PA set to launch listings data API through BBC Backstage

Posted by Martin Stabe on 27 August 2008 at 13:03
Tags: BBC

The Press Association’s events listings database is to be made available for non-commercial use by web developers and will be released through the BBC’s web developer network.

PA is releasing an API (application programming interface) of its events listings through the BBC Backstage programme, a developer network that provides access to BBC and some third-party content to a community of web developers.

The plan was first revealed by BBC Backstage producer Ian Forrester at the Mashed08 conference in June, and is set to go live this week.

Forrester said publishing APIs through BBC Backstage gives third-party data providers like PA access to the projects’s existing community of developers, which he has been actively fostering for several years.

“They saw the Backstage as being not just about releasing APIs but also the engagement with the community,” Forrester told Press Gazette.

“That’s why they - rather than set up their own Backstage-ish project - wanted to work with us.”

The news agency hopes that users of the data will provide new ideas about how to use it and how listings are stored.

The PA database contains listings of events in cinema, art, theatre, literature and includes includes web links, venue details, times and prices. It is the same data that PA also supplies to newspapers, magazines and websites.

PA head of digital development Chris McCormack said the launch of a public, non-commercial version of its listings came about after the service was developed for use by some of its commerical clients. PA has long delivered its material to media clients using XML feeds, but these require the clients to recreate PA’s database on their own servers. By providing APIs, the agency can instead give customers structured access to its existing content databases.

The version available to developers through BBC Backstage will be strictly for non-commercial use by the BBC Backstage developer community, McCormack said.

“We have to safeguard our existing customers, so we won’t be allowing anyone to do anything commercial with them,” he said.

McCormack said PA has no immediate plans for launching further public APIs.

“We’re going to wait and see how this goes first,” he said. “There’s no strategy or plan to release our news or TV listings or anything after this.”

Top UK news stories on Digg in 2007

Posted by James Ball on 10 January 2008 at 08:15
Tags: BBC, Digg, Guardian Unlimited, Journalism, Mail Online, Telegraph.co.uk, The Sun Online

The social bookmarking and news recommendation site Digg, which determines its front-page content by allowing its users to vote for (or “Digg”) links posted by other users, has gained a reputation for generating huge spikes in traffic to web sites that stike the Diggers’ fancy.

So what stories have the often-geeky Diggers chosen in 2007? Surprisingly, perhaps, every one of the top ten most-Dugg stories from the UK comes from a traditional news website. It’s a heady mix of sex, violence and astrophysics. Take a look for yourself:

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2 comments

Horrocks: Only 1 per cent of BBC audience contributes; UGC value apparent only when filtered

Posted by Martin Stabe on 9 January 2008 at 09:09
Tags: BBC, citizenjournalism

Head of BBC newsroom Peter Horrocks has argued that user generated has “brought a valuable additional aspect to our journalism”, but points out that only a tiny proportion of the audience contributes and the the real value of comments, user-generated content, and citizen journalism only becomes apparent when journalists can find the most valuable of these contributions.

On the BBC blog The Editors, Horrocks has posted the transcript of a speech that he gave to the Institute of Communication Studies in Leeds on the value of “citizen journalism”, a term which he uses interchangably with “user-generated content”.

“[T]he somewhat messianic and starry-eyed way in which public participation journalism is argued for needs some very careful consideration,” Horrocks argued. “And there are many different aspects of such journalism, with varying degrees of value.”

The BBC received between 10,000 to 20,000 e-mails or posts a day on its Have Your Say site — a figure that represents less than 1 per cent of users of the BBC News web site, Horrocks says. As a result, the BBC is having to carefully consider how to deal with this input from a relatively small minority.

Horrock’s long talk raises several very interesting and important points. A recurring theme, though, is that robust filtering — when journalists are able to sort the wheat from the chaff — is essential to maximising the editorial value of user contributions.

Following the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, Horrocks recounts, the BBC received many anti-Islamic messages on its Have Your Say forums. Horrocks says he believes these comments were far from representative of the overall audience views, that they had “very little” value and influenced the BBC’s coverage “hardly at all”.

“Buried amongst the comments however, rarely recommended by others, were insights from those who had met Benazir or knew her. And there were valuable eye witness comments from people who were at the scene in Rawalpindi,” he writes.

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How the BBC’s ‘10 per cent time’ works

Posted by Martin Stabe on 8 January 2008 at 16:46
Tags: BBC

All of the designers, developers, project managers at BBC Audio and Music Interactive are allowed to spend 10 per cent of their time working on their own pet projects — anything they like as long as it is work-related and benefits the Beeb.

