going to work it’ll probably be these guys.