However, it’s the axeing of BBC 6 Music that vexes me the most. This radio station has been a part of my life for the past six or so years, and is hugely important. It is literally the only reason that we own two DAB digital radios (given that we’ve always lived in cities with excellent FM reception, and so audio quality is irrelevant). Over time, I’ve watched the DJs come and go (having to say a sad goodbye to Phill Jupitus, Vic McGlynn and Andrew Collins), but the standard has always remained remarkably high, with just one, cough, exception. More importantly, the music is always more interesting, eclectic and appealing (to me), than any other station. I spend far more time listening to music via 6 Music than I do on my iPod/iPhone.

So the idea that the station is going to close is pretty distressing. I’ve seen tons of things I like get closed, from Urbis (just yesterday), to BBC Collective, and even the Millennium Experience (which was good, and had the potential to get better). But none of these closures have made me want campaign in the streets about them. Radio feels different somehow. Even though commercial radio stations do come and go (and get constantly rebranded), somehow they feel much more permanent than websites, visitor attractions, and so on. They feel like a fixture, a constant in our busy, changeable lives.

I would never be this bothered if a TV channel changed or closed down. BBC Four is great, and important, but we could live without it existing as a channel. The march towards non-linear television feels natural and unstoppable. I only care that the BBC continues to produce and commission good TV programmes, I’m not too bothered how I access them (I’ll even buy them on DVD or pay to download them via iTunes). But radio is much more substantially different to listening to an iPod, Last.fm, Spotify, and so on. Those are all great services, and I’m sure they’ll continue to improve (especially at doing personalised recommendations, which they still all suck at), but they are different and parallel to radio. Radio is about shared experiences. It’s about being ‘live’. It’s about good music, chosen for you by people who know it better than you. It’s about personalities who deliver warmth, wit and intelligent commentary. Those are all things that 6 Music delivers in abundance, and which are really difficult to find elsewhere.

The justification behind closing 6 Music doesn’t make sense. There may be reasonable arguments for re-thinking BBC Asian Network (treating the asian population as a single audience when they are as diverse as the rest of the population is perhaps tricky), and for cutting US imports and sports spending and focusing more on quality rather than popular content. There’s even an argument to be made for re-focusing the BBC’s online output and doing fewer things better, although setting arbitrary targets like cutting the number of web pages and reducing staff numbers is hardly giving much thought to this.

But the logic behind cutting 6 Music is nonsense. As many others have pointed out (and as is even alluded to in an earlier BBC Trust review of the station), it can’t be accused of having too small an audience whilst also not being niche and public service enough. The station has had to find a fine balance between growing audiences and remaining true to its distinctive music output. I think the BBC Trust review got this right by recommending that the station’s remit be altered to acknowledge the focus on celebrating “the alternative spirit in popular music” (a nice phrase) via presenters with a “strong musical credibility” (ie they can’t just be comedians). The idea that the station “unfairly harms commercial rivals” isn’t particularly credible either, given the relatively small audience and complete lack of any commercial rivals doing anything similar.

The truth is that only the BBC could run 6 Music. Absolute Radio (the newly relaunched Virgin Radio) may have made noises by offering to buy the 6 Music format and network, but they would never be able to run it at the same standard as the BBC. They’d cut costs dramatically, resulting in fewer DJs (especially the high profile ones, I expect), less music news coverage and fewer documentaries (which the BBC Trust had recommended increasing). Plus, they wouldn’t have access to the BBC’s extensive archive of music and recorded sessions. And then there are the ads, which kill any enjoyment of radio…

Besides, if the plans go ahead, then I imagine that the valuable spectrum released (two national DAB channels), would, for ‘fairness’ reasons, be auctioned off to the highest bidder. And there would be much more profitable national radio services to run than a commercial version of 6 Music.

So, having said why I think 6 Music should be saved, what do I (or ‘we’, if you agree with me) do about it, other than adding a Twibbon to our avatars on Twitter?

Well, the official process is that Mark Thompson will deliver his report to the BBC Trust, who will approve or amend it. They’ll probably do some form of consultation, so we can respond in our thousands to that. Outside of this, the issue may well become an election issue. The Tories have already spoken in favour of the proposed cuts. I can’t find any official Labour (or Lib Dem) response yet, but Labour MP Tom Watson has tabled a motion opposing the cuts, which will hopefully gain widespread support in the House of Commons. The unions, too, are reacting angrily to the news, with the NUJ threatening strikes and BECTU promising robust opposition.

