Archives for November 2007

An experiment. I've recorded an interview with Bob Young of Lulu.com on the future of the publishing business. It strikes me that many of the issues that face the music, film and television industries in the digital era might also apply at some point to the publishing industry - particularly if e-books like Amazon's Kindle take off. Will bitTorrenting for books replace Borders? How will authors make money if readers share pdf's of novels online?

A rough edit of the full interview with Bob is below and we'll play it towards the end of December. But it's far from the finished radio piece; ideally I'd like to include some responses from readers from this blog. If you've something to say on the issue why not upload a response to your podcast/favourite video/audio hosting site and send me a link and I'll consider including it in the finished broadcast.

• Click to listen to the interview on Blip.tv here

I'm very excited about After Our Time, a truly excellent fan blog for Radio 4's In Our Time. It's great to see a conversation started by a really good radio programme continued online. You can almost detect an element of convergent evolution in its similarity with WHYS's off bbc.co.uk offering

After Our Time is in the tradition of Speechification the group blog which fillets the best of Radio 4 and offers it repackaged with commentary in podcast form. If, like me, you long for your radio reviews to come with audio attached - Speechification is a blessing.

Speechification is in many ways a hand crafted version for talk radio of the excellent Now Playing mash-up profiled on Backstage (a graduate of Hackday). Now why not do that with speech and news? Prototypes like this from Kent Brewster show the rich content that can be pulled in from news - and hence talk radio - text.

It's the kind of development the folks at the new BBC Radio Labs blog will doubtless be pondering. As a broadcaster I'd like to see us making it easier for people to remix our content in inventive ways that enhance what we do, "in house". Lets help out our fans. Associating feeds and tags with our content is surely now more important than giving out the frequency or the station ident. It also acknowledges the truth that we are no longer working in a linear medium.

So in that spirit what should we do to make Pods and Blogs content more accessible online? I'm conscious that the 7-day podcast limit is an irritation. Leaving that to one side (as unfortunately we must) what could we do. How should we increase the tag-ability and searchability of what we produce?

UPDATE: Over on Cybersoc Robin Hamman points back to a post on City Of Sound which, makes a similar point to the above rather better, though at rather greater length. That post btw was written in 2004. I'd only add that in the meantime I've think we've learned that as well as "ripples" we also get echoes - issues, ideas, comments inspired by our content that suggest new programming opportunities.

Right click this link to download to your computer or the blue arrow to listen.
If you'd like to subscribe to the podcast, by far the easiest way to get it, click here: This week we featured:

• Following a Game Politics post we spoke about the the Peacemaker Game. Talking to us was Eric Brown of Impact Games


• From Peace to War Noah Schactman of Dangerroom spoke about "Sim Iraq"


• Some moving sounds of the aid crisis in Somalia thanks to David Axe who also writes at Dangerroom and has his own blog Warisboring


• The founder of Miss Landmine Angola explores the controversy surrounding it. A longer version of that interview is available here.


• The Brit Blog Roundup from Jonathan Calder at Liberal England. Anyone who may have lost some human ashes in the vicinity of Islington should probably check out this post we mentioned


• Dan Hardie let us record two conversations he had with Iraqi former employees of British Forces in Basra and Syria about the grave practical difficulties they have trying to leave the country. More on his blog


• Emma Clarke who does voices for the Tube on the media firestorm surrounding her (and thanks to her also for the wonderful ident at the start - Emma is a voiceover artist). Thanks also to Annie Mole for providing a blog perspective


• Finally huge controversy in the world of viral marketing following this disputed post on Tech Crunch. Viral marketting expert Matt Smith who is the co-founder of The Viral Factory gave us an ethical marketeers perspective on the whole row.

You can suscribe to the podcast via iTunes: MyYahoo: Googlereader It's always available in itunes first thing in Tuesday morning. Ideal for the Web2.0 commuter.

