OUseful.Info, the blog…

A few months ago, the art discovery website Artfinder appeared on the scene, providing a place to go to view art (online) from galleries around the world, build your own collections, receive recommendations about other artworks you might like to see (and maybe go and visit for real) and so on. A “Magic Tour” feature allows you to select three art works you like from sets of four, and then view a personalised art collection based on recommendations derived from your selection. Where quality prints of a work are available, there is an option to buy the print (for example, via MemoryPrints).

A couple of other related things that have crossed my radar over the course of the year include the Google Art Project, which offers very high definition reproductions of artworks from galleries around the world, and the JISC funded OpenART project, “a partnership between the University of York, the Tate and technical partners, Acuity Unlimited, will design and expose linked open data for an important research dataset entitled ‘The London Art World 1660-1735′”.

Today, I noticed the launch of a new BBC site, Your Paintings [announcement], which offers you the ability to create art collections, locate artworks by physical gallery location and so on… Hmmmm… (As yet, the URLs don’t seem to support content negotiation as a result of adding a .json or .xml suffix to pircture or gallery page; that is, as yet, the service doesn’t appear to be offering linkable data (hyperdata?) views over the content).

There was a time when Microsoft used to be charged with unfairly influencing the market, announcing it was about to release some feature or product that a rival was trying to market, effectively stifling competition through brand and market dominance. If you read the tech blogs, Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, et al. currently find themselves in a regular situation where the services, applications or features they release are heralded as being likely to wipe out competition in a niche discovered, created, or developed by a startup elsewhere (only in many cases it doesn’t quite work out that way…Bit.ly surviced Twitter’s shortener, Google Buzz threatened no-one, Facebook Places or Google Latitude haven’t squashed Foursquare, etc.).

The BBC has itself faced challenges regarding “anticompetitive”/fair trading behaviour, for example in local online news (local news video), catchup services/internet TV (Canvas) or (BBC Jam).

Now I’m generally a fan of the BBC, but I do wonder what additional value Your Paintings brings, especially given that it’s not apparently being launched with any additional technical capacity building features (i.e. it’s not (yet?) making metadata freely available for others to build on, though a couple of recent tweets suggest this may be on the timeline…)?

Having come across aNobii today (via @maireadoconnor), a service that offers “an online reading community built by readers for readers allowing you to shelve, find and share books”, I wonder: is this another area where the BBC could just “step in”, presumably as a way of building community around the wide variety of programming it offers that have good hooks in to books?

[Disclaimer: I've ranted before about the BBC not making more use of structured markup around book identifiers, but if they were to get into reading groupsm this would presumably provide the technical underpinnings...? (e.g. BBC "In Our Time" Reading List using Linked Data.) So I maybe should be careful what I wish for...]

So the point of this post? Just to note my confusion about what it is the BBC actually does, and how it does it… I know that it’s not just about the telly and the radio, but I’m not sure what it is about when it comes to the web?

And it’s not just confusion about the BBC’s role. It also extends to the public facing role of the OU, which I personally view as having more a “public service education” remit than the rest of the UK HE sector (whether this is a view than can survive the increasingly businesslike culture of higher education I don’t know…). In other words: to what extent should the OU be doing more in the way of education related online public service broadcasting?

PS so I wonder:

How much has the BBC allocated to its opening salvo on a Your Paintings AdWords campaign…?

I didn’t follow the twitter backchannel surrounding the second part of Adam Curtis’ documentary series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, but I did see a tweet that made me grab a snapshot of the friend connections between folk who were tweeting around it using the awobmolg hashtag. The following shows the major connected component (unconnected tweeps are filtered out) of a network built up from folk using the hashtag and how they’re connected (node size a function of authority, I think?):

I guess you could argue that this provides a glimpse over part of the UK’s tweeting digerati community, though I’m not sure what part…? Nodes are layed out using a force directed layout algorithm and clustered according to modularity group. I think I can spot culture/education sector, open gov/data advocacy and media folk clusters in there. If you want to look deeper, here’s the data set I grabbed as a Gephi/gdf file.

