[backstage] Commenting on the BBC Trust Project Canvas consultation
To bring the Project Canvas consultation a little more onto the web, we've republished the document at: http://writetoreply.org/ukgovoss/ URIs are available at the section an paragraph level, so if you don't want to comment on-site, and maybe decide to blog a response on your own site, you can still link back to the appropriate part of the document and feed your comments (via the magic of trackback) into the comment pool at WriteToReply. We're looking at ways of displaying an individual's comment feed so that their comments can be submitted via the 'official' consultation form, so if anyone has any ideas on this front, we'd love to hear them. tony
[backstage] Digital Britain report - Paragraph level commenting
Taking inspiration from the way DIUS have been using Commentpress to encourage people to comment on various government reports, here's a community sourced attempt to do the same for Digital Britain - The Interim Report http://writetoreply.org/digitalbritain/ It's built using a Wordpress MU installation - so the hope is that other people might start to add docs around the idea of http://writetoreply.org Here's part of the backstory: http://ouseful.wordpress.com/2009/02/04/comment-on-digital-britain-at-writetoreplyorg/ tony
[backstage] BBC realaudio in grazr widget
If you have a list of BBC listen again real audio URLs in a feed, and a real audio player plugin for your browser, you can now listen to programs listed as enclosures to a feed from within a Grazr widget: Here's the history: http://forums.grazr.com/topic.php?id=24 Here's a demo: http://grazr.com/config.html?file=http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/test/embedRATest.xml Here it is in a user context (sort of?!): http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/stringle2.php?t=psychemedia/stringleClickOnDemos=http://www.open2.net/clickono=http://www.opmlmanager.com/opml/clickonStringleDemo.opml tony --- Tony Hirst mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] homepage: http://robofesta.open.ac.uk/tony blog: http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/blog/ Dept. of ICT, Faculty of Technology Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK Tel: +44 (0)19086 52789, m./SMS 07709 766223
Re: [backstage] BBC Programme Catalogue
Hi - I was having a quick look at the Programme Catalogue (amazing what the OU has put out over the years - http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/006117.html) and a couple of things came to mind: - is there an API/any way of making a query to the catalogue that will return an XML response? - are you going to offer support for sparql (the reason i ask is that's the way the Talis/Silkworm/library webservice (http://directory.talis.com/ui/) API looks like it's going - http://api.talis.com/1/dir/sparql) - is the catalgoue reference number coding scheme hackable/defined according to some convention? If so, is the convention published anywhere? - is it possible to make compound(?) queries on the catalogue - e.g. to search for series Dr WHo AND contributor(?) Tom Baker thanks tony --- Tony Hirst mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] homepage: http://robofesta.open.ac.uk/tony blog: http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/blog/ Dept. of ICT, Faculty of Technology Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK Tel: +44 (0)19086 52789, m./SMS 07709 766223
Re: [backstage] BBC Programme Catalogue
ben- Yes there are API's - loads of them! If you perform your search you should see Feeds for every page returned. yes... For example http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/infax/contributor/4362(Tony Blair) returns FOAF data (http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/xml/contributor/4362) and an Atom dump (http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/feed/contributor/4362). got that sussed... If you want to convert your web-based searches into REST-like requests, you want to pick out the /infax/ in the url and change it to /xml/ and /feed/. I hadn't picked up on feed... I'd guessed at things like http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/xml/search/dr%20who which gives: Template is missing Missing template /home/system/opencatalogue/www/20051212/app/views/xml/search.rhtml but the atom/feed search: http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/feed/search/dr%20who http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/feed/search/t209 works fine:-) Now all I have to do is to persuade those in the know to get this feed fed into the under construction OU federated search engine ;-) thanks tony PS any ideas about the convention used to generate catalogue numbers - the OU programmes I found in a series search all seem to have the form: xOUxnnnx (e.g. FOUT695S) - is there any sense that can be made by parsing the catalogue IDs? --- Tony Hirst mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] homepage: http://robofesta.open.ac.uk/tony blog: http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/blog/ Dept. of ICT, Faculty of Technology Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK Tel: +44 (0)19086 52789, m./SMS 07709 766223
[backstage] BBC Topic based mashups