But perhaps a grass-routes campaign might just help? Would the general public show their support for the BBC by marching on the streets? It would be a good test of the BBC’s value, anyhow. And if we don’t do something now, it might be the beginning of the end for such a cherished national institution.

I pledge my support to the campaign. And I’ll keep you posted.

Other commentary on this story:

• Phill Jupitus: Killing BBC 6 Music would be a slap in the face to licence-payers
• Andrew Collins: Dead air?
• James Cridland: 6 music, photography, and tidying up
• Jon Grant: Why close 6music and Asian Network?
• Fiona Stewart: Save BBC 6 Music

Updates: (Mar 1) Added two links to other blog posts.

One of the nice things about the BBC iPlayer service, aside from the ability to watch telly you’ve missed, is that each TV programme now has a nice URL that you can e-mail to friends (or bookmark on delicious if you’re a geek). It might sound trivial, but before iPlayer, TV programmes were represented haphazardly on the BBC website, either getting a full-blown Flash microsite which quickly dated, or simply an entry in the 7 day listings which soon then disappeared from the web, possibly re-appearing if the programme was repeated, and then disappearing again.

Some smart people at the BBC realised that providing a URL for each TV and radio programme was the first thing any broadcaster website should be built upon. Tom Coates wrote about it back in 2004 in The Age of Point-at-Things. This thinking was then first adopted in the Radio 3 website, which had URLs like http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/worldroutes/pip/9z4hw/, written about by Tom in Developing a URL structure for broadcast. The alphanumeric code for BBC programmes was invented, and christened the ‘pip’ (programme information page).

Step forward a few years, Tom leaves the BBC, and the BBC Programmes site (often called simply ‘/programmes’) is launched, with a URL for every TV and radio programme broadcast (from launch onwards), in the form of http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00f2dfv. The alphanumeric ids are still there, only they’re a few digits longer, and seem to have been internally renamed ‘pids’ (programme ids), for unknown reasons. Job done, right?

Not quite. Shortly after the /programmes site launches (in beta), the iPlayer service launches. Now, the streamable videos could have been located at the existing /programmes/pid URLs, but for reasons of branding or infrastructure or whatever, end up at a new URL, in the form of http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00f2dfv. Note though that the same ‘pid’ is used. Having the two URLs perhaps isn’t the end of the world, there’s a page with the programme information (decription, credits), and a page with the actual video. The distinction between the two pages has started to merge though, with description info available on the iPlayer page, and the video available on the /programmes page – so maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all.

What’s really annoyed me though, and the reason for this post, is that the iPlayer URLs themselves have now changed again. The Stephen Fry programme linked to above, for example, is actually now linked to at http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00f2dfv/Stephen_Fry_in_America_New_World/. Yup, it’s gained an extra string of the programme name, with spaces replaced by underscores. Let’s be clear: there is no good reason to do this at all.

Stuffing keywords into URLs seems to be fashionable at the moment (it’s the default behaviour of software like Wordpress), but the rationale is pretty flimsy. The reasons given are firstly that it improves search engine ranking and secondly that it makes users more likely to click on your URL when they see it in the search results. The first reason might be marginly true in some edge cases, but search engines have more than enough information to go on already – they can look at the html <title>, the <h1> tag and the anchor text of pages and sites linking to that page. Which in the case of a TV programme, will nearly always contain the programme title anyway, so adding it to the URL in the hope that it’ll boost your search ranking is just wishful thinking. The second reason has more justification, but again is pretty marginal, especially as users seeing the bbc.co.uk should already feel more than confident enough to click the link, without having to see the programme title in the URL.

It’s bad enough changing your URLs arbitrarily with no good reason (see Cool URIs don’t change), but it’s even worse to not redirect (with a ‘301 Moved Permanently’ header code) from your old URL to your new ones, which is how the iPlayer site is behaving at the moment.

Even even worse is to set up your server to simply ignore the string in the last part of the URL, and to simply return the page that you would have got had this not been present. This means that I can craft ficticious URLs like http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00f2dfv/Stephen_Fry_is_our_saviour/, or http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00f085h/James_May_is_a_big_old_fool/ and have them still work, returning ‘200 OK’ header codes and BBC content. I can put them in my blog, save them to delicious, and they may even show up in search engines. And the age of being able to point-at-things at a permanent URI is broken.