@mhawksey also managed to grab approx 1500 or so of the #awobmolg tagged tweets into the Archive tab of this spreadsheet: awobmolg tweets

And by the by, here are cotags used in tweets alongside the #awobmolg tagged tweets I captured:

FIFA
EgyptsLostCities
Fuller
Cybernetics
BBC
therapeuticcommunity
Chaos
synergy
AWOBMOLG
Springwatch
TheMatrix
BGT
gameofthrones
politics
awobmolg
Bruntland
BBC2
anarchy
TheMotherofAllDemos
downsideofrain
TheStoryofIreland
marking
springwatch
RDLaing
powerofTV
spacearchaeology
gkchesterton
bbc
poetry
uep
notanetutopian
boomboom
systems
Bilderberg
adamcurtis
PaulMertonsHollywood
biofeedbackloop
allwatchedoverbymachinesoflovinggrace
socialmediacommodification
GameOfThrones
curtis
mature
bioweb
OctoberGallery
Freedom
shsn
BlatterOut
IIW
superinjunctions
banks
ple
psychoville
bgt
wtf
bollocks
AWObMoLG
ecosystems
buckyballs
Bbc2
alife
glee
anarchism
NIN
Observer
StarttheWeek
ecosystem
Twitter
silos
fb
UKUncut
Amortality
feedbackloop
honestly
eek
balancedequilibrium
Awobmolg
anarchist
bbc2
BBCTwo

ps via @josswinn, an archive of Adam Curtis films

This week saw the latest episode in the OU/BBC World Service Click (radio) co-produced season on openness, with a focus this week on privacy… You can hear an extended version of the discussion between entrepeneurial journalism and openness advocate, Jeff Jarvis, and professional contrarian, Andrew Keen: Privacy in a connected world

Unfortunately, the episode aired just too early to pick up up on this week’s “Who needs privacy?!” news, and in particular the new iPhone’s “secret” location logging behaviour: iPhone keeps record of everywhere you go; (find out how to see where your iPhone thinks you’ve been here: Got an iPhone or 3G iPad? Apple is recording your moves); but the discussion is a great one, so I encourage you to listen to it…(I’ll be asking questions later!;-)

The programme also saw the launch of its new hashtag: #bbcClickRadio

Whilst the Digital PlanetClick twitter audience is still dwarfed by the Digital Planet Listeners’ Facebook group, I’m keen to see if we can try to grow it… one way might be to show who’s recently been tweeting about the programme, and encourage people to start following each other and chatting about the issues raised in the programme a little bit more – something Gareth Mitchell (@garethm) can now pick up on at least on the first airing, as Click now goes out live…. So to that end, I’m going to try to work up a special version of my Twtter friendviz application that shows connections between folk who’ve recently tweeted a particular term, and in this case, the #bbcClickRadio hashtag. To see the map, visit http://bit.ly/bbcclickradiocommunity.

As a tease, here’s a rather more polished version of a map I grabbed recently…

(Unfortunately, the live one is unlikely to ever look like this!)

PS I wonder if the investigation into the iPhone tracking was inspired by the recent story about German politician Malte Spitz who managed to obtain a copy of the data his phone provider had stored about his location… Zeit Online: Tell-all telephone (If you want to play with the data, it’s available from there…)

If you’re a regular listener of BBC Radio 4, you will almost certainly have come across In Our Time, a weekly, single topic discussion programme (with a longstanding archive of listen again material) hosted by Melvyn Bragg on matters scientific, philosophical, historical and cultural. In certain respects, In Our Time may be thought of as discussion based audio encyclopedia. The format sees a panel of three experts (made up of academics, commentators and critics knowledgeable on the topic for that week) teaching the host about the topic. A diligent student, he will of course have done some background reading, and posted links to the references consulted on the programme’s web page.

I’ve already had a quick play with the In Our Time data, looking to see how easy it is to relate programmes to expert academics from various UK universities (Visualising OU Academic Participation with the BBC’s “In Our Time”), but I also wondered whether it would be possible to do anything with the book references, such as using them to identify courses that may be related to a particular programme; (this is reminiscent of a couple of MOSAIC competition entries that looked at ways of recommending books based on courses, and courses based on books using @daveyp’s data from Huddersfield University library that associated course codes with the books borrowed by students taking those courses).

Being a lazy sort, I posted an idea to the OKF Ideas Incubator suggesting that it might be worth considering extracting references from In Our Time programme pages and then reconciling them with Linked Data representations of the corresponding book data.

And then, as if by magic, a solution appeared, from Orangeaurochs: “In Our Time” booklist which describes a method for parsing out the book data and then getting a Linked Data resource reference back from Bibliographica.

