There’s this great Who song that you should play before reading this post. One of the greatest rock and roll bands of all time. They sang about their generation and the magic bus, told Tommy to go to the mirror, but today’s song is about not getting fooled again.

Flash back to the United Nations on 2/5/03. An impressive almost Presidential Secretary of State, Colin Powell, delivering some chilling news, not coming right out and saying it, but definitely leading you to believe that Saddam has nukes and chemical weapons and stuff even more horrible and is getting ready to use all of it in some unspecified horrible way. It’s the lack of specificity that makes it so chilling.

Consider the whole scenario. Powell can’t tell us what the danger is because that would violate some security that he can’t violate. Well, I did what a lot of Americans did that day, I sucked it up and got behind my government. And they suckered me. And I’ll never forget it. I got fooled, and used, and a lot of people died, in the name of freedom, and it was all a lie.

We all paid a huge price that day, and the bill may be coming due today, because they’re presenting us with the same scenario, this time about the economy. And we’re not going for it. You can see it in the way things flipped around overnight. A lot of people woke up this morning, like I did, and realized — wait I’ve seen this movie before.

Now we have another impressive Almost Presidential secretary, Henry Paulson, who says there’s impending doom, but he can’t say exactly what it is, it’s not security this time, but fear of starting another level of bank runs. Senators and Representatives come out of a Thursday night meeting with the secretary (would they have believed the President) won’t say exactly what he said, but they are stunned. The next day buried in a sea of press about this event is an almost innocuous paragraph in a NYT piece that talks about a flight to safety from the US Treasury money market. OMG. A point made by the secretary to the Congresspeople, a lot of your constituents have their savings in money markets. The Senators think to themselves, Fuck the constituents, that’s where my retirement savings are! (And by the way, mine.)

An aside, I never realized this until recently, but Congress was very easily whipped by fear of terrorism. The fourth plane on Sept 11 was likely headed for them. We were all so busy thinking about ourselves we forgot to notice that they had a huge conflict of interest, they were targets on Sept 11, and probably many of them suffering from post-traumatic stress from it.

Anyway, back to our story…

Having been fooled once, sure there are some among us who will be fooled again, but we will not all be fooled again, as evidenced by the posts on all kinds of blogs. This is one of those amazing days that except for stylistic elements the extreme right and the extreme left are in agreement. We can’t trust Paulson the way he’s asking to be trusted. It wouldn’t be prudent.

On the other hand, what if they’re right, and don’t want to speak the unspeakable for fear of provoking a run on the credit markets that would wipe out your savings and mine? If you’ve been conservative, as I have and many other have, do you want to be poor? Want to lose your house? Want to live on the street? No health care. No job. How long do you think you’d last? Think it might be worth $1 trillion to prevent that? I do. I bet you do too. But we can’t do it on the terms that Paulson asks for. There has to be some pain and there has to be oversight and checks and balances. There’s no such thing as a law passed by Congress that can’t be judged by the courts. Not in the USA, not under our form of government. And no way is Bush going to get that by us.

So here’s what I propose. The Republican slogan today is Country First. So let’s see the Republicans do a little of that famous Country First stuff.

Bush and Cheney must resign immediately. No immunity, no pardons. Nancy Pelosi will become President, promising not to run for re-election on November 4. Her term will be one of the shortest in US history, just long enough to enact the provisions of the bill being proposed by the Republican administration. If it really is the best thing for the country and not a trick, then the Republicans, being impressed by the seriousness of it, would have to insist that Bush step aside and let the Democrats execute the plan. The entire Bush cabinet stays in office through January 20, but reports, of course to Pelosi. And that includes Paulson.

It’s pretty simple. If they won’t do it, we know they’re bluffing.

If they will, I will give my support to the plan, even though I still don’t know what will happen if I don’t.

Updated: An abbreviated to-the-point version of this piece on Huff.