Here's something that should be quick to prototype - given ebven just a few minutes of spare time (i wish...) A topic based resource page - the ball park is perhaps apps along the lines of those eg here: http://del.icio.us/psychemedia/personalpage The gist of the idea is to have a page containing all manner of stuff related to a topic - podcasts from radio, relevant tv listings, appropriate news stories etc This is not totally unlike some of the themed BBc pages - eg http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/ or http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/robots/index.shtml - but it would differ in the sense of being customisable/personalised as well as covering news, programming and follow-up in one place if i get that 5 mins, i'll see if i can force what i have in mind into one of the personalpage sites.. btw - is there any backstage related activity on ning.com? i've not had a look in there for a week or so --- SEE THE WICKED ROBOT INVASION MAP http://www.wickedrobots.co.uk/ --- Mail tags: --- Tony Hirst mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] blog: http://micro-info.blogspot.com/ Dept. of ICT, Faculty of Technology Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK Tel: +44 (0)19086 52789, m./SMS 07709 766223 http://robofesta.open.ac.uk/tony http://www.robofesta-uk.org - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
[backstage] Images as News Annotations
backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk on 11 August 2005 at 18:31 + wrote: I can completely understand why bringing images from news stories into your prototypes is a compelling idea. Unfortunately it's not something the BBC is able to make available on backstage nor can it condone screen scraping of images from the news site. I think this is one of those areas where annotations streams will be useful, becuase it opens up the possibility of services providing image annotations for news stories using open image collections tony - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
Re: [backstage] What's playing now...
backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk on 26 July 2005 at 09:58 + wrote: Music recently which was pretty successful in terms of synching delivery etc. I thought this might be one of the issues... I was part of a tour of Greenwich maritime museum the week after the Lords were questiioning time delayed pips on digital radio programmes, and the Curator of Time (which must be the best job title ever, i think) was letting rip on the issue! However, I guess you don;t need to be so accurate if you are spooling the the titles of the last 3 songs, each of which last minutes... tony --- SEE THE WICKED ROBOT INVASION MAP http://www.wickedrobots.co.uk/ --- Mail tags: --- Tony Hirst mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] blog: http://micro-info.blogspot.com/ Dept. of ICT, Faculty of Technology Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK Tel: +44 (0)19086 52789, m./SMS 07709 766223 http://robofesta.open.ac.uk/tony http://www.robofesta-uk.org - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
[backstage] What's playing now...
If server load isn;t really an issue, I'd love to have access to a 'what's playing now/what's just played' feed... As well as tickers, there are a stack of potential mobile applications... eg mre often than not, there'll be a tune playing on a music station that i miss the name of/miss the artist, and I would love to be able to send a txt (wjp radio1) and a get a msg back with attributions for the last 3 tunes (and perhaps download links for those tunes from an online music store, or reservation links to add the appropriate album to my amazon wichlist) tony - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html.
Re: [backstage] Geotagging BBC news stories
With the speed with which the annotation stream idea is being worked up, I can see the time is ripe to revisit the idea of an information mixing desk (cf an audio mixing desk). Info feeds come in at the top, stories can get boosted/attenuated in the presentation order according to eg timeliness, keywords, locale etc etc (cf bass, treble etc), effects applied to feeds correspond perhaps to annotation feeds, perhaps to info pulled in from other services (eg if a story/feed is tagged, then delicious can be mined for related pages, and perhaps even related feeds (hmm - does delicious support rss or webservice linktypes, so you can just search on those?) But that's by the by... What I meant to post was: As I understand it, the annotationStream idea allows a user to provide a set of annotations that can be applied to a particular original feed. But what if I want to define a feed that is a combination of several distinct annotationStreams defined at quite a high level? is there any merit in going a step further and having an annotationMix (or annotationPatch?) (that may or may not be an annotationStream?) that contains eg one or more useAnnotationStream annotationURI=URI-for-annotation-service / tags and defines which bits of those various annotations from each feed should be used in the final annotationMix? It wouldn;t go as far as defining an xslt to remix the final feed, but would be useful as a config file for a mixer of several feeds, perhaps, or setting up an XSLT to generate the final annotated/mixed feed? tony - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html.
