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A brief history of Olympic dissent: Athens 1896
The selection of Beijing and The People's Republic of China to host the 2008 Olympics was always a controversial choice, which has thrown a sometimes unwelcome spotlight on the country. China's record on Internet censorship, human rights, the death penalty and the environment have all been questioned by the Western media as they cover the build-up to the games, and the torch relay, intended to be a celebration of the spirit of the games, was instead a focal point...

Read the full post - Published August 1, 2008 in Articles, Cyprus, Greece, Olympics, Politics, Popular, Turkey

A lifetime of lost playlists: Part 12 - Pretending to see the future
In this series of articles I've been looking at how the way I've organised and consumed music and made 'playlists' has transformed over the last 30 years. When I first started showing an interest in listening to records when I was a youngster, my playlist mechanism was pretty much shouting at my mum to put my records on. As I got older the Compact Cassette allowed more opportunity for me to choose what I was going to listen to...

Read the full post - Published July 30, 2008 in Music, Popular

Hanging on to Perl
James Cridland, BBC radio new media über-lord left a comment on here recently, pointing out that, despite the fact that I was watching the telly at the time, I was one of the very, very few people to put their hand up and admit to coding in Perl during the recent TechCrunch UK / BBC debate at Broadcasting House. The question arose because of the continual clamour that the BBC should release all production code under some sort of Open...

Read the full post - Published July 26, 2008 in BBC, Popular, Web

A lifetime of lost playlists: Part 1 - Pump up the volume
Format-driven changes in my music consumption over thirty years Nowadays we are surrounded by 'attention' data about music. Amazon tells us that other people who bought the same music as us also liked something else. The iTunes music store gauges the relative popularity of tracks from an artist. Last FM allows us to let all our Facebook friends know what we've just been listening to - however embarrassing it might be. And we miss it when it isn't there....

Read the full post - Published July 10, 2008 in Articles, Music, Popular

"People, Places, Subjects" - BBC Topic and Guardian keyword pages: Part 1
Some time in 2001 I went to my first ever meeting with people from BBC News Online. I was enthusiastic, fresh-faced, and completely oblivious to the 'difficult sibling' history that existed between the BBC New Media & Technology department where I worked, and the senior managers from BBC News Online that I was meeting. I suggested they do two things. Firstly, remove the 'noindex' meta tag at the individual story level on news.bbc.co.uk. Secondly, based on the evidence of search...

Read the full post - Published July 4, 2008 in Articles, BBC, Popular, The Guardian, Web

Being an extra on John Fogerty's Live at the Albert Hall DVD
I went to see John Fogerty at the Royal Albert Hall on Tuesday. I've been a big fan of Creedence Clearwater Revival ever since listening to my dad's tapes in the car in the 1970s - as you'll be finding out in a series of articles about music nostalgia I've got coming up in July - and so it was an ambition fulfilled to finally see him live. John Fogerty was also fulfilling an ambition as well. 37 years ago,...

Read the full post - Published June 30, 2008 in Music, Popular

Last night's TechCrunch / BBC debate on a 'Common Platform'
Yesterday I went to the joint TechCrunch/BBC debate at Broadcasting House, where a panel discussed some of the issues raised by Mike Butcher's recent posts on TechCrunch UK bemoaning the lack of support the BBC was giving to innovation amongst Britain's web start-ups. The session was recorded, and I'm sure it will be released on backstage.bbc.co.uk or the BBC Internet Blog at some point, and that there will be copious commentary from many of the people there, so I thought...

Read the full post - Published June 26, 2008 in BBC, Popular

"You're wired!" - 7 things The Apprentice can teach you about new media projects
I'd never watched The Apprentice until this year, when a procession of people we were staying with in London had it as unmissable 'appointment' television. I was immediately hooked, and once we got back to Greece, I had an unmissable 'appointment' to download the show as quickly as possible every Thursday morning, whilst trying to avoid 'spoilers' on the British media web. Throughout the series, I couldn't help thinking about the parallel lessons that could be drawn from the programme...

