The new Radio 3 site launched yesterday and it represents the culmination of about 6 months work, which has been some of the more exciting and challenging I've had the opportunity to take part in.
The main benefits from the work are that Radio 3 now has a single persistent page for every episode of every programme they broadcast, these are uniquely identified and grouped by programme. The schedules are also persistent, which allow you to check what it was that you heard earlier in the week. The schedules are linked to the programme episode pages, so that the permenant broadcast history of the channel is being created on the site.
Now that every programme is represented at a basic level, including programmes like the Early Music Show, which have never had a web presence, the Radio 3 team can easily embellish the web presence for any programme. It is also better structured and more easily searchable. Further thoughts on the new site from Tom Coates.
Working on this project with Radio and Music has been great fun, made more so by having great collegues to work with, Tom, Margaret, Zillah, Tim, Rija, Mike, MattB, Ian, Manjit, Paul, PaulF, DanH and the Radio 3 team, plus Tony and Jason in NM&T. Working with Tom and Mags in particular has been one of the most enjoyable times in my working life -- thanks each and everyone of you.
June 2004 Archives
New weblog created to support the ID cards consultation process, created by my friend Mark Simpkins. He has taken every paragraph of the consultation document and made a weblog post of it, opening the entire document up for public commentary.
I think that this is a great idea, it is a pity that other Government Bills are not treated in the same manner. The new European Constitution would be a good choice and might assuage some peoples' feelings over this document if they could actually read it. It is available as a PDF, so you can read it (other languages), just not comment on it.
Well I managed to miss the various calendar based points for noting the passing of time here, so 400th post will be a reasonable celebration point. I've been writing a weblog for about 18 odd months and have recently been very quiet, due to work pressures and preparation for a trip to the Alps in about a fortnight.
I've also got several other projects quietly simmering, one of which might launch this week. Writing a weblog is not just about what you write, it is about having an active interest in the web as a medium. I know that many people are happy using tools like typepad or blogger, but choosing MT has meant that I can start to hack about with other project ideas; some of them fail; others thrive initially then damp off; a couple look like they will be ripening nicely. Enough loose metaphors, I'm pleased that writing on take one onion enabled me to independently play with webprojects to the point were I'm having to internally limit the number by spartan like means, you should see the photoblog I started... I could also do with some better design skills.
It has also meant I've thought more deeply about some issues and got much more involved than I might have, in particular with the Iraq war. I've met many nice and interesting people through this site and have seen my name rise up google's ranks. The most popular posts have been from memory the ones on Spencer Tunick and the one about the east london line. I've enjoyed my loosely framed exploration of cultural differences and am often surprised by the things I've written on when investigating my search logs.
I'm planning ona redesign and making my now thriving linklog public, when I find some time to migrate to the MySQL instance awaiting me on my kind hosts, Sundive Networks. I've canned my photoblog, as I just don't have the time for that kind of photography, though if I get round to connecting my 6600 to my MT install over GPRS then I'll rethink that. Digital camera to powerbook over usb then edit compress and upload is too much of a faff for daily life. Other photography projects are in the works though.
Thanks for reading and thanks to those of you who have linked to me, trackback pinged me, or emailed me about the things I have written, all very enjoyable.
For a refreshing view on the news of the day, look not further than snowmail, it is a daily email from Channel4 News, ostensibly written by Jon Snow, but sometimes by others. The style is wry, almost entertainment, sort of what you'd expect them to be saying before they go to air. Very addictive stuff, of the email newsletters I get in my inbox it is one I invariably read. Smart thinking from Channel 4 too, opening the doors of the organization to create that cluetrain conversation.
From the BBC the most similar programme in style is probably Broadcasting House on Sunday mornings from Radio4, originally hosted by Eddie Mair, it is now ably presented by Fi Glover, who has made it her own, a nice way to wake up on Sunday morning.
So , 79p per track, that might encourage me to buy some music from Apple. However it is the ease of use more than anything else, as £7.99 per album is close to what a real CD costs from amazon or digital costs from bleep etc. I also have some concerns about longevity, I can still play back CDs from 20 years ago, just like I have slides which will last for decades. How well DRM based AAC file will fare is up for debate.
Further media coverage from BBC, Macworld and the furore over the indys not joining in, macworld and the guardian (registration required).
There are a growing number of page per day projects, spawned largely by the Gutenberg project. Last year Phil Gyford started doing Samuel Pepys Diaries, recently Matt Webb has started Leonardo DaVinci's notebooks. This weekend marks the hundredth anniversary of Bloomsday, the day Leopold Bloom walked around Dublin in Joyce's Ulysses. Jason White has now done this for Ulysses.
There are thousands of books in the Gutenberg project, so there must be more out there to turn into this format. Actually, Dickens might be very appropriate to publish in this fashion, as that is how much of it was originally written for newspapers. Not that I'm planning to, as I've got 2-3 other projects fermenting, slowly.
26 things is a photo competition in which you get a list of 26 words and have to interpret them and produce a set of pictures one for each word. It has been run by Tracey from sh1ft.org twice last year, this year it starts on 1st July. I'm hoping that this year I'll actually get further down the list than previous times. There are other games on her site too
It is a good challenge, as it helps to be focused when taking pictures. Colour is a fine brief, but yellow is a much stronger one. It is a great way to improve your photography and creative interpretation of a scene. From memory the words last year where evocative ones like — smile, light, heavy, red, fast. I'm quite looking forward to it, as I should have a bit more time in July.
Lastly it also gives you a stock of photographs, with which you can enter competitions in magazines, which actually have prizes to win.
Recurrent meme from The Guardian, apparently we still lag down the scale in terms of number of bank holidays as compared to the rest of Europe, even with the additional ten countries. There is a campaign website to rectify this asking you to vote for a preferred day, personally I think an autumnal bank holiday would be best, but it is not as straightforward as it seems. Funny sniping from the CBI too, puffing about keeping Britain competitive, "We all like the idea of more time off, but most people understand that can't come without cost" — live a little!
I've heard about this race for a good few years, via Lucy's running magazines mainly and thought that four legs good, two legs bad would always be the case, but it seems not. It is the annual Man vs Horse race run over 20 odd miles in Wales and a south Londoner has won it and 25k in prize money too.
Quite amazing and yet another encouragement to get out there and pound the streets for me. When the current launch abates and certainly before I collapse exhausted on an alpine mountainside at the end of the month.
Fascinating overview of Canon's design process, particularly focusing on the development of the physical usability of the SLR camera. An interesting read, I use a Elan7 / EOS30, which is one of the featured cameras and it does just feel right, things are in the right places and on the whole the camera does not make you think too hard, so you can concentrate on composition.
One of my desires from a desktop weblog editor is to sync the draft posts from my MT install and then take them away on my PowerBook and finally finish the missing posts of takeoneonion, of which there are twenty or more. Most of them rambling epics which the editing window of MT does nothing to encourage.
Ben Hammersley has answered the first part of this with the release of two extensions to the XMLRPC interface, mt.getStatus and mt.setStatus, which work with MT3.0D. Now I await the efforts of the Mac based weblog editing tool writers...