Re: [backstage] Geotagging BBC news stories
backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk on 25 July 2005 at 15:42 + wrote: Do you knock up prototypes? Yes - given time (in fact, i only ever do prototypes, and then it's coded with cannibalised code that hangs together with the software equivalent of gaffer tape.i don;t think i've ever got anything as far as a late beta...;-) however, i'm blagging minutes rather than hours for not-work stuff at the mo, and the pace of change on this list means that prototypes are appearing at the speed of thought... if only i could get time to put a bid in for the info mixing desk as a proper research project...(gazes longingly into the distance) [resonates with this from Matt. I wish I could buy some time to get the annotation streams thing up and running! ] re the info mixing desk - I thought i'd blogged about this a bit ago, but can;t find it anywhere expect for a couple of pages of scribbled notes in an old logbook, so i'm afraid i can;t link you to more detailed thoughts just at the mo... Original idea was just a rap on an rss equivalent of something like this: http://www.theatrecrafts.com/sound_mixingdesk.html that was more than eg just this: http://www.feedcombine.co.uk/st/content/makefeed/ (which doesn;t appear to be working at the mo?) Cf the sounddesk, the line feeds are RSS feeds. Eq allows you to filter results on keywords, perhaps (eg like +terms and -terms in search engines), auxiliaries i saw as sending the rss to some sort of feed processor that returns something pulled from the original feed (tho now i realise that what the aux's would more usefully do is provide Matt's annotationStreams...) The different channels/faders, allow you to set the weight of items from different RSS inputs(with added FX/annotations) in the overall output infomix. This could be another RSS feed, or it could be data plotted on a google map, or some other visualisation. The sounddesk graphic doesn;t have mute/solo buttons, etc, but they'd be there to allow the infomixer to check individual feeds etc. I had a scout around some time ago for exemplars (lazy as i am) and about the only thing i came across at the time that wasn't an RSS aggregator was this text mixing desk http://www.lazaruscorporation.co.uk/v4/cutup/textinput.php which is NOT the sort of thing i was thinking of... but it probably takes you to interesting places if you think around it a bit... In terms of FX, it's also quite a fruitful starting point thinking of info analogues to sound FX, though they soon breakdown - so for example an echo on a blog posting might be a quote from, or interpretation of, that blog on another blog; Re annotation feeds - another useful 'annotation' might be images or movies to illustrate a feed (so the info mising desk needs an 'add image' effect..:-) tony --- SEE THE WICKED ROBOT INVASION MAP http://www.wickedrobots.co.uk/ --- Mail tags: --- Tony Hirst mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] blog: http://micro-info.blogspot.com/ Dept. of ICT, Faculty of Technology Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK Tel: +44 (0)19086 52789, m./SMS 07709 766223 http://robofesta.open.ac.uk/tony http://www.robofesta-uk.org - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
Re: [backstage] What's playing now...