From BBC News Online: Two computer discs holding the personal details of all families in the UK with a child under 16 have gone missing. The Child Benefit data on them include name, address, date of birth, National Insurance number and, where relevant, bank details of 25m people.

Reaction from blogs has been swift and mostly unforgiving. Professor Ross Anderson a leading security expert writing in the Light Blue Touchpaper blog says:

It’s surely clear by now that the whole public-sector computer-security establishment is no longer fit for purpose. The next government should replace CESG with a civilian agency staffed by competent people. Ministers need much better advice than they’re currently getting.

The Spy Blog says:

Why was one junior civil servant allowed to have access to download the full database, when the National Audit Office didn't even request all of that data, only a small sample for audit purposes e.g. a dozen records ?

Mr Euginides links to a worrying view of the consequences:

UK banks could be forced to close the accounts of all child benefit claimants affected by an HMRC “operational failure” that resulted in the loss of 25 million records stored on discs, a Gartner analyst has warned.

The Impact legal blog notes that this isn't the first problem to have recently affected the Government:

Central government doesn't seem to be having much luck complying with its data protection obligations at the moment. As we reported last week, the Treasury [actually the Foreign Office] has recently had to give undertakings to the ICO that it will comply with the Data Protection Act following an incident involving disclosure of personal data on a visa applications website. In the BBC report on the current issue, the ICO says it is already investigating two incidents involving the Treasury.

UPDATE: Oh the irony. Just noticed this. At the 2007 Civil Service Awards earlier in the month there's an interview with a person described as the "HMRC Chief Executive" talking about the need to celebrate success..

UPDATEII: And some wag has put a fake advertisement for "the discs" up on Ebay.

Right click this link to download to your computer or the blue arrow to listen.

If you'd like to subscribe to the podcast, by far the easiest way to get it, click here: This week we featured:

• Last of Iraqi's wrote a fascinating piece about "awakening" Salam Adil adds wider Iraqi blog perspectives.


• British WWII code breaking computer Colossus restarted last week. The majority of those working on code breaking at Bletchley Park were women. We heard from Jan Peters and Sue Black who have just completed a new study in conjunction with the British Computer Society into the role of these women. Jamillah Knowles spoke with Jean Bartik one of the women who operated the American WWII computer ENIAC


• Clark Boyd of WGBH/BBC spoke about the blog row between Venezuela and Spain (this isn't on the podcast because of music rights issues)


• Chuck Norris is the star of a political campaign video. Has the world turned upside down? We spoke with Ian Spector the godfather of the Chuck Norris Facts genre


• Amazon's Kindle e-book readerreviewed by Robert Scoble


• Ebbsfleet United try crowdsourcing - Don Tapscott offers some thoughts on the Wisdom of Crowds


• And we hear from the people who posted the 2billionth and 100millionth flickr photos

Of course I couldn't finish this write-up without posting the Chuck Norris video. Here you go:

You can suscribe to the podcast via iTunes: MyYahoo: Googlereader It's always available in itunes first thing in Tuesday morning. Ideal for the Web2.0 commuter.

This is apparently the 2billionth Flickr photo. One of the commenters in the flickr entry has listed other milestones:

• 1 000 000


• 10 000 000


• 100 000 000


• 500 000 000


• 2 000 000 000

Right click this link to download to your computer or the blue arrow to listen.

If you'd like to subscribe to the podcast, by far the easiest way to get it, click here: This week we featured:

• An interview with Muhammad Abdullah who is accused of making a threatening video on YouTube directed at local councillor campaigning against the building of a mosque. More here


• Asma Mirza who blogs for Islamabad Metroblogs and one of the students protesting at the Lahore University of Management Science spoke to us (there's an interesting snippet about political approaches to students in there)


• Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit spoke to us about the controversy surrounding the Weblog Awards


• The BBC's Jamillah Knowles is trying to write a book in a month. She spoke to Chris Baty of Nanowrimo who is the brains behind the book in a month scheme


• Britblog roundup from Philobiblon. Send British blog suggestions for next week to Britblog [at] gmail [dot] com


• Army of Dude and Eason Jordan of Iraq Slogger offer different perspectives on coverage of the Iraq War


• Current Vanguard Journalist Kaj Larsen had himself waterboarded. Current.com will be launching in a UK current.com on November 19th. And you can watch Kaj’s pod regarding Waterboarding on Current TV on channel 193 on Sky and 155 on Virgin Media.