C’mon BBC, sort it out.

Update: as a prime example of why putting titles in URLs is such a bad idea, the URL for the most recent editio of Top Gear is http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00fm0xc/Top_Gear_Series_12_Episode_2_(new_series)/. Yup, someone at the BBC decided it’d be a good idea to add ‘(new series)’ to the programme title in the iPlayer database, presumably because old series get repeated so often that it’s hard for users to tell what’s new or not (hint: it should be possible for the website to work this out from the data programmatically, and then display a ‘NEW’ icon). So now the URL (which is meant to be ‘permanent’ & ’stable’) has ‘new’ in it. Which will be accurate for, oh, about 6 months?

The questions seem a little unrelated to each other to me, but I’m going to run with this on the presumption that there’s some underlying purpose.

Question 1: ‘What BBC content do you watch / listen to / interact with which you feel strongly about. In fact what content do you just enjoy, passively ‘consume’ etc.’

I tend to go for the high-value dramas, like Spooks, Hotel Babylon, Torchwood, Doctor Who and so on. I’ll also watch BBC News bulletins, but not on a strictly regular basis. Comedy-wise, I’ll make a point of tuning in to watch Have I Got News For You and more recently Never Mind the Buzzcocks. I’ll watch a bit of QI if it happens to be on too. I used to watch Neighbours, and have followed it over to Five, for now.

My radio is permanently tuned to 6Music. I keep trying to get myself to listen to other stations for a bit of variety, but that never really happens. I listen passively to 6Music in the morning, and some evenings. Weekends though I’ll nearly always listen to Russell Howard, Stephen Merchant and the Adam & Joe show.

Question 2: ‘How much of this do you get from traditional routes (i.e. broadcast to your television, radio or recorded off air via a video / pvr) vesus other routes (BBC Listen Again, iPlayer, DVD or download via the likes of Bittorrent)? How much of this material is BBC and how much from other sources?’

Most of the TV comes through our Freeview PVR, either live or recorded and watched later (using some timers set up to regularly record favorite programmes). Until recently, poor reception meant we could pretty much only receive BBC channels, but we’ve started to get decent ITV and Channel4 reception now too. We’ve also started to use the excellent iPlayer streaming service on the Macbook – usually for when we’ve missed and forgotten to record a programme, or for when we want to watch it from bed. The full-screen streaming resolution is perfectly watchable, and never has to rebuffer over our Be* connection.

I also subscribe to a few BBC podcasts, such as the 6Music shows mentioned above, plus a few newsy ones and iPM, to listen to on the tube and train in to work.

I have a few BBC DVDs, mostly for the TV series that are worth rewatching a fair few times – like Spooks and Hustle.

To my geek shame, I’ve never tried using Bittorrent. This is through sheer can’t-be-botheredness though, rather than much of a moral purpose.

Question 3: ‘Where do you talk about BBC content? Online, on your blog, forums, amongst your online friends? or do you just chat about it at work, at the pub. Do you have ‘water cooler moments’ or do you in fact not really talk about it much?’

Well, I don’t have ‘water cooler moments’, as our water cooler was cruelly taken away from us at work. However, we do sometimes talk about TV shows at work – usually after something big was on that at least a few people actually watched.

Online, I’ve using Twitter quite a bit, and will sometimes twit a brief comment on a TV show. Having just looked through my archive, it seems my TV-related twits are either to announce I’m about to watch something (eg Messiah, Skins, Mighty Boosh or Horizon), which I guess is partly to remind friends to watch it too, or a brief reaction after it’s finished (eg Doctor Who, Skins, Neighbours). I’ll usually include the channel name, so I guess you could probably pull these comments automatically by cross-matching the time with the channel name and programme name, and possibly the phrase ‘watching’.

I’ll also blog TV shows now and then, but more rarely.

Question 4: ‘If you wanted to get in touch with the people who made the content how would you go about it?’

This doesn’t exactly come up a lot, except for radio shows, which are always desperate for you to make contact. Especially on 6Music, where the DJs are often desperate for you to get in touch. I’ve e-mailed and texted shows a fair bit – nearly always getting my comment read out.

