Complex, aspirational imagery? Witty wordplay or graphic ingenuity? Girls in bling-bling bikinis? Nope – spell out the transformative power of your product in a flowchart…

From my moblog. Spotted on Amwell St, London.

…so to speak. The BBC has published it’s report on it’s own performance in online media, prior to a governmental review.

These two points stood out for me:

“In looking forward we will be conscious not just of the ways in which online resembles the BBC’s traditional media of television and radio ( free provision of content, broad mix of genres, core editorial values, shared brands) , but also the ways in which it is likely to remain profoundly different ( no spectrum scarcity, low barriers to entry, largely on demand, many-to-many rather than one-to-many).”

“many-to-many” eh? And…

“Going forward, our aim will be to continue, where appropriate, to share code which we develop with others in the new media industry in order to ensure that the intellectual capital built through the licence fee is available to all. We will make this available free of charge in open source form for others to use and develop as they wish. In future, we would expect this to include code or other intellectual property which helps to improve the quality of video and audio online, and small software packages we have developed to improve the efficiency of web production systems.”

Wonder if anyone preparing this read Azeem’s Open-Source-BBC proposal.

» BBC – About the BBC – DCMS review of the BBC’s online services

The BBC’s Director-General (CEO, I guess) has announced a project called Creative Archive:

“Let me explain with an easy example.

Just imagine your child comes home from school with homework to make a presentation to the class on lions, or dinosaurs, or Argentina or on the industrial revolution.

He or she goes to the nearest broadband connection – in the library, the school or even at home – and logs onto the BBC library.

They search for real moving pictures which would turn their project into an exciting multi-media presentation.

They download them and, hey presto, they are able to use the BBC material in their presentation for free.

Now that is a dream which we will soon be able to turn into reality.

We intend to allow parts of our programmes, where we own the rights, to be available to anyone in the UK to download so long as they don’t use them for commercial purposes.

Under a simple licensing system, we will allow users to adapt BBC content for their own use.

We are calling this the BBC Creative Archive.

When complete, the BBC will have taken a massive step forward in opening our content to all – be they young or old, rich or poor.”

There’s a lot of other stuff about the BBC in the press at the moment, which has overshadowed this announcement… but it’s great news.

Brave and disruptive – and will have to be executed as such, with no half-measures or compromises to vested interests, but it’s still great..

Some good coverage and analysis here and here.

While trying to find stuff on Graham’s Number ( dimly-remembered from childhood obsession over the Guinness Book of Records) I come across Robert Munafo”s large numbers page, and his fascinating, Hofstadter-inspired classification of numbers:

” Class-1 numbers are those that are small enough to be perceived as a bunch of objects seen directly by the human eye. What I mean by “seen directly” is that it is possible to see the number as a set of separate, distinct objects in a single scene (no time limit, but the observer and the objects cannot move). 100 is a class-1 number because it is possible to see 100 objects (goats for example) in a single scene. The limit for class-1 numbers is around a million, 1,000,000 or 10^6. You can just barely put 1,000,000 dots on a large piece of paper and stand at a distance such that you can perceive each individual dot as a distinct dot, and at the same time be within viewing distance of the other 999,999 dots. (I have actually done this, just for fun!)”

Big Numbers was the name of a troubled Alan Moore / Bill Sienkiewicz co-creation. The High Numbers was the original name of The Who.

Pete Ashton on the mirrored hysteria in signs and society:

“It’s probably because I’d been on a farm for so long but I’m much more aware of signs at the moment, warning signs specifically. It seems like they’re shouting at me. “Watch out!” “Don’t do this!” “You might die!” I noticed a lot in the car park and thought it might be interesting to capture them all and isolate them from their usual context. So I did.”

» Pete Ashton’s weblog: Don’t do anything abnormal

Spend an hour at work listening to Eigenradio.

“If you took a bunch of music and asked it, “Music, what are you, really?” you’d hear Eigenradio singing back at you.

I’m finding it strangely relaxing, and it is helping me focus: the snatches of pattern and random beats and notes are blocking all other office input: like noise-cancelling earphones working at a network scale.

» http://eigenradio.media.mit.edu/
[via Interconnected]

While I’m in the storytelling/magic/technology mood (when am I not?), Geoff Cohen’s “coherence engine” site is really on a roll at the moment. He’s considering Campbell’s “hero with a 1k faces”, MMORPGS and emotional response…

» CoherenceEngine: “Atoms of Meaning, Molecules of Narrative”

BBC News Online readers come up with somewhat b3ta-esque ideas for making London’s underground cooler in the Summer. All the suggestions have been forwarded to the Mayor of London.

» BBC News: Your ideas to cool the Tube (and win £100k)

Just back from vacation and deadlines. Some quoteblogging.

First of all, Adam Greenfield’s presentation to 1ILMC:

“If for three thousand years we’ve relied on rumor and reputation, custom and external data stores and never least explicit signage to organize our urban experiences, the advent of latent, user-generated, unedited, location-based content is something that has the potential to change the way humans do cities, change it utterly and in short order.”

It’s titled “Whatever happened to serendipity?” – something to chew on. Just finished reading “Cosmopolis” while on my break: “we need a new model for time” says one of the characters. Causality, confluence and coincidence are things we suspect are becoming fathomable in nature and culture. Just as we are developing our thoughts around them, Adam perhaps suggests we are building ourselves the prosthetics to engage with them.

But then “Here we are, here we are!, here we are.” atop a tower of abstraction.

“this bee, white black and yellow, I bet every single element of it had purpose: every particle, every force, every relative position and potentiality of it, oh and more and wider than I have space here to say, all the way down to the substrate of the universe itself. Not like my desk, built on top of all these layers, in the highly stacked and abstracted world of people — which is, in fact, just like London around me, there at the west end of Fleet Street, a human construction, a deeply nested virtual machine really, that’s all it is — there with our precarious artifact around me, I witnessed a bee, not built on top of reality but part of reality itself.”

Are perhaps the prosthetics Adam describes a circuitous route back down to where Webb found the bee to, well, be? Or more stuff to spiral us higher, further away.

“A rat became the unit of currency”

From Hecklerandcoch:

“Worlds are created by brains. At a simple level, bees, migratory birds, dogs and even limpets, which return to a particular spot after feeding, contain internal maps of their surroundings. Humans, who think abstractly, create more complicated inferential maps going beyond their known surroundings, to include the world, celestial objects, real and hypothetical beings, and the past and future as well as the present.

~ Alex Comfort – Reality & Empathy: Physics, Mind, and Science in the 21st Century
(State University of New York Press, Albany, 1984, page xiii)”

Which leads finally, to Peterme on supporting hypertext pattern dubbed “the cycle”:

“In a hypertext, this is how readers build their experience of context. By definition, you don’t read a hypertext from beginning to end, nor in some broad-to-narrow hierarchical fashion. You piece together an experience through exposure to its elements, and their relationships. Understanding relationships requires cycling through the material, returning to the same point more than once, and seeing how it’s all connected.”

Just like the best cities. Adam’s prosthetics might remake the most modern and inorganic of cities with an overlay of shared information and images. Other related stuff I need to pile in but can’t = My experience of Siena, Kevin Lynch’s Image of the City (again)

I’ll unpack this later in the week if I can, as I unpack my dirty t-shirts and underwear.

—
* apologies to John Donne

Enjoy the giant-robot approach to world diplomacy?

(New-World) Order your Neocon t-shirts here…