Reasons Not To Top-Slice #6: “Could Doctor Who exist without the BBC?”

From IMDb forums.

It can, and does make challenging TV, which other commercial stations can’t/don’t/won’t. Take, for example, any of the Adam Curtis documentaries.

Or, quite frankly, the latest Torchwood.

I cannot see any of the commercial channels trying a five parter-in-one week. It’s only because the Beeb is free of commercial pressure that they can indulge themselves and us, in it.

“I Fought The Law and The Law Won”

I don’t buy newspapers very often these days. But back in May I happened to get the Observer on a day when it was publishing its Music monthly supplement.

I was very interested in the “Walking The Plank” feature inside it (see picture above). I wasn’t able to find this feature on the Observer’s website so I’ve reproduced it above (which is an irony in itself).

“Walking The Plank” looks at the history of five music file sharing sites. In case you can’t read the text above here’s what it says in the final box at the bottom of each column.

Napster: Shut down by courts. Bought by Bertlesmann for $8 million and relaunched as legal, subscription based service…

Limewire: One year after opening a store allowing people to pay fro tracks, the now legits site claims 70 million unique users per month.

Grokster: Shuts down five months after the Supreme Court rules it can be sued for misuse of its file sharing software.

Pirate Bay: Convicted of promnoting copyright infringement. The founders and their buisness partners aare sentenced to a year in prison and ordered to pay £2.4 milllion…

Oink’s Pink: Alan Ellis was due to appear at Teeside crown court on charges of conspiracy to defraud…

Like a lot of people when I first came across ideas around digital media and how it was changing notions of copyright I got rather excited (the link is to my internal BBC blog of the time so you won’t be able to read it unless you’re inside the BBC firewall). Reading that post again now makes me realise how naive I was. Particularly in the light of what’s actually happened in the past three years.

When Pirate Bay lost their court case there was a lot of bold rhetoric about them fighting the system (“we can’t pay”). But from the look of this story they’ve gone legal, and may have to pay.

Things have value as long as human beings are prepared to assign value to them and pay for them. As long as they are prepared to pay for things, laws around ownership of those things will still exist. And it doesn’t matter if you disagree with a law, if it’s the law then in the end you have to obey it or face the consequences.

These days I am pretty sceptical of statements like “data wants to be free”. This is an example of what I was taught at school as “the pathetic fallacy” – the tendency of human beings to think that inanimate objects and other living things have the same “feelings” as human beings do. Human beings may or may not want to be “free” (whatever that means), but code doesn’t have feelings or aspirations.

It is true that the nature of digital media means that its easier for some people to do certain things (like copying). But just because they can, doesn’t make those things right or even useful.

Virtual world Second Life was the centre of a copyright dispute. None of Second Life is “real”. Yet people felt ownership of the things they made there and objected to other people “ripping them off”.

People make rules, then break them, then make them again. And it’s the rule makers who have the power. In cyberspace as much as anywhere else.

Reasons Not To Top-Slice #3

I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue.

It’s back. Not sure about Fry. I laughted.

Bob Log III Live Sheffield – The Shakespear, Monday 6th April 2009 – TOP QUALITY

I was sent this extraordinary video by an old friend.

I don’t know what it is, or who it is.

But I think it’s the future…

Don’t Mess With Guido!

The news agenda has moved on. We’ve entered a period of quiet reflection.

What can be learned from the McBride/Guido Faukes affair (or “smeargate”)?

1.

Don’t make it personal.

Hazel Blears attack on bloggers included a swipe at the “vicious nihilism” of Guido Fawkes and Staines has claimed McBride tried to smear him. This gave Staines real personal motivation to get back at McBride. So attack your opponents arguments, but not them personally. Play the ball, not the man.

2.

Don’t put anything in an email you wouldn’t want made public.

This is blindingly obvious, but people still forget it. If McBride had made a telephone call to Derek Draper instead, he’d still be in a job.

3.

Don’t mix up different types of information.

In McBride’s email he said he has one possible real story and a lot of (unpleasant) gossip. Ditch the gossip and if you think you have a good story just find a sympathetic journalist.

4.

Don’t take on someone who has better skills than you.

We still don’t know how Staines got hold of the email. So he either has very good contacts or very good computer skills. We already know he has good social media skills. Regardless of the morality or legality of how he got the information Staines was a digital native, while his enemies were not. He won.

5.

Think about the best vehicle for the information.

Staines didn’t just stick the email on his blog. He gave it to newspapers, maximising the public impact, and minimising his own risk. He used his blog as a teaser to build up anticipation knowing that people would find it when the story broke.
This is not about bloggers versus mainstream media. Staines has simply shown himself to be a master at using media (digital and print) to achieve an end. He’s proved himself more effective at this than most people with jobs in Comms and Government and journalism.

My guess is that he probably dislikes the BBC as much as he dislikes politicians.

If it wasn’t for that, I’d hire him.

“Tories Admit to Wiki Alteration”

Every so often you get a story like this one.

And people say “this proves that Wikipedia is unreliable”.

It actually proves that if you try and put a disputed or contentious edit in Wikipedia you always get found out.

So it actually proves how reliable Wikipedia is.

What it also proves is that sometimes facts are disputed.

It seems that there are various different possibilities for Titian’s birth date. So it’s probably not a good idea to use Titian’s birthday as a way of scoring a political point…

Every time there is one of these incidents Wikipedia just gets stronger and stronger.

BBC Programme Encourages Traffic To Non BBC Website Shock

From Hitwise.

Personal blogging at its best

From Richard Sambrook.

Merry Blogmas 2008!

Photo by Duane Shoon on flickr.

Although as I write this post I’m still feeling poorly, it has been a very good year.

Thanks to everyone who made it very good.

Merry Xmas!

BBC iPlayer Day Thoughts

A quick brain dump the afternoon after iPlayer day.

Positive:

1. Excellent contributions from some senior executives. Candid revelations from Ian Hunter, Tony Ageh (got him on the blog at last!) and a very good video from Anthony Rose (one of the highlights of the day).

2. Good content from others – especially Jon Jacobs thoroughly entertaining video (another highlight). And Rory Cellan Jones.

3. Community activity on flickr and twitter good with some sense of BBC people joining the community (but see negatives below).

4. Another tiny step towards the BBC being more open – with a couple of people who had never been on the blog before joining – possible contacts to develop later.

5. Seemed to create a good feeling among the iPlayer team and others in FM&T’s extended family.

6. A good feeling around how far the conversation around FM&T has changed in 12 months. This time last year the tone was very hostile, yesterday there were very few dissenting voices (perhaps there should have been more) and the message coming back seemed to be “we love you!”

Negatives:

1. I should have remembered one of Nick Reynolds’ golden rules (“don’t do video, you don’t understand it and it always goes wrong“). Still we sorted it in the end and the content in the videos was very good. We’ll do it better next time.

2. Probably too much content. You shouldn’t really use a blog to pump this much stuff at people. Better planning might have resulted in a slightly trimmed down offer. There’s still some stuff left over!

3. Too much content, not enough links.

4. Because of 1 and 2 I didn’t have a strong enough sense of what the community was saying and didn’t have enough time to follow up on any questions being asked.

5. Probably not enough hard technical detail to satisfy some of the Internet blog’s tecchie followers. Not enough research and other stuff being shared (although Ashley’s pictures were great).

6. Could have done more around what was actually happening on the ground on the day.

What did you think of iPlayer day?