Month: March 2008

“I don’t think even Google could cope with funding an open bar in Glasgow.”
— Kevin Marks.

The BBC News front page has been redesigned. I wonder if they’ll start posting stories with paragraphs of more than one sentence now, or if they’ll still write like we’re all idiots.

Hmm… actually, it’s not much of a redesign. They’ve widened the page (wait for the cries from people still running 800×600 screens… both of them), added white space, and made the banner neater. Looks nicer, though.

[update: they didn’t test the new front page on an iPhone, then?]

Great rant over at Studio Daily, about how owning a copy of Final Cut doesn’t on its own make one an editor. Duly noted, heh.

There’s a flipside to this, however: just as one sees lots of people who claim to be video editors, but who’ve no idea about the offline/online workflow, so one also sees lots of post-production facility houses who’ve no idea about the web video workflow.

Finding someone to take up the slack on SciCast is going to be extremely difficult – and not just for technical reasons. See, I also need that person to have the practical savvy to spot safety hazards, the production experience to know what can and can’t be cleared, the editorial expertise to judge helpful and problematic tweaks, and the academic knowledge to recognise content that’s plain wrong.

At the moment, it’s not clear how that generation of film-maker is going to get trained up. So, I watch Scoble’s demo of a Newtek Tricaster, and I think four things:

• “Shiny! There are times I could really really use one of those!”
• “The 80s are calling, and they’d like their tasteless DVE moves back.”
• “$8000? This is going to get killed as soon as hardware catches up.”
• “Wait – live broadcast is hard. This is going to be early-80s desktop publishing all over again.”

I think it all comes back to one problem, and one worry:

The problem – shiny new equipment and falling prices are great, but the real challenge is working out how to maintain anything like high production values, when the people using the gear haven’t experienced high-value productions.

The worry – audiences will take what they can get, and high production values will simply die. YouTube is evidence of this, though YouTube without copyright-infringing material might be evidence to the contrary.

One solution – Apple, please please please open up iTunes video in a similar way to the signed iTunes artist programme for indie music. Being able to sell videos through iTunes would be… interesting.

(for more of this sort of thinking, see Gia’s post about several things, including professional journalism and blogging.)

There are times when I wish I carried around my Newton. Mostly, when someone is showing off their button-festooned tappy-tappy crashy monstrosity of a mobile phone, I’d like to haul it out and say, ‘Oh, I can do that on this.’

Sure, the Newton’s a tad large, these days. But it’s more than a decade old.

It’s all very well crowing about embedded wiki servers and on-platform development environments, but those of us who used Newtons found out that many of these things turn out to be not very useful in the nineteen-nineties.

…and that was with a gesture interface.

Harrumph.

OpenSocial chappie Kevin Marks is in Glasgow – or rather, he’s planning to be, via SFO➙LHR➙GLA. Since he’s flying British Airways there’s some uncertainty about the precise arrangements, particularly concerning his luggage.

We’re meeting in a Glasgow bar Monday night; come and join us, and find out what happened to his smalls. Plus, you know, other stuff. Details on Upcoming

Apologies for the currently-TBC venue: seems like a fine excuse to have a bit of an, er, bar recce, hunting down free WiFi in the Merchant City. I’m heading out just as soon as my tricorder^H^H^H^H^H iPod touch is charged.

[update: Bar 91 was nice enough but not hugely comfy; Red Lizard seems OK but was heaving with folks watching the Liverpool match – so it’s The Butterfly and The Pig. Again. Upcoming page updated.]

Utterly genius remake of the lightcycles sequence in Tron:

The Big Experiment has had decent press – not heaps, but a fair bit. This is good, if it highlights the challenges facing science education in the UK, and particularly if it entertains people a little along the way.

But I’m curious. It’s on Discovery, which last month accounted for 0.2% of viewing in homes with multi-channel TV. I don’t have access to the full data, but this show sadly isn’t in Discovery’s weekly top 10, putting its audience below 51,000 this week, and below 42,000 last week.

So it’s TV, but that doesn’t mean it’s huge. It’s down in the range where I don’t trust BARB figures on account of small sample size. Next, you have to consider that it’s on for just six weeks of the year.

Now, SciCast is hardly pushing huge page view numbers, but it’s growing nicely in the 40k page-views/month sort of bracket, and it feels like we’re just getting started. We haven’t hit all that many schools yet; we haven’t done anything with Bebo or MySpace; we don’t even have downloads, amazingly.

There’s clear growth potential, and over, say, a year, we’re already heading into the same audience reach territory as Discovery’s show. Plus, our stuff is freely available and usable by educators, families, and individuals, for the long term. Not to mention the skills value inherent in making the films yourself, which is what many of our current audience are doing.

So here’s the observation: The Big Experiment was sponsored by BT. Now, what they coughed up won’t have paid for the whole series. But I bet it would have paid for SciCast. Probably twice.

Making original content for the web is currently a precarious business. But this will, I think, change. If BT have got their money’s worth out of The Big Experiment, then our job is to demonstrate – with hard data – that we can do better than that.

Then the wheels really come off broadcast.

I don’t get Discovery UK (heck, I don’t get Five), so I only have the web video clips to go on to judge this new series: The Big Experiment.

Interesting. It’s a stunt series, essentially the same ideas as Jamie’s School Dinners, but I don’t necessarily object to that in itself. What annoys me is three-fold:

• That a populist science series is now so unusual, it deserves attention merely for existing. My, how things have changed since Don’t Ask Me.
• That it looks like it has to cheat in order to ‘compete’ with Mythbusters and Brainiac.
• If you really wanted to make a difference, and influence children’s lives, you’d make this stuff for Bebo. But of course, there’s no commercial sense in that…

Despite this series, and a new (/rebadged) children’s engineering show the BBC are making, I still think science TV is dead. We’ve lost the culture of treating these series as routine and expected (in the same way that comedy and drama and news are), and I think the funding model is broken too. Particularly now Scrapheap Challenge has gone too, I can no longer see a career path for science TV specialists except via big documentaries.

By my reckoning, science television is no longer a sustainable industry. I don’t think it has been for a few years already.

So I’m not miffed by The Big Experiment – it just makes me rather sad and wistful. Well, apart from one thing: their claim that lifting people with helium balloons has never been done before. Umm… yes, it has. There’s the (surprisingly non-apocryphal) man-in-a-lawn-chair story, then a couple of publicity stunts for a champagne company and Coca-Cola, and then an old children’s TV show did it almost ten years back.

I remember it clearly.

I was there.

There’s lots of excitement this week about Muxtape, a super-simple web app that lets you publish song playlists. But here’s the thing – the playlists actually, you know, play. They stream. Nice.

Of course, most of the music I’ve seen on there is commercial. Obviously. Which begs all sorts of questions. Here’s Ewan Spence and I discussing some of them.

Is Muxtape heading for trouble?

I can get somewhat laissez-faire about space stuff. It’s almost forty years since we went to the moon, and I’ve never been quite convinced by the utility of manned space exploration.

But every now and then something creeps up on me, building to a vertiginous moment of astonishment. These photos are the latest cause.

There are people in there. Working in space. Doing stuff.

Woah.

Crazy.