You can suscribe to the podcast via iTunes: MyYahoo: Googlereader It's always available in itunes first thing in Tuesday morning. Ideal for the Web2.0 commuter.

Tom the ambulance driver behind Random Acts of Reality linked to a bit of blog begging by a desperately cash-strapped medical student who had run out of funds to pay for her course (she's now OK it seems thanks to the generosity of her readers)

I'm not sure the exact reasons she ran out of money, though it looked like one of those cases where she didn't really fit the system vis:

The reasons are many, and often include my graduate status, the fact that I'm classed as dependent on my parents (but aren't), and the fact that the student loan company have pulled some of my funding from the last academic year.

This did remind me of a good friends situation many years ago. Her parents didn't like the idea of her going to university and refused to fill in their part of the grant form, so she received no grant. She was forced her to work all the way through college and, I believe, missed out on a 1st class degree as a result. I'm wondering, as I write this, if any students reading this blog have found themselves without money simply because their personal circumstances don't quite fit the rules imposed by the bean-counters? Drop a note in comments

Oh and get well soon Tom!

Right click this link to download to your computer or the blue arrow to listen.

If you'd like to subscribe to the podcast, by far the easiest way to get it, click here: This week we featured:

• Zainub Razvi from Metblogging Karachi and Arif Rafiq from the Pakistan Policy Blog joined us


• Pete Cashmore Senior Editor at Mashable spoke about the Google phoneAndroid and Open Social


• Mary Beard who writes about classics for the TLS spoke about her excellent blog A Don's Life I immediately dragged the conversation downhill by talking about Roman Sex-workers, 300, and Spartan underwear. O Tempora O Mores!


• Britblog roundup from Susanne Lamido. Send British blog suggestions for next week to Britblog [at] gmail [dot] com


• Sunny Hundal (also of the excellent Pickled Politics) spoke about a LiberalConspiracy which aims to revitalise the blogging left. And Susan Gardner of the Daily Kos offered some suggestions from the US left-blogging experience. Guido Fawkes takes a few pot shots at the enterprise here


• It's still under-development but we had a sneak peak at a site employing the Wisdom of CrowdsClouds to predict the weather. Our resident weather expert Philip Eden gave the professional meterologists perspective - not as negative as you might think


• Alfie Dennen is campaigning to save Britain's Stopped Clocks

You can suscribe to the podcast via iTunes: MyYahoo: Googlereader It's always available in itunes first thing in Tuesday morning. Ideal for the Web2.0 commuter.

I'm not much of a car junkie, but I covered the Darpa Challenge when I was in the US and ever since I've had a soft-spot for Robot Cars. The Urban Challenge, the final of which takes place on November 3rd, will turn country mouse robot cars into urbane street warriors as teams try and build cars that can navigate an urban environment unaided. No word on whether they will awarding points for spinners and megawatt stereos.

Dangerroom points out that there's a team from Virginia Tech (their website here). I remember in 2005 there were two teams from Louisiana, then just recovering from Katrina.

More on the Urban Challenge from Darpa's site here. Other finalists websites are Tartan Racing, Stanford, Cornell, Ben Franklin and Carolo You can listen to my podcast from the 2005 Darpa Grand Challenge here.

Music Thing points us to Abba's Mamma Mia performed on beer bottles. Next stop Mountain's Nantucket Sleighride transcribed for the glass harmonica?