Inspired by Google’s famous “20 per cent time” principle, the system has already yielded one product launch: the iPhone-optimised BBC podcast downloads page.

Tristan Ferne explains how it works over on the BBC Radio Labs blog.

4 comments

Radio 4 programme maps its listeners’ locations

Posted by Martin Stabe on 2 January 2008 at 16:38
Tags: BBC, Google Maps

BBC Radio 4’s iPM has published its Google Map showing the locations of its listeners.

More than 22,000 listeners e-mailed their postcodes to the programme, and a backlog soon developed, forcing presenter Eddie Mair to publish a blog post explaining why individual listeners’ locations had not yet appeared on the map.

As BBC blogging expert Robin Hamman points out on his personal blog, Cybersoc.com, the resulting map highlights the problem of what he calls the “’send it to us’ approach to audience engagement” — it’s not very scalable. The enormous volume of emails were overwhelming.

But Hamman also points out that the the map — with its pushpins spread across Europe and other parts of the world — also shows how the Internet is expanding the BBC radio station’s reach globally.

iPhone podcast service is first fruit of BBC ‘10% time’

Posted by Paul McNally on 15 November 2007 at 11:01
Tags: BBC, iPhone

The BBC has made all of its podcasts available to download wirelessly using Apple’s new iPhone and iPod Touch.

The project is the first to be completed by the BBC’s Future Media and Technology (audio and music) department using “10 per cent time”, a working practice implemented by its new head, James Cridland.

The idea, borrowed from Google’s “20 per cent time”, dictates that every employee should be allowed to spend a fraction of their working week away from their normal job, developing new ideas and working on different projects.

The iPhone service was the brainchild of two web developers in the BBC’s future media and technology department, Chris Johnson and Simon Cross, who has more details on the BBC Radio Labs blog.

@Society of Editors: Information Commissioner: Private broadcasters could come under FOI

Posted by Martin Stabe on 5 November 2007 at 18:05
Tags: BBC, Freedom of Information, ITV, Society of Editors, Society of Editors

The Information Commissioner has acknowledged that his budget for enforcing the Freedom of Information Act is “drop in the ocean”, and suggested that private broadcasting companies might be considered for inclusion in the list of bodies that must respond to FOI requests.

“I am really really struggling at the moment,” Thomas said. He described his office’s £4.7m annual budget to enforce the Freedom of information Act as “really a drop in the ocean”.

Marketing costs had been cut and the backlog of FOI cases is no longer growing as the office is now able to close cases as quickly as they come in, he said.

Discussing the Government’s recently-announced consultation on what private organsiations might be brought under the Freedom of Information Act, Thomas suggested that private broadcasters might be considered for addition to the list.

This would bring ITV and Sky into line with the BBC and Channel 4, which both have to respond to questions about subjects other than their “journalism, art or literature”.

“I would be really surprised if Network Rail weren’t brought under the Act,” Thomas said.

The BBC News website is (not quite) 10 years old

Posted by Martin Stabe on 30 October 2007 at 17:14
Tags: BBC

BBC News Online is ten years old this week. The anniversary comes at a tumultuous time for the site. BBC News Interactive, the department that runs the site, is due to disappear as part of the corporation’s restructuring.

The site is also preparing for some major commercial changes, as the BBC prepares to launch BBC.com, a commercially-funded web site for overseas users. According to a blog post by head of global news Richard Sambrook, an advertising-supported BBC.com is due to launch next month, to be followed by a subscription based site in the new year.

The BBC’s own potted history shows the staggering traffic growth of the site, which now registers more than 1 billion pageviews per month (yes, billion with a ‘b’). The BBC doesn’t regularly release regular monthly unique user figures, its most recent annual report put the traffic at 12 million unique users — per week.

One strange quirk in the story of the BBC News website’s anniversary is that nobody can quite recall the exact time of the launch, except that it was this week in 1997. Archivists and historians must already be fretting that so much human knowledge is now being published in an online form that is not necessarily as permanent as paper.

Two contemporaneous accounts — neither of which are online — put the launch date as 4 November, however.

A small item at the bottom of page 2 of Press Gazette on 31 October 1997 noted that BBC News Online was tuning up for launch on the fourth. At the time, the corporation seemed to have been promising a rather television-like experience:

The statement ‘This is BBC News Online’, accompanied by the World Service signature tune Lillibullero, could become as famous as ‘This is London’ when the Corporation’s 24-hour rolling Internet news service is launched next week (4 November).

