currybetdotnet BBC archive

70 years of televised F.A. Cup Finals
It seems that for many years now football pundits have been claiming that the F.A. Cup has lost its sparkle, and hasn't been living up to the tradition of the tournament. Various reasons are often cited for this - the abolition of replays, Manchester United refusing to take part in 2000, and the fact that nobody outside 'the big 4' has won it for a decade. It will be slightly different this year, as successive 'giant killings' have left us...

Read the full post - Published April 30, 2008 in BBC, Football, Television

100 years since the first London Olympics
Earlier this week I wrote a post on the anniversary of the 1906 Intercalated Olympic Games in Athens. We are used to the Summer Olympics being held later in the year nowadays, but April used to be the chosen month to get the games underway. Today is the centenary anniversary of the first time that London held the games. Following the first three modern Olympiads in Athens, Paris and St. Louis, the 1908 Olympic Games were scheduled to be held...

Read the full post - Published April 27, 2008 in BBC, Football, London Olympics, Olympics

The BBC need a TARDIS to transport their Doctor Who RSS URLs
There was an astonishing message in the official BBC Doctor Who News RSS feed yesterday: Now that we've switched over to our shiny new site, our news stories are being created in a different way. Therefore you'll no longer see news stories added to this page. Instead, you'll find them if you follow the link below. More importantly, if you subscribe to our RSS news feed using the link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/news/syndication/rss091.xml you'll need to update it to: http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/rss.xml That way you'll...

Read the full post - Published April 23, 2008 in BBC, Doctor Who, RSS

60% of Editors Blog comments hate the BBC News redesign
"A silly waste of licence-payer's money and another example of the relentless advance towards turning the Web into a Fisher-Price wonderland for simpletons." And with a quote like that, you know you must be on the BBC Editor's blog talking about the re-design of the BBC News site. At the time I checked it yesterday, Steve Herrmann's piece about the new look had generated 627 comments. At last count there were over 1,500. From experience I have a checklist...

Read the full post - Published April 2, 2008 in BBC, Popular

Postcard from Macau #4: Hong Kong's missing TV archive
I recently spent three weeks visiting Macau, the former Portuguese territory on the south coast of China. As a former colony like Hong Kong, it is now a 'Special Administrative Region'. This post is one of a series looking at aspects of information design, user experience, internet use and journalism that interested me when I was there. In the first of my posts about my recent trip to Macau, I mentioned the Sunday Morning Post. This is an English...

Read the full post - Published March 20, 2008 in BBC, Doctor Who, Macau, Television, Travelogue

The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Doctor Whoniverse
Thirty years ago today, at 10:30pm on a Wednesday night, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a new landmark sci-fi comedy - the first part of Douglas Adam's "The Hitch-Hikers Guide To The Galaxy". I was first introduced to the radio series by a school friend. Staying round his house in the early 80s, we'd stay up as late as we could get away with, listening to some C90 recordings he had of the episodes. He didn't have totally impeccable taste mind...

Read the full post - Published March 8, 2008 in BBC, Doctor Who, Radio, Television

What difference does it make? Adding Wikipedia style 'diffs' to BBC News
I was giving some thought to the frequent requests that the BBC's news site make its editing more transparent and accountable by retaining each version of an article on the site, a 'diff' if you like, in the style of Wikipedia. On the face of it, it seems like a simple feature to implement, with some obvious advantages, but I've also been thinking about some of the practical problems it might present. As always seems to be the case with...

Read the full post - Published March 3, 2008 in BBC

Is nobody blogging about the BBC's The Editors Blog anymore?
I've generally been a big fan of the BBC The Editors Blog since it was launched. Although not everybody agrees with the points of view put across by BBC News staff on the blog, I find it an interesting forum of discussion, and a useful attempt to try and grasp how the new interactivity of the internet impacts on the day-to-day decisions made by news editors. However, there is one bit of functionality on the blog which I've been noticing...

Read the full post - Published February 17, 2008 in BBC, Blogging

Measuring the iPlayer impact on broadband usage
There was an interesting piece on the new-look online Guardian yesterday about how the better than expected take-up of the streaming version of the iPlayer was putting undue strain on Britain's broadband infrastructure - "What is the true market impact of the BBCi iPlayer?" Steve Hewlett points out some flaws with the original market impact assesment as part of the regulatory process for approving the iPlayer - the Public Value Test - because it did not rigorously enough examine the...

Read the full post - Published February 12, 2008 in BBC, The Guardian, iPlayer

British television sci-fi is seventy today
It is a genre that has been a big influence and source of entertainment for me ever since I first saw Tom Baker's boggle-eyes staring out at me from the opening credits of Doctor Who when I was 4 or 5, and today is the seventieth anniversary of what is generally attributed to be the first piece of sci-fi television. On the 11th February, 1938, the BBC broadcast a thirty-five minute segment adapted from Czech playwright Karel Čapek's play "Rossum's...

