Community Champions Petition
August 30, 2007 Posted by Kevin in : Bristol , add a commentThe Community Champions Fund has supported literally thousands of individuals across the country to get exciting and creative new projects off the ground in their communities.
Supported by the Department for Education and Skills (now Deptartment for Children, Schools and Families), this fund will end in March 2008, and there are no plans to replace it.
The Scarman Trust is campaigning to save this unique programme. Scarman recognise that their Community Champions have done extraordinary things, building positive community activities from the grass-roots and reaching thousands of people and have begun a petition for continued support of this programme.
This petition to Save Community Champions can be found on the Number 10 website.
The petition reads:
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to ensure
Community Champions awards continue to give active individuals
the opportunity to do extraordinary things and make a real
difference in their communities
Could things get any worse for the BBC iPlayer?
August 17, 2007 Posted by Matt in : Bristol , 4 comments
After four years of troubled beta testing for the BBC iPlayer, the Beeb could be forgiven for thinking that the situation could not get any worse. It now has: the techies are grumbling at ever lengthening bug lists and the ISPs are wading in regarding the BBC iPlayer’s insatiable appetite for bandwidth. However, if the BBC keeps a clear head and focuses on content rather than whizzy forms of delivery, I am sure that quality content will keep the BBC iPlayer on everyone’s desktop.
The BBC iPlayer’s latest controversy is with the main internet service providers regarding the huge web resources the player needs. The BBC iPlayer uses peer-to-peer technology, which allows bits of content to be downloaded from other users, at speeds of up to 300M-bytes of data per hour! My feeling is that this sort of bandwidth should be fine for a limited audience. Besides if we are already consuming a fair whack of bandwidth for YouTube, iTunes, Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, surely the ISPs can’t blame the BBC iPlayer on its own, as the sole threat to bandwidth infrastructure?
If you stand back and think about the situation, this is not so much an IT oversight for yet another poorly executed public sector IT project, more of an extremely jumpy cable and internet service provider market, trying to protect their own online content. The cable and TV giants Virgin and Sky have their own “on demand” TV services that are competition. It seems that the big media giants are banging their chests to try and put off the BBC from entering web TV.
Yes, there have been teething problems, which I will leave the web designers and IT professionals to analyse, but I will reiterate that despite these issues 120,000 people have already downloaded the player and this is with a really small catalogue of content!
Now here comes the real threat from the BBC. To dominate online communications, as I always tell our clients, the popularity of blogs, podcasts and videocasts comes down to quality of content, pure and simple.
Compared to Sky and Virgin who have superior delivery infrastructure, i.e. they are also ISPs, the BBC is the 500lb gorilla in the room in comparison when competing on content for online TV. The Beeb’s back catalogue and quality of programming is second to none, worldwide.
Following a recent speech from Ashley Highfield, Director of New Media & Technology at the BBC, it seems that their long term strategy will be to incorporate the Open Archive project into the BBC iPlayer. The Open Archive Project is the BBC plan to make its archive of all audio-visual content available to the public for viewing and research purposes on a trial basis started in March 2007, with the aim of providing a full service from Spring 2008.
Imagine the response from Joe Public if you could download (using the BBC iPlayer) the entire series of Walking with Dinosaurs, East Enders or Casualty? Clearly even antique buffs will find every Antiques road show ever filmed, as a hugely valuable resource. The possibilities and appeal are endless. Especially if the BBC can sort out copyright issues and distribute the player to a worldwide audience, not just the UK that it is now! I am sure that the growing expert community would gladly pay for access to BBC content online!
Clearly the end game is looking strong for the Beeb, but as there are so many problems with the player this may take some time…. For the record the Montage team tried to get the player going and had so many various problems and snags regarding MS Media player upgrades, virus and firewall software settings that we gave up! The library interface looks great and there is loads of great content on there already, just a shame it’s a real pain to get to it…….
Free eInclusion Event, 4 & 5th October, London
Posted by Kevin in : Bristol , add a commentTechshare Expo 2007 is a new showcase for products and services helping people with disabilities participate fully in the information age.
From the internet to home computers, educational technologies, video games, digital TV and mobile phones - Techshare Expo 2007 will be a showcase for products, services, tips and techniques.
Entry to the event is free. For more information and to pre-register go to www.techshare-expo.com
Offload: Systems for survival
August 9, 2007 Posted by Clare in : Bristol, Media, Events, Environment, Technology , 1 comment so far
Futurefarmers (US) present their ‘Gardening Superfund Sites’, which looks at the influence of technical or eWaste around the Silicon Valley and across other US site. (more…)
