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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
"Filtering" user-generated content on the BBC News site p>
Google blocks access to the Biased BBC blog via search p>
24/7 TV news websites: Part 12 - Search III p>
24/7 TV news websites: Part 10 - Search p>
Mark Thompson survives online Telegraph grilling p>
24/7 TV news websites: Part 3 - BBC p>
Who's deceiving who? The Daily Mail on Jools Holland's Hootenanny p>
Top Gear the second most popular downloaded TV show on BitTorrent p>
'Militant' atheists are not killing people p>
Blogging at the BBC: Part 9 - The formal blogging years p>
The BBC's new international homepage beta p>
Blogging at the BBC: Part 8 - Guidelines p>
Blogging at the BBC: Part 7 - The downside of blogging from the inside p>
Blogging at the BBC: Part 6 - The upside of blogging from the inside p>
Blogging at the BBC: Part 5 - Blogging from the inside p>
Blogging at the BBC: Part 4 - Life, the Universe, and Everything p>
Blogging at the BBC: Part 3 - ...and Islands p>
Blogging at the BBC: Part 2 - Highlands... p>
Blogging at the BBC: Part 1 - My introduction to blogging p>
Finding, sharing, and playing with that Tony Palmer BBC rejection letter p>
Farewell to the BBC.co.uk logo. Thankfully. p>
I make Doctor Who news at last p>
That 2002 BBCi Search impartiality problem in full p>
10 years of BBC.co.uk on the BBC Internet Blog p>
BBC RSS subscription league table for English & Scottish football teams p>
Top 50 BBC Podcasts in Google Reader p>
Top 100 BBC RSS feeds in Google Reader p>
The BBC's UK website...brought to you by Airbus p>
More details on the Linux user base of the BBC, The Telegraph and The Guardian p>
Busting the BBC's 600 Linux users myth p>
BBC Programme pages illustrate the value of metadata and simplicity p>
So where did those 900,000 mysterious Spooks viewers go? p>
Biased BBC blog in the BBC's Ariel newspaper p>
A good day to bury bad broadcasting news? p>
A strange day due at the BBC p>
Batten down the hatches! BBC phone scandals go back 20 years p>
BBC homepage introduces embedded black'n'white television p>
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About Martin Belam
I'm an internet consultant and writer, with 8 years experience in product management, information architecture, and user experience design for global brands like Sony, Vodafone and the BBC. I specialise in advising on search, widgets, online news publishing and bulk email delivery.
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email: martin.belam@currybet.net
tel: +44 (0) 7801 828718
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