Read the full post - Published February 11, 2008 in BBC, Nostalgia, Television

"Filtering" user-generated content on the BBC News site

Published February 9, 2008 in BBC

Google blocks access to the Biased BBC blog via search

Published January 30, 2008 in BBC, Google, Search

24/7 TV news websites: Part 12 - Search III

Published January 24, 2008 in BBC, CNN, France 24, Search, Television, Web

Pearson profits all round

Published January 22, 2008 in BBC, Politics

24/7 TV news websites: Part 10 - Search

Published January 22, 2008 in BBC, CNN, Search, Television, Web, Yahoo

Mark Thompson survives online Telegraph grilling

Published January 16, 2008 in BBC, Daily Telegraph

24/7 TV news websites: Part 3 - BBC

Published January 10, 2008 in BBC, Television, Web

Who's deceiving who? The Daily Mail on Jools Holland's Hootenanny

Published January 6, 2008 in BBC, Daily Mail

Top Gear the second most popular downloaded TV show on BitTorrent

Published January 2, 2008 in BBC, Doctor Who, Television, iPlayer

'Militant' atheists are not killing people

Published December 23, 2007 in BBC, Politics

Ten years of BBC Online

Published December 22, 2007 in Articles, BBC, Blogging, Nostalgia, Web

Blogging at the BBC: Part 9 - The formal blogging years

Published December 21, 2007 in BBC, Blogging

The BBC's new international homepage beta

Published December 20, 2007 in BBC

Blogging at the BBC: Part 8 - Guidelines

Published December 20, 2007 in BBC, Blogging

Blogging at the BBC: Part 7 - The downside of blogging from the inside

Published December 19, 2007 in BBC, Blogging

Blogging at the BBC: Part 6 - The upside of blogging from the inside

Published December 18, 2007 in BBC, Blogging

Blogging at the BBC: Part 5 - Blogging from the inside

Published December 17, 2007 in BBC, Blogging

Blogging at the BBC: Part 4 - Life, the Universe, and Everything

Published December 14, 2007 in BBC, Blogging

Blogging at the BBC: Part 3 - ...and Islands

Published December 13, 2007 in BBC, Blogging

Blogging at the BBC: Part 2 - Highlands...

Published December 12, 2007 in BBC, Blogging

Blogging at the BBC: Part 1 - My introduction to blogging

Published December 11, 2007 in Articles, BBC, Blogging, Popular

Finding, sharing, and playing with that Tony Palmer BBC rejection letter

Published December 10, 2007 in BBC, Media, Music, Television

Farewell to the BBC.co.uk logo. Thankfully.

Published December 7, 2007 in BBC

I make Doctor Who news at last

Published December 4, 2007 in BBC, Blogging, Doctor Who

That 2002 BBCi Search impartiality problem in full

Published November 29, 2007 in BBC, Radio, Search

10 years of BBC.co.uk on the BBC Internet Blog

Published November 28, 2007 in BBC, Blogging, Nostalgia

BBC RSS subscription league table for English & Scottish football teams

Published November 23, 2007 in BBC, Football, Google, RSS

Top 50 BBC Podcasts in Google Reader

Published November 22, 2007 in BBC, Google, RSS

Top 100 BBC RSS feeds in Google Reader

Published November 21, 2007 in BBC, Google, RSS

The BBC's UK website...brought to you by Airbus

Published November 5, 2007 in BBC

More details on the Linux user base of the BBC, The Telegraph and The Guardian

Published November 5, 2007 in BBC, Daily Telegraph, Linux, The Guardian, Web

Busting the BBC's 600 Linux users myth

Published November 2, 2007 in BBC, Linux, Popular, iPlayer

BBC Programme pages illustrate the value of metadata and simplicity

Published October 29, 2007 in BBC

So where did those 900,000 mysterious Spooks viewers go?

Published October 25, 2007 in BBC, The Guardian

Biased BBC blog in the BBC's Ariel newspaper

Published October 19, 2007 in BBC, Blogging

A good day to bury bad broadcasting news?

Published October 18, 2007 in BBC, Television

A strange day due at the BBC

Published October 18, 2007 in BBC

Batten down the hatches! BBC phone scandals go back 20 years

Published October 15, 2007 in BBC

BBC homepage introduces embedded black'n'white television

Published October 12, 2007 in BBC

'War Gifts' exhibits at the BBC's Television Centre

Published October 10, 2007 in BBC