The original recipe suggested screenscraping the raw book references from the page HTML, but I posted a comment (at the time of writing, still in the moderation queue) which suggests:

Hi
Great to see you taking this challenge on. Re your step 2 – obtaining the reading list – a possibly more structured way of doing this is to get the appropriate section out of the xml or json representation of the programme page (eg http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00xhz8d.xml or http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00xhz8d.json).

I wonder if the BBC will start to structure the data even more – for example by adding explicitly marked up biblio data to book references?

Anyway, you can see an example of the results at pages with URLs of the form http://www.aurochs.org/inourtime_booklist/inourtime_booklist_v1.php?http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00xhz8d – just add the appropriate IOT programme page URL to extract the data from it.

There are a few hit and misses, but it’s a great start, and something that can be used as a starting point for thinking about how to annotate programme related booklists with structured bibliographic data and exploring what that might mean in a world of linked educational resources that can also reference linked BBC content… :-)

PS Hmmm, I wonder what other programmes are associated with books? A Good Read and Desert Island Discs certainly…

The second in the OU’s co-produced season of programmes with the BBC World Service Digital Planet radio programme is now available on the Digital Planet podcast feed, this week covering the topic of “Ownership and Openness” and featuring OU Senior Lecturer (and intellectual property geek;-) Ray Corrigan.

In the spirit of openness, wherever possible we’re trying to open up access to full length versions of the interviews used in the programme on the OpenLearn website. So for example, if you want to hear fuller length interviews recorded from Brazil’s Campus Party, as covered in the opening episode of the openness series, you can find them here: Campus Party Brasil 2011 – The Digital Planet Interviews.

Interviewees include Jon “Maddog” Hall on Free as in Freedom, not as in price and Sir Tim Berners Lee on net neutrality, opening up data, why open data is important and on WIkileaks.

The OpenLearn site also hosts a recording of Al Gore’s Campus Party 2011 Keynote which I don’t think received an airing on either Digital Planet, or Digital Planet’s sister World Service TV programme, Click?

And as if that’s not enough, the audio clips have been made available as MP3 files, which means you can download them to your own device, or embed them in your own web pages… Like this:

Sir Tim Berners Lee on why open data is important:

If you can think of any other ways we can open up the programmes, please let us know:-)

To keep up-to-date with the OU Digital Planet extras, keep your eye on the OpenLearn Digital Planet profile page, or even better, subscribe to the OpenLearn/Digital Planet RSS feed:-)

What makes for an open platform, and how can you apparently shut part of the internet down – such as Egypt, for example – without breaking it for everyone?

These were two issues that came up in this week’s episode of Digital Planet, from the BBC World Service. As we’ve done a couple of times before, the Open University has joined with forces with the BBC World Service to co-produce another six episodes of the weekly technology magazine programme Digital Planet (/programme page) over the next six months around the general theme of openness.

We’ve got all sorts of things we’d like to try out over the next six months. perhaps even a Digital Planet android app to go with the Digital Planet ringtone we released in an episode from a previous run, the next best font after Comic Sans, Gareth New Roman or the Digital Planet Listeners’ Map (have you added yourself yet?)!

We also intend to support the programme with regular blog posts around the stories that we’ve featured on Digital Planet, as well as ideas for future stories. To start the ball rolling, have you ever wondered What makes for an open platform? (Did you know that IBM originally intended to keep control over the IBM PC platform, and one trick they used was to make the bit they wanted to keep under control public?!)

We also hope to get a few OU voices on the programme… Despite regularly blogging and tweeting, as well as speaking at conferences and workshops, I’ve never really been one for speaking “on-the record”, partly out of fear that I have a face for radio and a voice for mime; but as needs must, I took a speaking role on the first episode in the series and was thankful it wasn’t as terrifying as I’d expected! (Brian Kelly’s notes on ‘how to cope a radio interview’ served me well, I think, as did the friendly faces of presenter Gareth Mitchell, producer Cathy Edwards and OU colleague David Chapman!) The programme will stay “live” on the Digital Planet podcast feed for another three or four days (I think the run of radio broadcasts has finished now?) if you haven’t subscribed yet;-)

You can also listen again to a recording of the whole programme here: Digital Planet/OU special – Introducing Openness

Although not an OU/BBC co-pro, the “get some academics in to chat to Melvyn” format of BBC Radio 4′s In Our Time means that the OU has, over the years, had a handful of academics appearing on the programme. I’ve been mulling over opportunities for playing with the BBC programmes linked data (no RDF required) I wondered how easy it would be to grab the programmes that OU academics have appeared on. For example, it’s increasingly possible to see programmes associated with particular places (h/t to @gothwin for that; see his post on A Crude BBC Places Linked Data mashup for an application of that data) although the organisations listing is still a bit sparse.