Thnx for the info, dan. track now playing in LiveText - the scrolling text you see on a DAB Digital Radio LCD screen or when listening to the radio over our DTT Freeview services etc. That kind of information (The track now playing is...) is also available across several networks on LiveText does LiveText get fed to the web anywhere at all (even as a diagnostic?), or is a MAKE involving a DAB radio, hacking the display to generate acsii, and then pushing that to the web via a server the only way to do it at the mo? ;-) tony --- SEE THE WICKED ROBOT INVASION MAP http://www.wickedrobots.co.uk/ --- Mail tags: --- Tony Hirst mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] blog: http://micro-info.blogspot.com/ Dept. of ICT, Faculty of Technology Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK Tel: +44 (0)19086 52789, m./SMS 07709 766223 http://robofesta.open.ac.uk/tony http://www.robofesta-uk.org - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
Re: Fwd: [backstage] Google generated BCC RSS feeds
backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk on 04 July 2005 at 09:52 + wrote: My data comes directly from the BBC, not via google; you are looking at the wrong script. [ http://www.vaporum.com/locked/rss_search/flo.shtml ]http://www.vaporum.com/locked/rss_search/flo.shtml do you produce an rss feed of the results too? ;-) tony --- SEE THE WICKED ROBOT INVASION MAP http://www.wickedrobots.co.uk/ --- Mail tags: --- Tony Hirst mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] blog: http://micro-info.blogspot.com/ Dept. of ICT, Faculty of Technology Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK Tel: +44 (0)19086 52789, m./SMS 07709 766223 http://robofesta.open.ac.uk/tony http://www.robofesta-uk.org - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html.
[backstage] Geotagging BBC news stories
Several sites are plotting news stories on Gmaps I beleive (anyone using yahoomaps yet?) and as a result generating geo info for news stories. Lazy as I am, is anyone syndicating this geo info indexed/searchable by BBC news story ID? thanks tony --- SEE THE WICKED ROBOT INVASION MAP http://www.wickedrobots.co.uk/ --- Mail tags: --- Tony Hirst mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] blog: http://micro-info.blogspot.com/ Dept. of ICT, Faculty of Technology Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK Tel: +44 (0)19086 52789, m./SMS 07709 766223 http://robofesta.open.ac.uk/tony http://www.robofesta-uk.org - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html.
Re: [backstage] Geotagging BBC news stories
backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk on 21 July 2005 at 21:52 + wrote: it seems you have the same motivation as I had when I mailed this list about RSS Annotation Streams! missed that - ah: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/msg00330.html and http://datamining.typepad.com/data_mining/2005/07/rss_annotation_.html I agree with the sentiment, and then some - if someone goes to the trouble of adding value to a story/feed, it would be good if those extras could be syndicated separately but identifiably too without others having to reinvent/reimplement the same technique/recreate the same annotation data. Perhaps this is format that we want to develop further? That sounds like an interesting (and perhaps useful) exercise...where to start? i tend to work back to generalised solutions from a couple of similar but different implementations of a thing...would it be fair to say that the annotation stream on its own would be relatively worthless without the original story it was annotating? or could you imageine it ever standing alone on its own terms? Back to the geotagged BBC stories, even something as simple as returning lat/long when passed a story ID would be v reusable... For example: http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/prototypes/archives/2005/05/a_map_of_the_ne.html http://boneill.ninjagrapefruit.com/wp-content/bbc/newmaps/ divines geo data and Duncan's http://backstage.min-data.co.uk/geotagged/ must have a script for locating stories So if someone can make story id/geotag info available, then I'm sure the lazy community (of which I count myself a part) would be v grateful :-) tony - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html.
Re: [backstage] Google generated BCC RSS feeds
backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk on 01 July 2005 at 17:54 + wrote: Screen scraping HTML is in my opinion not good practice. Agreed - but I wasn't scraping HTML - I was using the Google web service... and I think that makes it a different issue to the case of screenscraping...? For example, as the content was being provided from google in a 'raw' form by Google, presumably this carries the implication that the content will have to be republished somehow? Which is why I posted the query... ( the example was constructed solely to illustrate the question, rather than to be used in an app.) The use of the site:bbc.co.uk etc search switch is where part of the problem lies, I think. I'm not sure I can articulate at the moment the feeling I have that there is a difference between republishing general google results (which in a sense is publishing google's view of the world) and republishing the results from a single site. Perhaps an extreme workaround would be to say that site:whatever should be disabled in the google search api if the request is not coming *from* whatever? A bit like the borwser imposed security constraints on who you accept scripts from... But this is off-topic for the list... tony - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html.