For TV shows, I guess I’d use the ‘contact’ button on the relevant BBC minisite, if there was one, although that often leads to a generic form. I might try and guess their BBC e-mail address (firstname.lastname@bbc.co.uk). Or if it was a complaint, which I’ve only done once, I’d go to BBC Complaints.

If you’re reading this and think it’s relevant and also want to answer the questions, you can copy them from here, or from Nodalpoints’s blog post.

Note: this is not a meme.

This shows just how frustrating and damaging the time-delay of comment moderation can be. It’s often quite natural for people to comment on other comments within blogs, but the delay in comments appearing can make these ad-hoc conversations hard to follow, and repetitive comments.

Whether blog comments are an appropriate forum for ‘a conversation’ is interesting a debate in itself. Jeremy Keith over on adactio has implemented a comment functionality where a blog post is open for comments for a set period of time, but the comments aren’t actually published until that period is up, whereupon they all appear at once. He suggests this might help create a response more akin to ‘the wisdom of crowds’, encouraging more independence of thinking, and less of a conversation. It’s an interesting model, but hasn’t yet caught on much elsewhere.

Meanwhile, Mark Simpkins at the BBC has written ‘Raising The Social Bar’ over on his blog, arguing that the BBC should be encouraging people to respond to blog posts and web pages by writing on their own blog (or social networking space). It’s by no means an original idea, but he’s started to think through what it’d mean for the BBC, in particular suggesting that the BBC might have a role to play in guiding people how to set up a blog, etc, and in also making it easier for people to contact the relevant author/editorial team (recognising that many comments are just feedback that doesn’t have to be public).

It’s an interesting and worthwhile argument, but there are still plenty of unknowns. For example, even if I have a blog, I wouldn’t want to turn every comment, be it a thought-out bit of feedback or a pithy one-line, into a post on my own blog. Posting to my blog or to someone else’s blog feel like different spaces somehow, and what I’m reading about elsewhere isn’t the same as what I’m writing about here.

I’m not sure where the solution is coming from, but somehow I don’t feel that there’s going to be one single solution. At times, it may be appropriate to collect comments directly on a webpage, at other times, it may be best to encourage people to write longer-form responses elsewhere. At yet other times, it may be better to encourage people to send feedback privately, and then collate the most interesting responses together editorially as a new page.

I hope more people pick up the questions raised by Mark. For the time being, though, I just hope the BBC can fix their blog infrastructure and speed up the comment moderation…

‘These sites allow you to store, tag and share links across the internet. You can share these links both with friends and people with similar interests. You can also access your links from any computer you happen to be using.’

Am I the only person who thinks that these look a bit tacky? Whilst it seems fine to have these links on a blog, on the BBC News site it just doesn’t feel right somehow…

I wonder what Currybet (who just completed a fairly long-winded review of which newspaper websites include these features) thinks…

Sounds a bit expensive, and dangerously vague to me, so I hope someone’s driving it who knows what they’re doing. I hope it’s not just optimistically praying for a magic-bullet third-party CMS solution to come along and revolutionise BBC content production…

Time: 2:38. Battery: 88%. About to start.

2:42. Lights dimmed. Starting now.

The presentations

(They get 90 seconds each. ouch). There’s some kind of clever voting system using batons and a scanner. Not sure how it works.

#0: Word up http://www.ellybowness.com/hackday/index.html (I’ll link these up later) – based around text / dance culture. using a dance mat – challenge based on how fast you can spell out a message on the dance mat, i think. they’ve got a video – looks kinda fun.

#1: Inus 4 Still Delicious http://harriyott.com/HackDay/StillDelicious – only used 30 seconds. a simple app to check your del.icio.us bookmarks for dead links.

#2: Sprung Where should I live…? – webiste which mashes different sources to show you where to live. includes education data, population density and crime data. big red spot over london for crime data.

#3: Hackfighter Hackfight http://hackday07.tokofu.com/ – man, he’s talking fast. uses your different web identities to create some kind of online roleplay game. eg uses twitter to do charisma.

#4: Leo Lapworth Mightv and yahoo Search http://www.mightyv.com/series/771/61 – existing mightv website – have added links and search results to tv listings.