Looking through the programme data, the participants in a programme are listed separately, but not their affiliations. However, in the free text that is used in the long synopsis of the programme, a convention exists to identify the guests, with affiliation or short bio, who appeared on that particular programme:

In the post Augmenting OU/BBC Co-Pro Programme Data With Semantic Tags, I described how the Thomson Reuters’ OpenCalais entity extraction/semantic tagging service could be used to augment the BBC programme data with additional data fields based on analysis of the supplied text. One of the extraction services identifies a set of related fields termed PersonCareer, which detail (where possible) the name of a person, their role, and the organisation they work for. The convention used to list the guests on each programme is appropriate for the extraction of PersonCareer data, at least in some cases.

Rather more reliable is the extraction of University names as Facility data types. What this means is that we can tag each programme with a list of Facilities relating to the universities represented by guests on the programme, and then – where a PersonCareer is extracted, attempt to text match the PersonCareer/Organization name with the extracted Facility name. (Sample code is available here. I had “issues” with character encodings, so there is an element if hackery involved:-( In order to aggregate data from across programmes in the series, I built up a network of programmes and participating institutions using a NetworkX representation, which then gets dumped to output files in a variety of graph formats.)

Here’s an example of the output, filtered to show programmes and programme tags (from the BBC data, rather than Calais extracted tags) that had some sort of association with the Open University:

The above diagram is actually a filtered view over the whole programme’n'university representation network using the Gephi ego network filter:

Node sizing is related to degree in this sub-network, and nodes are coloured according to node type (person, institution, tag, programme.) The graph shows programmes that an OU academic appeared on, and (where possible) which OU academic, by name. Programme tags from the BBC programme data are also shown, as are other institutions that appeared on the same programmes as the OU.

Here’s a snapshot of the full graph – you’ll notice there is some mismatch* in references between the universities mentioned that could possibly be reconciled using a string similarity technique or maybe running the data through Google Refine and using one or more of its string similarity/reconciliation tools.

* things are actually even more pathological: in some cases, I think that Oxbridge Colleges may be identified in PersonCareer metadata as the career organisation, rather than the university affiliation, which may well have been recognised as a Facility. If an organisation identified in a PersonCareer is not one of the Facilities added that has been identified and added to the graph, the organisation is also added. The question we’re left with is: do the errors such as they are make this graph, such as it is, completely use less, or is it better than nothing and something we can work with and improve incrementally as and how we can. [UPDATE: related maybe? Making Linked Data work isn’t the problem]

I’m not sure what the next step should be, but linking the OU ego-graph into the OU Linked Data would be one way forward. For example, displaying papers in ORO authored by appearing academics, or trying to relate programmes to related courses on the OU course catalogue (or even though not indexed in the OU Linked Data store, courses on OpenLearn). A big problem with brokering the Linked Data connections is that I’d have to do free text/regular expression searches on the OU Linked Data store using terms from the BBC/OpenCalais data. THat is, there are no common unique identifier/URIs that can be used as “proper” linking terms:-(

For what it’s worth, I’ve been looking over some of the programmes that the OU co-produces with the BBC to see what sorts of things we might be able to do in Linked Data space to make appropriate resources usefully discoverable for our students and alumni.

With a flurry of recent activity appearing on the wires relating to the OU Business School Alumni group on LinkedIn, the OU’s involvement with business related programming seemed an appropriate place to start: the repeating Radio 4 series The Bottom Line has a comprehensive archive of previous programmes available via iPlayer, and every so often a Money Programme special turns up on BBC2. Though not an OU/BBC co-pro, In Business also has a comprehensive online archive; this may contain the odd case study nugget that could be useful to an MBA student, so provides a handy way of contrasting how we might reuse “pure” BBC resources compared to the OU/BBC co-pros such as The Bottom Line.