Homeland Security Threat Level: YELLOW (ELEVATED)

National Weather

Midwest
A slow moving front may produce showers and thunderstorms from the Upper Mississippi Valley to the central Plains.  Parts of the Eastern Dakotas and Minnesota may see heavy rain.
Flood Warnings continue for numerous rivers in Illinois, Indiana and Michigan. 
Highs will range from the low to mid 60s in western North Dakota to the mid-80s in the Ohio Valley.
Northeast
Pleasant weather is forecast for most of the region with cool mornings quickly warming into sunny afternoons.
High temperatures will range from the upper 50s in northern Maine to the low 80s in West Virginia.
South  
High pressure over New England combining with low pressure off the Southeast Coast will bring gusty onshore winds along the Carolina Coasts.  Heavy surf, rip currents and beach erosion are possible. 
Scattered showers and thunderstorms are possible in southern Texas and the Florida Peninsula. 
Numerous Flood Warnings remain in effect for portions of Texas, Florida, Arkansas and Louisiana.
High temperatures will range from the 70s in the southern Appalachians to around 90 in parts of Texas, Florida and Louisiana.
West  
Most of the region will be dry except for a few showers over eastern Montana.
Eastern Washington, eastern Oregon and Idaho may see below freezing temperatures.
Temperatures will range from the 30s in the higher mountains to the 100s in the Mohave and Sonoran Deserts. (NOAA, National Weather Service, Various Media Sources)

Puerto Rico Heavy rainfall (93L)

• The PR EOC is partially activated 24\7 with select ESF’s.
• The Governor has declared a State of Emergency
• The PREMA Joint Information Center is partially activated.
• The USCG has provided a liaison to the PREMA EOC.
• 4 fatalities; no injuries reported
• 19 shelters; population 337 in 15 municipalities (FEMA Region II)
• Fourteen preventive shelters have been opened in 12 municipalities.
• 13 rivers are flooded and several roads have been closed due to flooding or landslides.
• The Puerto Rico Electric and Power Authority (PREPA) reports about 7,146 (0.48%) customers are without service.
• The Puerto Rico Aqueduct Sewer Authority (PRASA) reports about 103,379 (8.27%) customers are without service.
• State/Federal Preliminary Damage Assessments (PDA) will begin tomorrow with 10 IA teams and 9 PA teams in 12 municipalities
• A Mission Assignment has been issued to ESF-3, USACE for PA PDA support.
• No Federal assistance is being requested at this time. (FEMA Region II & CAD, PREMA, VITEMA, NWS)

Federal / State Response for Hurricane Ike and Midwest Storms

Region V
Illinois

• State EOC has returned to normal operations.
• Joint PDAs are ongoing.
• 1 fatality; no injuries reported
• All power has been restored.
• 4 shelter; population 7 (ESF 6 Sept. 22) Ohio
• Ohio EOC at Level II (Partial Operations)
• 7 fatalities; 1 injury reported
• 47,825 customers remain without power.  (DOE Sept. 22)
• 1 shelter; population 12 (NSS as of Midnight EDT Sept. 22) Indiana
• State EOC is activated at Level III (Normal Operations)
• Joint PDAs are ongoing.
• 8 fatalities; 19 injuries reported
• 1 shelters; population 6  (NSS as of Midnight EDT Sept. 22)

FEMA Region VI
Louisiana

• GOSHEP activated at Level III
• 5 fatalities; no injuries reported
• 12,287 customers remain without power  (DOE Sept. 22)
• 8 shelters; population 513 (ESF 6  Sept. 22) 

Texas

• Activated at Level I, 24/7
• 19 fatalities; no injuries reported. (JFO Sitrep #13)
• Shelters / Occupants: 141; population of 13,500; 41% capacity; shelter counts are reducing with efforts to transition people for re-entry into areas. (ESF 6  Sept. 22) 764,503 customers remain without power. (DOE Sept. 22)
• PODs continue to consolidate with inventories of commodities to plan to terminate supply flow; there are 27 PODs in Texas.
• There is 3 Disaster Recovery Center (DRC) and 11 Mobile Disaster Recovery Center (MDRCs) located in Texas. (JFO REPORT #13)
• The US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) has established 27 Rights of Entry (ROE) sites for citizens to register their property for the Blue Roof Program.
• Registration intakes are over 525,000 with 70% submitted online.
• The City of Galveston will re-open on Wednesday, September 24, 2008.

Presidio, TX Levee issue update: Presidio County, along with the City of Presidio, continues efforts to mitigate the flood impacts from the Rio Grande River.

