Hashtags on programmes – It’s the bat signal!

Mark Kobayashi-Hillary, writing for ComputerWeekly this week, has picked up on the BBC displaying a hashtag at the start of the new series of Have I Got News For You and said some very nice and insightful things about it: …when the BBC started broadcasting episode 1 of series 40 of ‘Have I got news […]

Twitter and The Apprentice – some quick observations

I wrote last year about the ‘data flood’ that confronts you if you try to watch what everyone on Twitter is saying about the Apprentice. Well, it’s back, and more talked about than ever. This isn’t surprising of course. Twitter has grown a lot since March last year, and people will always talk about what’s […]

Mark Thompson’s MacTaggart Lecture: it’s about services

Mark Thompson delivered this year’s MacTaggart memorial lecture earlier tonight. The best bit? …The clue actually is in the title – public service broadcasting. It’s about services as well as individual programmes. At its best public service broadcasting is woven of whole cloth. And, just like the wicked old British Library, it’s founded on the […]

BeeBCamp 3

The first BeeBCamp was about 14 months ago (here’s what it’s all about and here’s what happened at that first one). Today’s was the third such event, and opened up not only to more non-BBC guests than the previous one, but also to people who don’t happen to work in London. We had live video […]

Inside the brain of Adam Curtis

I don’t often talk about work projects, but I cant hold my tongue about this one. I’ve been rather excited about it for a while, and it went live today. Adam Curtis is the documentary filmmaker behind ‘The Power of Nightmares‘, ‘The Century of the Self‘ and more. Recently, he’s done some pieces for Screenwipe […]

Alternatives to ‘UGC’

I’ve started reading the research paper on User Generated Content undertaken by Cardiff University and the BBC. ugc@thebbc: Understanding its impact upon contributors, non-contributors and BBC News. The study involved 10 weeks of ethnographic shadowing in BBC newsrooms, interviews with 115 journalists and 12 senior managers, analysis of a range of radio and television broadcasts […]

Apprentice Live Predictor

For the next hour I’ll mainly be watching the Apprentice. Except I won’t. Not just watching anyway. A few weeks ago, I talked about the Apprentice and Twitter and if you’re anything like me, you generally watch TV with a laptop open. This is sometimes known as a ‘second screen’ experience (I even recently heard […]

Apprentice + Twitter = data flood

Series 5 of The Apprentice started on BBC One last night. Wondering what the web would be saying about it, I enjoyed the two-screen experience by watching the programme on TV while also looking down at a laptop on my lap with tabs open on Anna Pickard’s live blog on the Guardian, the Apprentice message […]

Steve Bowbrick, the BBC’s critical friend

For the past seven months, Steve Bowbrick has been exploring the BBC from the inside. Last night, Nick Reynolds (Editor, internet blog) invited Steve to share his findings. First, Steve’s short lecture in which he described openness as An uncomplicated, generous use of license fee funding to generate content and code, as well as sharing […]