Introducing… 'on TV tonight'

I watch a fair bit of TV, maybe a few hours an evening, as a way of relaxing and being entertained without having to do much. The problem is that, whilst there’s usually a couple of good things on per evening, they’re ever more thinly spread out among a growing range of channels. I’d be constantly scanning the TV listings, trying to pick out the few things worth watching from the pile of junk and repeats that weren’t.

It was this frustration that led me to create on TV tonight, a website which I’ve described as delivering “daily recommendations for the discerning viewer”. The idea is that write up a few sentences on which programmes I think are watching, which get published each morning and delivered to you via RSS. If there’s nothing but rubbish on, then you’ll get a short message telling you there’s ‘nothing worth watching’, and you can make plans to go out to the pub instead.

Of course, it’s all slightly tongue-in-cheek, as you can clearly make your own mind up (and probably will), but I simply hope that my suggestions are occasionally useful, even if only as a reminder.

Part of my motivation for producing the site is to force myself in writing regular, concise copy for a web audience in a given format. Having a blog gives you a great flexibility to write whenever you feel lit it, on whatever subject interests you, in as much depth as you can must, but this can make you a bit lazy. Writing requires creativity and inspiration, but it’s also a craft best honed through the discipline of regular practice.

Another reason I’ve done this is as an experiment into a concept I’ve been thinking about which I’ve called ‘micropublishing’. The idea is to focus on publishing concentrated amounts of highly relevant content which fills a specific need of a time-poor audience. By being rich but small, the content can be aggregated and transferred across platforms to be consumed in any way that’s useful. On TV tonight might be only a small demonstration of this, but I’d be interested to see whether the phenomenon gains wider traction. Del.icio.us-driven link-logs are perhaps the most common example already out there. I’d like to see this approach tried with news publishing, where the number and length of articles would expand and shrink to match the amount of actual news-worthy stories taking place, rather than being largely fixed at a set amount. With online distribution, there’s little point in publishing much on a slow news day any more.

I designed and built on TV tonight mostly over the recent Christmas break. It’s all pretty simple and back-to-basics, although I did spend far too long agonising over the fonts and line spacing.

Please do take a look, and let me know any feedback. You’ll probably get the best feel for the site by subscribing to the RSS feed for a week and seeing whether it’s something that works its way into your daily read.

The content is creative commons licensed and microformatted-up in case you want to try and do something interesting with it.