Puffbox

This was on the cards for some time… the BBC has (finally!) announced a deal to put ‘short clips of BBC content’ on three Youtube channels – one for news, which will carry advertising and hence won’t be available to UK viewers; and two for entertainment, one for promotional ‘DVD extra’ kind of stuff, and one for longer clips from the BBC archive. The deal will run for ‘several’ years, and is non-exclusive. Ashley Highfield is quite clear on it though: it’s purely a promotional channel for the Beeb, not a full-on distribution mechanism.

As such, it’s not a particularly exciting announcement (in itself). ‘Controversially,’ says BBC news itself, ‘the BBC Worldwide page – adverts and all – can be seen in the UK.’ This might work out as the thin end of a wedge, but I don’t imagine people manning barricades over it. From my own perspective, I’m trying to get a high-profile client to bite the Youtube bullet at the moment, and this should help.

Sky News is absolutely loving this ‘contaminated petrol‘ story. The Sky News Centre (if they still call it that?) is located just off the A4 in west London, right next to a big Tesco’s – which, conveniently, has a petrol station. As you can see from this map, the two couldn’t really be closer together.

So it’s time to come clean, guys… all these live reports from ‘West London’ are actually from that very same Tesco’s, on your very doorstep. If the camera’s battery pack runs out, you could probably run a household extension cable out one of the fire doors. To be honest, once you know the area, it’s amazing how much is actually filmed in the immediate vicinity…

BT Tradespace is a project, launched a few weeks ago, which hadn’t come onto my radar until today. Currently in beta, it’s ‘a new service by BT to enable small businesses to create an online presence in minutes, with no technical knowledge needed, that they can use to promote themselves using blogging, podcasting, photos, and many other features.’

Translation: it comes across as a Myspace kind of thing, driven by Microsoft’s Sharepoint technology, with a bit of Digg thrown in. The heart of the service is the blogging component, labelled ‘News & views’ – presumably so as not to scare the non-tech audience away. There are components for photo sharing, events calendars, and ‘featured items’ – plus the ability to upload podcasts, which is surely beyond most of their target audience? Lots of RSS feeds everywhere too, which (of course) we like. Microsoft’s Virtual Earth mapping is built in, and you can have the site owner’s ‘business card’ sent to you by email or text message. There’s also the ability to make a free phone call to the site owner… but I haven’t investigated it yet.

I’ve actually had real trouble getting into it. Mostly, that was my foolish preference for Firefox; a quick switch to IE, and it all worked nicely. (Only to be expected from a Sharepoint-based system, I suppose.) But partly also because I know how these things work already, and I’m looking for the established – admittedly geeky – jargon. Still, everything seems to be there, albeit sometimes under a different name.

It’s an interesting project – still in its earliest days, with membership only just into three digits. But it costs nothing to sign up to… so why not give it a shot? Get in there quick, and grab yourname.bttradespace.com while you still can.

The BBC has started an Election 07 blog, with the ‘political editors from across the UK’ covering developments ‘throughout the Assembly and Parliament elections’. Currently it’s dominated by next week’s Northern Ireland elections, and hence by NI political editor, Mark Devenport. To an Ulster native like myself, that makes it extra interesting – but I can imagine it turning off a lot of people. Ulster politics is an acquired taste, and is almost certainly incomprehensible to the outsider. I don’t think it works to lump it in with Scotland and Wales.

The guys at the Telegraph deserve a nod for their marking of St David’s Day…

Dydd Gwyl Dewi Hapus to all our Welsh viewers. Now, please do us a favour and sort out the train line around Newport. I spent far too long there, before and after my beloved Arsenal’s Carling Cup Final appearance on Sunday.

Now, what do we get for St Paddy’s, chaps?

I’ve been having a few problems with a Netgear wireless network base unit. With the normal support channels not really helping me, I resorted to contacting the Customer Service staff. The Netgear UK website declares:

Should you have any customer service issues, please feel free to contact UK Customer Services at: [email protected]. Please allow up to 24 hours for a response during normal business hours Monday to Friday. Please note that the team responding to this email address are not technical support.