Top tip [via Tom Scott/@derivadow]: do you know about hack where by [http://.bbc.co.uk]/programmes/$string searches programme titles for $string?

So what to do? Here’s a starter for ten: each radio programme page on BBC /programmes seems to have a long, medium and short synposis of the programme as structure data (simply add .json to the end of programme URL to see the JSON representation of the data, .xml for the XML, etc.).

For example, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00vy3l1 maps on to http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00vy3l1/json and http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00vy3l1.xml

Looking through the programme descriptions for The Bottom Line, they all seem to mention the names and corporate affiliations of that week’s panel members, along with occasional references to other companies. As the list of company names is to all intents and purposes a controlled vocabulary, and given that personal names are often identifiable from their syntactic structure, it’s no surprise that one of the best developed fields for automated term extraction and semantic tagging is business related literature. Which means that there are services out there that should be good at finessing/extracting high quality metadata from things like the programme descriptions for The Bottom Line…

The one I opted for was Reuters OpenCalais, simply because I’ve been meaning to play with this service for ages. To get a feel for what it can do, try pasting a block of text into this OpenCalais playground: OpenCalais Viewer demo…

If you look at the extracted tags in the left hand sidebar, you’ll see personal names and company names have been extracted, as well as the names of people and their corporate position.

Here’s a quick script to grab the data from Open Calais (free API key required) using the Python-Calais library:

from calais import Calais
import simplejson
import urllib
from xml.dom import minidom

calaisKey=CALAIS_KEY
calais = Calais(calaisKey, submitter="python-calais ouseful")

url='http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00vrxx0.xml'
dom=minidom.parse(urllib.urlopen(url))

desc=dom.getElementsByTagName('long_synopsis')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue

print desc

result = calais.analyze(desc)

result.print_entities()
result.print_relations() 

print result.entities
print result.simplified_response

(I really need to find a better way of parsing XML in Python…what should I be using..? Or I guess I could have just grabbed the JSON version of the BBC programme page?!)

That’s step one, then: grabbing a long synopsis from a BBC radio programme /programmes page, and running it through the OpenCalais tagging service. The next step is to run all the programmes through the tagger, and then have a play. A couple of things come to mind for starters – building a navigation scheme that lets you discover programmes by company name, or sector; and a network map looking at the co-occurrence of companies on different programmes just because…;-)

See also: Linked Data Without the SPARQL – OU/BBC Programmes on iPlayer

The last few weeks have just seemed crazy to me – lots of events, new folk to meet, some incredibly stimulating conversations and a seemingly incessant flow of announcements that might actually mean something coming in over the interwebs. Picking up email as I was leaving the OU last night, I spotted an invite to today’s launch of a reversioned BBC iPLayer. I couldn’t make it down/up to London today, but the press release, #iplayer twitter coverage, live blogs and BBC blogs [UPDATE: another here], as well as the thing itself – http://beta.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/ (or in mobile form, http://beta.bbc.co.uk/mobile/iplayer/) kept me more than entertained.

One thing that’s kept coming to mind over this period has been the changing nature of TV viewing. Considering my own TV viewing through the main “living room screen”, it’s now split pretty much into thirds:

• one third live TV from the four analogue terrestrial channels we can receive (BBC1, BBC2, ITV1, Channel4);
• one third DVD box sets;
• one third iPLayer on Nintendo Wii, (which personally is to say: BBC1, BBC2, BBC3, BBC4 and BBC Parliament). NB my iPlayer on the Wii viewing tends not to be between 8pm and 9.15pm when for whatever reason buffering and dropouts disrupt viewing to such an extent that programmes are pretty much unwatchable. maybe it’s a local bandwidth problem, or maybe it’s a BBC problem…?

[Source: BBC iStats]

(Thinking back a couple of years, the split used to be split 2/5 live TV, 2/5 HDD recordings, 1/5 video; but then the HDD broke and I replaced it with a cheap one with such an unusable interface we never bother with it anymore, except as a DVD player.)

I think it would be safe to say that if 4oD or the ITV Player were available on the Wii, we’d watch ITV and Channel 4 content on it… Same for Channel 5 (maybe?!).

The new iPlayer, whilst not providing a place to watch content from other providers, will apparently start providing a discovery service over content from other channels. As the press release puts it:

Later in the summer, audiences will also be able to find links to programmes from ITV Player, 4oD, Clic, Demand Five and SeeSaw – as a result of partnership deals with public service broadcasters ITV, Channel 4, S4C and Five, and communications infrastructure and media services company Arqiva.