#5 Tom Scott Hacked! A live conference game http://www.thomasscott.net/hacked/ – took a suggestion literally – conference game using post-it notes. have even added apis.

#6 Team Moon UNdemocracy.com http://www.undemocracy.com – they’ve screen-scraped UN website and turned it into a proper website, with persistant links . from the fax mp dudes. very worthwhiel.

#7 Acme 3d mouse and missile launcher – have got a 3d mouse )what’s that_ and a usb missile launcher. launches missile into audience. kinda fun. gets a laught.

#8 Vaporteam theflashbackproject – not quite following this one, speaker has a strong accent. something to do with pictures and locations.

(skipping #9)

10 Josh Clark “Machine-Tag Generator” http://hackday.bigmedium.com/ – web app which adds machine tags. post text into box – yahoo term extractor – wikipedia search – generated machine tags. bit convoluted, but interesting.

#11 Monkey Tennis BBC Nwsr 24 http://nwsr24.neuron1.com/ – matches subtitles (scaneed via OCR from tv stream) and matches them to wikipedia links. also has flickr photos and maps. cool

#12: 12 Storybook Storybook http://72.249.74.106/ – taking images from web into Mia. some kind of story-telling thing. plus animation.

#13 North and South Top Gun – an ‘offline application’ drawn on paper. zooming into a person. takes a phone call about an ‘api’. very funny.

#14 Chris and Jeff Hood.FM http://feesta.com/gadgets/hood.fm/maps.php – adding geo tags to last.fm music. creates a ’soundtrack for the city’. not sure how they do the geo/music matching.

#15 Lance MyBlogBunny – uses Plaze api and nabaztag bunny. the bunny is talking!! bunny is also talking in semaphore with its ears.

#17 bli.mp team The bli.mp, a socially controlled air ship. – http://blimp.ts0.com/ go blimp team. we’re controlling the blimp now from our laptops. in theory.

#18 happy coders flickr captcha http://flickrcaptcha.textdriven.com/ – makes an image-based captcha (from Flickr, naturally). does what it says on the tin.

#19 James Aylett collapsing contacts on social networks http://tartarus.org/james/computers/hackday/ – tries to solve the problem of having to add all your friends seperately on all the different social networking sites. crap interface. also plots friends on a map.

20 Wencheng and dotBen BeebTube Video News Widget http://freshtube.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/beebTube.xml – taking bbc news videos and embedding it iGoogle. also works in ‘Bubbletop [plug plug]. browser crashed.

22 Banana Labs Fruitr http://fruitr.co.uk/ – ‘image recognition for lazy chefs’. matches pictures of fruit and veg with recipes.

#21 Colm McMullan and Richard Keen Multimap Twitterbot http://richardkeen.net/mm_twitterbot_demo/index.html – mobile application using text messages. they’ve done a video. nice presentation. bit difficult to see – just loks like text message inbox.

23 SWX Team SWX http://aralbalkan.com http://swxformat.org – something to do with flash. bit technical. they’ve got a bunny too. will this bunny speak? nope, doesn’t look like it. they’re talking byte code and serialisation now…

24 Leo Lapworth “Where to find the best second hand clothes.” – mixes nestoria property data (find 5 million quid properties), put them on the map, looks up yahoo for oxfam shops in the area. nice.

26 Peter Kaushik Submitting RSS feeds into Answers API – tries to find a correlation between what’s in the news and what people are talking about on yahoo answers.

29 Erin and Kelvin John Peeled http://peel.withassociates.com – matches john peel session data with last.fm to try and find related and similar artists. awesome idea. some nice visualisation.

28 Mark Birbeck YOWL – black screen. oh, its up now. ‘YUI-based control modification system’. can’t get it working so we’re skipping.

27 Martin Kleppe Hedgehog http://labs.sumaato.net/hedgehog/ – something to do with maps. no idea what. sorry.

(people are going so fast we’re ahead of time. guess the 90 second timer is a bit intimidating)

back to YOWL guy. still no idea what he’s on about.

32 Anti spam in Yahoo Pipes Shevek – built a ranking mechanism in Pipes. don’t quite get it.

#30 multimedia@southampton artheworld http://multimedia.ecs.soton.ac.uk/artheworld/ – having mac problems.