News Online, which is the first comprehensive Internet news service to be launched by the BBC, is to have hourly audio bulletins especially packaged for it by the World Service. Other news, divided into UK News, World News, Business, Science and Technology, and Sport, will be presented as text and graphics.

…

News Online is to gather material from the full gamut of the BBCs newsgathering resources. It is to be ‘pushed’ to users via channels on web-browsers. The BBC already has a channel on Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 and will have one on the next version of the Netscape browser, which will be launched by the end of the year.

…

The site employs 30 journalists, but their role will largely entail the laying out and editing of material garnered from other sources. The service will also have close links with News 24, the 24-hour television rolling news service which is to be launched on 9 November.”

The following week, published 7 November, there was a longer feature about the new site which referred to it having launched “earlier this week”. (That issue also noted plans for the launch of regional news services on Ceefax, which was a venerable service even then, but is now beginning to disappear from terrestrial television because of digital switchover.)

There is more support for the 4 November date in Stuart Allan’s excellent history, Online News, which cites a Guardian article from 3 November 1997 in which then head of news Tony Hall is interviewed about the following day’s launch. Allan also cites an article from the Times on 5 November 1997.

The BBC’s On This Day feature endorses the 4 November date. Then again, there is one story on the low-bandwidth verision of the site dated 18:01 on the evening of 3 November 1997.

Unfortunately, Press Gazette didn’t publish any screen grabs in its coverage back in 1997 — records of what the site looked like on day one seem to have gone missing as well. Unfortunately, even Archive.org didn’t capture the site that day.

Localising the BBC story

Posted by Martin Stabe on 18 October 2007 at 14:20
Tags: BBC

The regional press is busy finding the local angles on today’s announcement about the BBC Trust’s approval of Mark Thompson’s plans

The South Wales Argus says Broadcasting House in Cardiff could be sold off as part of cost savings at BBC Wales. The paper also stresses that BBC Wales will also cut digital-only BBC2W will also be amalgamated with BBC2 Wales when the analogue signal is switched off in 2009.

The announcement of the plans today revealed that BBC Wales will cut between 220 and 235 posts, with 145 to 155 net redundancies.

BBC English Regions, which currently employs 2,900 staff will lose between 370 and 390 posts, totaling between 130 and 150 net redundancies.

The News & Star and the North West Evening Mail report that Radio Cumbria will lose two (or maybe three) staff as part of the cutbacks and will have to make savings of 2.2 per cent for the next five years.

BBC Scotland will have between 155 and 165 net redundancies as 225 to 240 posts are cut.

In Northern Ireland, where the corporation currently employs 670 people, 100 to 110 post will be slashed, creating 75 to 85 net redundancies. The Belfast Telegraph reports.

One thing that hasn’t been cut is the BBC’s plans for ultra-local online video news. But local newspapers will be happy that plans for ultra-local satellite televisions news have been scrapped.

Even Heat has found an angle.

More follows…

Covering a General Election, Google style

Posted by Martin Stabe on 17 September 2007 at 12:17
Tags: Australia, BBC, Google, Google Maps, Google News, Wikis

Google Australia has launched a site to cover that country’s 2007 federal election using many of its existing tools.

As TechCrunch reported, the site combines links party-political YouTube videos, a Google Maps mashup containing information on candidates by constituency, “election gadgets” to let users of Google personalised homepage track statements from MPs and Senators, plus feeds from Google News.

Just a minute. This sounds an awful lot like the sort of election site a clever newspaper might produce. Some certainly think this is another creeping encroachment into content by the search giant.

The launch of the site “signals a significant strategic shift on the part of Google to become a primary web destination, as opposed to restricting itself to its historic role as a supplemental, though highly valuable, research tool,” newspaper editor-turned Silicon Valley insider Alan Mutter wrote on his blog, Reflections of a Newsosaur.

Mutter argues that project Down Under is almost inevitably a trial run for next year’s presidential election in United States — an unwelcome development for US news sites just as the latest online metrics show that their traffic growth appears to be slowing.

Google could, of course, also apply all the same technologies could be applied just as well to the next UK general election. So Mutter is quite right that news organisations — the kind that do all the expensive bits of producing content — need to get smart about their election coverage to compete with the mashup artists from California.

A good start might be happening at BBC News, which is planning to use wikis to populate its constituency profiles pages at the next election.

Meanwhile, Google’s other recent eyebrow-raising innovation — its experiment with hosting comments about news stories on Google News — has hardly had the most auspicious start.

In its first month, the Google service appears to have posted just over 100 comments, noted PR blogger Steve Rubel. Could Google be struggling to keep up with the labour-intensive process of manually checking e-mailed comments?