These “metadata partnerships” mean that audiences looking for long-form programmes from other TV services will be directed to their websites: BBC iPlayer will link and drive traffic to them, without any sharing of technology or syndication of content.

But that’s for later? What’s for now…?

First up is a revamp of the iPlayer website:

If you sign in with a BBC ID, you can get a range of personalisation options, including personal recommendations based on your previous viewing habits (I wonder if they use the Google Prediction API?!;-) and the ability to share recommendations with your friends from Facebook and/or Twitter who have also linked their social network account to their BBC ID:

Unlike Recomendations, Favourites are private (though it could be handy to at least get hold of a private feed/one with an obfuscated URL, so that you could transport favourites elsewhere? Hmmm… I wonder if we’re going to start seeing personalised BBC iPlayer iGoogle gadgets, or wordpress widgets?!;-)

I assume that Personal Recommendations are based on Favourites and watched programmes? Linking iPlayer state to a BBC ID means that you can watch the content through any browser and link it back to your account, though I’m not sure how (if) the desktop iPlayer client also picks up BBC log in details? (Hmm, could it do this through a Flash cookie I wonder?)

One problem for me is that a lot of my iPlayer viewing is done through the Wii, so unless that has been updated with personalisation features (I’ll check later today;-), the most useful data for making recommendations to me will be lost. (That said, the whole family watches iPlayer on the Wii, so the recommendations could go all over the place, cf. disrputed Amazon recommendations just after Christmas! (You’d think they’d be able to make the recommendations based on views between different windows of time?!) However, from the figures, it looks as though the WIi channel isn’t widely used…

[Data: BBC iStats]

(Hmmm, which reminds me… looking at the the Wii Shop last night, Nintendo we’re pushing a scheme giving out free Nintendo points if you could persuade someone else to hook their Wii up to the net. So maybe there are a lot of Wiis out there that aren’t networked, although they could be….?)

There look to be further personalisation options available in the Categories area (“My Categories”), although I’m not sure how this works…?

A second future announcement related to a tie-up with Windows Instant Messenger. Again from the press release:

A partnership with Microsoft allows Windows Live Messenger users to log in to their messaging service through BBC iPlayer, enabling them to invite other contacts to watch programmes at the same time and chat live. This is an experimental feature, which will be available in beta later in the Summer; if it proves successful, the BBC plans to extend it to other instant messaging services.

That is, users will be able to watch content on-demand, but synched with their remote friends, so they can chat along to it at the same time…. To me, this shouts out a great opportunity to capture programme synched tweets that can be fed into an evolving status updates caption feed (e.g. other Martin’s Twitter powered subtitles for BBC iPlayer, JISC10 Conference Keynotes with Twitter Subtitles or most recently Google I/O 2010 – Keynote Day 2 Android Demo with Twitter Subtitles).

(As to the deal with Microsoft, I can understand why the BBC feels it needs to partner with different corporates in a fair way, but from local experience in my household, most of the chat that used to be relayed by Instant Messenger now runs via Facebook chat…)

I’m not sure I fully grok what being able to watch content in synch with remotes friends actually means. YouTube piloted a feature like this several years ago (Youtube Streams?), where groups could gather around a video and chat around it, but I think they have since dropped it? (Maybe the timing wasn’t right a couple of years ago?) What this does mean, of course, is that small groups can start to reintroduce concurrent (“locally scheduled”) programming, that we have been moving away from through consumption of personal recordings and on-demand content?

Chatting to OU PR guru Paula Feery last week, it struck me that a lot of TV related PR activity (which we go in for at the OU because of our co-pro arrangement with the BBC) is aimed at getting previews of programmes into the press. But from my own viewing habits, a large part of my viewing (particularly over iPlayer content) is guided by post hoc reviews appearing in the weekend press of programmes broadcast over the previous seven days, as well as “last week’s” Radio Times, and (occasionally) social media comments from people I follow relating to programmes they have recently watched themselves. From a PR point of view, there may be an increasing benefit in considering “after-TX” PR opportunities to exploit the fact that content remains viewable over a 7 or 28 day period (or even longer for series linked content or content that is rebroadcast on other BBC channels).