33 homogenizr kelly le hack hackday.buro9.com – screen-scrapes myspace, runs yahoo term extractor, then publishes that person’s ‘ideal friend’. nice

34 MetaHack Celso http://hackday.sig9.net/ – tries to create a ’seamless transition’ from mobile to web. camcorder not working. ooh its working now. nice. read a blurb on mobile, click ‘read later’, then see it on your pc. using some kind of reader. nice concept.

35 Mnemosyne You say potato, I say Solanum tuberosum |http://iconclass.org/static/javascript/flickr_iconclass.user.js – greasemonkey script which translates tags for flick into different langues. i think. sounds clever. u

30 multimedia@southampton artheworld http://multimedia.ecs.soton.ac.uk/artheworld/ – augmented reality. using a camera because they can’t get mac to display on screen. not enough time to explain it prperly.

36 DeProp Tom Morris http://deprop.opiumfield.com – yet another mashup using Pipes and yahoo term extractor. running on political blogs.

37 Mark Birbeck RDFA and Y! pipes – eek, RDF. far too complicated for me. think it’s a bit like a microformats for RDF using a parser?

38 RM Scope – trying to change targetting of advertising campaigns with future events? linked in with right media advertising api. looks complicated.

40 James Wheare Tagmaps Local Explorer Localhostin’ for now. Will be a URL soon I guess – map displaying bus stop data on a satellite map. shows the bua stops near ally pally.

39 pixeldiva (aka Team Yarn Insurgence Force) Buzz Knit http://pixeldiva.co.uk/~hackday/ – ‘my names’s anne and and i’m a knitter’. likes to knit socks, but they’re a bit boring. she’s done a knitting hack! has created a knitting pattern based on search terms. ‘one of these days i might be able to knit my blog rather than writing it’.

41 Matthew Somerville Along the Same Lines http://www.dracos.co.uk/play/flickr/?num=38.889444&type=lat – another geo-tagging photo thing, which finds photos on the same line of longtitude/latitude. not sure why. kind of fun though.

42 Per Hest – wasnt paying attention, sorry.

They’re doing a ‘faceball’ demonstration – think they need to kill some time, we’re running pretty fast. there’s two people on stage throwing balls at each other. i’m a little confused. this must be something i’ve previously missed out on.

43 Supernova SLorpedo: The mixed reality game of naval warfare – a secondlife / real life mashup. playing battleships? uses yahoo answers api to name the ships (tenuous link in order to qualify). second life 3dness looks good though.

44 Laughing Man ‘flickrDrop’ – yet another mashup using flickr and yahoo term extraction. think it’s meant to be a visual search engine.

They want to hear from the person who travelled the furthest (but not from americans) to get here. not sure why.

45 Simon Willison Google Smite http://simonwillison.net/static/2007/smite.html – Google did the lightning!!!

46 The Oxford-Birmingham-Kansas alliance London Geeks (from the same guy as the Smite thing) – website which aggregates everything tagged with ‘londongeeks’, all hosted externally.

47 Tweather Tweather http://nimportequeldomaine.com/tweather/ – it’s twitter gone insane! map showing how people are reporting the weather on twitter.

48 Matthew Somerville Flickr! FixMyStreet – fixmystreet guy. they’ve enabled reporting via mobile, with pictures. awesome – one of those concepts which Just Makes Sense.

Beagle III – its a coke/mentos thing. is that a hack? nice video though. we have life off… hey they’ve got mid-flight photos. cool.

51 RemindMe.tv RemindMe.tv – lets you bookmark tv programmes to watch. get a reminder by a text message. if you’re further from your house (via location text), then it texts you earlier. nice.

52 Richard Rutter and Andy Hume “Get us Organised” – Web App for Upcoming that lets you decide between your friends on a time/location for an event. nice idea. a hack I Would Actually Use.

Battery: 46%. man, this is exhausting. fun though.

They’re playing faceball. standing up this time. ‘oohs’ from the audience at a near miss. what’s the score? is there a score? hmm, that was an anti-climax.

54 Steffan Flickr Tunes? – linking images from flickr with song lyrics. uses yahoo term extraction, creates a slide show as the song plays in iTunes. also got machine tags to sychronise your own images with the track. nice. i want this now.

55 twitup twitup twitup.com – uses twitter as a way of aggregating what people are talking about bbc tv programmes. i think. this is quite nice too.