Read the full post - Published June 20, 2008 in Articles, Popular, Television

There is the BBC's new media overspend...and then there is Google
Yesterday I bookmarked a piece on The Guardian's site which gave Edward Roussel from The Telegraph the chance to put his view on the BBC's massive new media 'over spend'. There are some good contributions from Jemima Kiss and Emily Bell in the comments, and the whole thread is well worth a read. Roussel makes the point that the BBC's new media budget is greater than the digital budget of all UK newspapers put together, and that it threatens to...

Read the full post - Published June 1, 2008 in BBC, Daily Telegraph, Google, Newspapers, Popular, The Guardian, Web

"Can you trust a media blogger?"
A couple of weeks ago I went to the launch of Adrian Monck's "Can You Trust The Media?" and I wrote up an account of it for my blog. That somewhat begged the question: "Can you trust a media blogger?". Reviews of the book have appeared in The Observer, The Guardian and on the blog of Charlie Beckett. Obviously, as these have been sanctioned by the 'great-and-good' of mainstream media these are valid reviews. But what about my account of...

Read the full post - Published May 20, 2008 in Blogging, Media, Newspapers, Popular

60% of Editors Blog comments hate the BBC News redesign

Published April 2, 2008 in BBC, Popular

Google hijacks traffic from newspaper site search

Published March 31, 2008 in Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, Google, Newspapers, Popular, The Guardian, The Sun, The Times

Doctor Who and The Pirates

Published March 2, 2008 in DRM, Doctor Who, Popular

The Buffy guide to the Internet - 1997 style

Published February 24, 2008 in Nostalgia, Popular, Television, Web

10 tips for integrating your del.icio.us links into your blog

Published February 5, 2008 in Blogging, Popular

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

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

ACAP - flawed and broken from the start?

Published December 2, 2007 in Newspapers, Popular, Search, Web

Busting the BBC's 600 Linux users myth

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

"The Tardis and Multiplatform" - Julie Gardner talks about Doctor Who's multi-media incarnations

Published September 28, 2007 in BBC, Doctor Who, Popular, Web

The meerkat photograph hoax review - which UK newspapers admitted online to being duped?

Published September 12, 2007 in Newspapers, Popular

Reckless Records RIP - Part 1: An End Has A Start

Published August 13, 2007 in Articles, Music, Popular

BBC iPlayer launch: The first 14 days

Published July 17, 2007 in BBC, DRM, Linux, Popular, iPlayer

Why my Doctor Who blog failed: Part 1 - The Greatest Show In The Galaxy

Published July 2, 2007 in Articles, Doctor Who, Popular

Free the BBC from the same old tired DRM debate

Published June 13, 2007 in BBC, DRM, Linux, Media, Microsoft, Popular, Radio, Television, Web, iPlayer

Madeleine McCann and Alex Meschisvili - a culture contrast

Published May 28, 2007 in Children and Teenagers, Greece, Media, Popular

Newspapers 2.0: How Web 2.0 are British newspaper web sites?

Published May 8, 2007 in Articles, Media, Newspapers, Popular, Web

It was twenty years ago today...The Beatles CD reissues from 1987

Published April 17, 2007 in Music, Popular

The ten things most likely to be on The Daily Express front page

Published April 3, 2007 in Daily Express, Media, Newspapers, Popular

My 'biased' view of the Biased BBC blog

Published March 14, 2007 in Articles, BBC, Popular

Using Bloglines to snoop on people's private Gmail

Published October 1, 2006 in Google, Popular, Web

The software used to access the BBC homepage

Published October 22, 2005 in Apple, Articles, BBC, Linux, Microsoft, Popular

Haunted Walthamstow and Chingford

Published September 8, 2005 in Ghost Walks, Popular, Walthamstow

Haunted Malta

Published July 11, 2005 in Ghost Walks, Popular, Travelogue

A day in the life of BBCi Search - part 1

Published March 27, 2003 in Articles, BBC, Popular, Search