The social features of iPlayer also means there are improved opportunities for promoting content though social media channels (so for example: maybe @open2 needs lots of Facebook and Twitter friends, a BBC ID, and someone tasked with recommending all the OU’s BBC output ;-)

PS I still can’t find an easy way of grabbing a list of OU/BBC programmes for a 7 day watch again service (which I have to admit, I haven’t maintained for over a year, so I’d be very surprised if it still works?! Same with the mobile version). I don’t think it’s possible to get a feed of recommendations or favorites out of iPlayer, but if it was possible, it would be handy to have one with a list of content in that list that was currently available on iPlayer ;-)

PPS So much for personalisation…. BBC ID registration requires an age; I set mine to well over 16 but still get this?

I can appreciate why, but if this is supposed to be a personalised service….?

PPPS Reminds me, I still haven’t looked at the Google TV announcement yet… Here’s Liam’s take on it: Google TV: Your TV may never be the same again

PPPPS for more of my disconnected thoughts about status update captions, see eg:

- Twitter Powered Subtitles for BBC iPlayer Content c/o the MASHe Blog;

- Searching the Backchannel – Martin Bean, OU VC, Twitter Captioned at JISC10 (since implemented by @mhawksey).

For Martin’s development timeline, see MASHe tt-tweets category.

PPPPPS A comprehensive run down of the new features, plus commentary on the design philosophy, can be found in this blog post from Anthony Rose: Introducing the all new BBC iPlayer (This time it’s personal)

Following the broadcast of the final episode of The Virtual Revolution, the OU/BBC co-produced history of the web, over the weekend, and the start today of the radio edit on BBC World Service, here are a few thoughts about how we might go about building further attention traps around the programme.

Firstly, additional content via Youtube playlists and a Boxee Channel – how about if we provide additional programming around the edges based on curating 3rd party content (including open educational video resources) as well as OU produced content?

Here’s a quick demo channel I set up, using the DeliTV way of doing things, and a trick I learned from @liamgh (How to build a basic RSS feed application for Boxee):

I opted for splitting up the content by programme:

Whilst the original programme is on iPlayer, we should be able to watch it on Boxee. I also created and bookmarked a Youtube playlist for each episode:

So for example, it’s easy to moderate or curate content that is posted on Youtube via a programme specific playlist.

Here’s the channel definition code:

<app>
<id>bbcRevolution</id>
<name>Virtual Revolution, Enhanced</name>
<version>1.0.1</version>
<description>Watch items related to the BBC/OU Virtual Revolution.</description>
<thumb>http://www.bbc.co.uk/virtualrevolution/images/ou_126x71.jpg</thumb>
<media>video</media>
<copyright>Tony Hirst</copyright>
<email>a.j.hirst@open.ac.uk</email>
<type>rss</type>
<platform>all</platform>
<minversion>0.9.20</minversion>
<url>rss://pipes.yahoo.com/ouseful/delitv?&_render=rss&q=psychemedia/_delitvS+bbcrevolution</url>
<test-app>true</test-app>
</app>

[This needs to be saved as the file descriptor.xml in a folder named bbcRevolution in the location identified in Liam's post... alternatively, I guess it should be possible to prescribe the content you want to appear in the channel literally, e.g. as a list of "hard coded" links to video packages? Or a safer middle way might be to host a custom defined and moderated RSS feed on the open.ac.uk domain somewhere?]

Anyway, here’s where much of the “programming” of the channel takes place in the DeliTV implementation:

(Note that the Youtube playlist content is curated on the Youtube site using Youtube playlists, partly because there appeared to be a few pipework problems with individual Youtube videos bookmarked to delicious as I was putting the demo together!;-)

Secondly, subtitle based annotations, as demonstrated by Martin Hawksey’s Twitter backchannel as iPlayer subtitles hack. The hack describes how to create an iPlayer subtitle feed (I describe some other ways we might view “timed text” here: Twitter Powered Subtitles for BBC iPlayer Content c/o the MASHe Blog).

With The Virtual Revolution also being broadcast in a radio form on the BBC World Service, it strikes me that it could be interesting to consider how we might use timed text to supplement radio broadcasts as well, with either commentary or links, or as Martin described, using a replay of a backchannel from the original broadcast, maybe using something like a SMILtext player alongside the radio player? (Hmmm, something to try out for the next co-pro of Digital Planet maybe..?;-)