I did contact them. And more than two and a half weeks later, despite numerous follow-ups, I’m still waiting for an acknowledgement of my complaint. There’s a serious problem with either the website editing, or the company’s concept of Customer Service. Neither should be excusable.

Update: would you believe it, I’ve just had a response, and a very positive one too. See, the power of blogging? 😉

Yes Charles, yes Alan, I’m sure your new initiative is purely about provoking a policy discussion within the Labour Party. I’m sure it’s got nothing whatsoever to do with the leadership question.

Others will be much better placed to talk about the politics of this. I’ve finally managed to find the website, and it’s located at www.the2020vision.org.uk. I can imagine a few completely unrelated websites suddenly seeing an increase in traffic: such as Andrell Education, or this US initiative on energy security. Both 2020vision.org.uk and 2020vision.co.uk have been registered, but neither presents a website – which is going to confuse a lot of people. At least if you saw the wrong site, you’d know you were in the wrong place.

The site itself is running on the Expression Engine blogging platform, so there’s lots of scope for comments on site content – when eventually there is any site content. Currently it’s very sparse indeed – everything seems to be ‘coming soon’. According to the homepage there’s no news, no speeches, no policy papers.

But Charles Clarke’s launch speech promises:

We will post speeches, articles, policy papers and blogs which address these matters. We’ll start on Friday with the subject of identity management, about which a Channel 4 Film, the Insider, is being broadcast on Friday evening. The website will link to all those which address the debates about our political future, and it will stimulate involvement and engagement from individuals throughout the country. And the2020vision will organise throughout the country events to encourage and stimulate discussion and debate about these political and policy questions. Our funding, from donations, will be published on the website and declared to all the relevant statutory bodies.

It doesn’t yet look like a great experiment in social networking or collaborative authoring, or anything like that. The platform is certainly capable of it, though. Whether that’s really where their focus lies is, of course, still to be seen.

Complaining about the outdated list of RSS-consuming methods in The Times reminds me of something I meant to flag up before. ReadWriteWeb has analysis, based on two (admittedly contradictory) sources, of the most popular web-based RSS readers. It looks like Google Reader has taken over from Bloglines as the number one, apparently by a significant degree. The global figure would seem to be backed up by the data for this particular patch, with Google Feedfetcher now topping my own feed stats.

Personally I’ve stuck with Bloglines thus far… it does what I want it to do. The only reason I might want to switch over to Google is because I use all their other stuff – mail, search, etc – as my default choice.

I don’t want to be picky… actually, who am I kidding, I live for picky. But I don’t really understand why The Times (of London) feels the need to reinvent the industry-standard RSS icon.

Actually, it seems symptomatic of a general not-getting-it: they haven’t thought to include auto-detection of feeds in the appropriate places, and their feeds themselves are not compliant with the standards. The feeds don’t declare themselves as XML in the first line – and since there’s no character set specified, it fails the classic UK site test: can it do pound signs? (It can’t. And surely they checked that? Don’t headlines in the business feed typically include a pound sign?) Plus there’s no such language code as ‘en-uk’; rightly or wrongly it’s officially ‘en-gb’.

Nor do they make reference to the market-leading methods of consuming RSS: their list (Feedreader, Newsgator, NetNewsWire) looks like it hasn’t been dusted down in a couple of years. No reference to IE, Firefox, Outlook 2007, Bloglines, Google Reader, My Yahoo, live.com, netvibes, etc etc etc.

Some of this is so basic that it shocks me.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a Firefox fan primarily because of the range of available extensions add-ons. One recent find – and it’s a true godsend – is URL Fixer. If you’ve ever cursed yourself having typed an address ending mistakenly in .ku or .cmo, you’ll know you need this. Sits in the background, and corrects you when it thinks you’ve screwed up. Which is exactly what you want it to do.