58 Puggle iwondr http://www.benaldred.co.uk/iwondr/ – twitter bot. text ‘i wonder ..’ (eg what the train times are) and it’ll text you back. really? sounds like that’d need some impressive language parsing.

53 Chris Alcock Flickr Face Ball? http://blog.cwa.me.uk/2007/06/17/yahoo-hackday-flickr-face-ball/ – more faceball. loads pictures in from flick, add a faceball ball, then upload to flickr. that all?

58 Puggle – mitmaping. displays thumbnail of a web page. unless i’ve missed something.

59 Meteor Real time wifi traffic stats for Hack day http://hackdaylondon.meteorserver.org – frequence analysis on livejournal blogs (‘me’ is popular). then a map showing your wifi stats (where in the world you’re connecting to).

60 Marcus Bointon Hack Saver – a screensaver??

61 zome belgian guys (m)y-space http://doplr.com/myspaceZ/front.php?id=rumblestripsuk – scrapes myspace (including the songs). that’ll be popular with the myspace lot. AND you can save the songs as a local MP3!

63 Nick Bilton The New York Times >R&D Lab shifd.com – yahoo maps mashed up with geoRSS.

Battery: 37%. Time: 4:50.

66 Paul Mison, Candace Partridge Above London http://twitter.com/abovelondon/ – text message alerts for when the Internation Space Station and ‘merifium flare’ flies overhead. doesn’t bother to text you if it’s cloudy though. nice.

65 Angel Gonzalo, Daniel Remeseiro Pyzeta http://mindbots.net/nestorihack – woah, they’re videoing a video. bit difficult to see what’s going on. some mobile thing. they filmed it in portrait so it’s tilted to the left.

64 Stephen Fernandez team steeev – script to let you tag people in flickr photos. good concept actually. flickr falls down on this – facebook does it well. Flickr need to integrate this hack

68 Dominic Cleal Locality http://chaldene.epicwebservices.net/hackday/ – anotehr app showing where to live.

70 Adam Cohen-Rose Whats around me – mobile app which sends local pictures to your mobile.

69 TH 1 NK?_H4CK Urban Catchphrase – a game. bit confused as to how it works.

72 Oli and dave wifi badge http://www.flickr.com/photos/oliverashford/sets/72157600376043758/ – were going to do top trumps with your friends, but run out of time. hacked the free wifi strength monitor and made it into a badge.

71 Dharmafly Hack Hud http://premasagar.com – nice greasemonkey script. slagging off the bbc html code, haha.

73 OSDE.info BYSACC http://bysacc.osde.info – mashup designed to add links back to original photos for composite images. nice concept. uses machine tags i think.

Batter: 27%. Time: 5.13.

Nabazhack – a bunny hack that reminds you when ‘Doctors’ is on. or other tv programmes, presumably.

A cat hack? ‘I IZ HAPPYCAT’

16 moo NetTwitchr.com http://www.nettwitchr.com/ – site based on the idea of finding out what is happening on the internet by peeking behind your curtains. mashes up weather, fixmystreet info, etc. looks cool – will check it later.

More from the paper-based app. They’ve released a new version, ace.

BBC team are demoing an iPlayer facebook app. they’re screen-scraping their own app! they got themselves banned from the iPlayer in the course of making the app, haha.

And we’re done… Man, that was hard work… some great hacks – well done everyone!

Should be fun, and interesting. Although I’ve not been to anything like it before, so I’m not quite sure what to expect.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to come up with some idea, and then get a bit of help from other people to be able to actually do it.

Nothing particularly new, except that the deadline for platform neutrality has been removed, and replaced with a six-monthly audit. The critical issue here is Apple, which represents the second biggest platform (after Windows). Apple won’t licence its its DRM technology (as explained by Steve Jobs), so the BBC will have to either do a deal to make content available through the iTunes online store platform, persuade Microsoft to licence an Apple versions of its player, go non-DRM, or use another DRM system that’s cross-platform (but would require extra software downloads). None of which are particularly easy options.

This seems like a positive step forward, and will hopefully better manage the expectations of the users. The only metric that might be missing is the amount of time it takes on average for each comment to get published. And whilst the post says “we hope these changes will encourage more people to take part”, I can well imagine that some people will be put off from commenting by the sometimes enormous moderation queue.