• Sandbag operations continue with 6500 sandbags put in place.
• Air operations successfully placed a large number of large sandbags to reinforce weakness in portions of the levee and remain on stand-by to support additional large sandbag mitigation efforts.
• Sandbagging operations continue as needed by community and county residents and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice has provided 70 offender personnel to assist in sandbagging operation efforts.  Priorities of the incident are: to prevent levee failure; to continue to maintain emergency shelter operations; provide for a rapid response for search and rescue should the levees fail. (TX SOC Rio Grande River Flood Event SITREP # 3)

Tropical Weather Outlook

Atlantic/Caribbean:
93L - High Potential for Tropical Cyclone Development
A broad area of low pressure centered over the eastern Dominican Republic continues to produce heavy rains over portions of the eastern Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and the U.S. and British Virgin Islands.  This system has changed little in organization during the past several hours; however, upper-level winds are expected to become a little more conducive for development and this system has the potential to become a tropical depression at any time during the next day or two as it moves northwestward away from Hispaniola.  Heavy rainfall with potentially life-threatening flash flooding is expected to continue over the area through early Wednesday.   
Eastern Pacific:
90L - Medium Potential for Tropical Cyclone Development
A broad area of low pressure centered about 225 miles southwest of Manzanillo, Mexico is producing very limited and disorganized shower activity.  Development of this system, if any, is expected to be slow to occur as it moves west-northwestward.
Western Pacific:
No tropical cyclone activity affecting United States Territories. (NOAA, HPC,  National Hurricane Center, Central Pacific Hurricane Center and the Joint Typhoon Warning Center)

Earthquake Activity

No new activity (FEMA HQ)

Preliminary Damage Assessments

No new activity (FEMA HQ)

Wildfire Update

National Fire Activity as of  Monday, September 22, 2008:
National Wildfire Preparedness Level: 2
Initial attack activity: Light (63)
New large fires: 0
Uncontained large fires: 5
Large fires contained: 2
States with large fires: CA, MT, OR
Predictive Fire: Clear weather with drier conditions is expected along the West coast, with light north/offshore winds across parts of northern California. Winds out of the southwest will increase across the Southwest and parts of the Great Basin Continued cool and moist weather will continue over much of the northern and central Rockies, with some snow across the higher terrain of Idaho and Montana. The Gulf States will have widespread showers and thunderstorms. Elsewhere, seasonable fall conditions will arrive a little early.  (NIFC, NICC)

Disaster Declaration Activity

The Governor of Indiana requested a Major Disaster Declaration as a result of severe storms and flooding, beginning on Sept 12 and continuing.
The President approved Major Disaster Declaration (FEMA-1794-DR) for Mississippi as a result of Hurricane Gustav.   (FEMA HQ)

Detroit - U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers at the Ambassador Bridge, Fort Street Cargo Facility, encountered an individual who was a member of the Free And Secure Trade program attempting to smuggle drugs into the country. The FAST program is one of CBP’s Trusted Traveler Programs. (more)

Thanks for all your questions and comments on my earlier post about audio-on-demand for the iPhone.

Rather than answer them all independently, here are answers to some common questions:

Is audio-on-demand only available on the iPhone?

iPlayer video and audio-on-demand will also be available on the Nokia N96, which Nokia is due to release on 1 October (see Matthew Postgate’s previous post). We initially launched this service on the iPhone as it’s a very popular device amongst our audio and music audiences, but the BBC’s new media teams are working hard to bring audio-on-demand to other mobile devices in the very near future.

Can I stream live BBC radio on the iPhone?

The iPhone is currently only available on the O2 network in the UK and continuous streaming of audio and video content is not permitted under the terms of O2’s flat-rate packages. We’re currently working on supporting live streaming when you’re connected via wifi.

Can I stream live BBC radio on other mobile devices?

I would love to make iPlayer available on all mobile devices but as the media support and browser functionalities vary so widely, this may take some time. Where we can be certain that a WiFi connection is being used, and that this connection is also used by the device’s media player software, then it’s already possible to access live streams. For more details see here.

Unfortunately, many mobile devices swap to 3G or GPRS connections without informing their users - which can be very expensive. The BBC is in discussions with network operators on this issue and hopes that consumer demand will help to drive this change.

Why doesn’t BBC radio podcast all their programmes?

The BBC negotiates rights with collective bodies and artists’ representatives to make streamed material available for up to 7 days after broadcast. Where rights allow, we also make BBC programmes available to download as podcasts. We currently make over 170 titles available as podcasts and this number will continue to grow. The limits we place on this growth are largely down to cost.

Why have on-demand mobile services been prioritised before improving on-line audio quality?

Improving the audio quality of live internet radio streams remains a key priority. This is a much larger piece of work and will take a little longer to complete. There’ll be a post later tonight on the Radio Labs blog detailing progress towards this.

Why do some programmes appear as ‘currently unavailable’?

The audio-on-demand facility for iPhone, giving people the chance to listen to programmes from “the past seven days”, only launched on Monday. So, the complete list of programmes is being built up over this week. All listed BBC radio shows should be available by Monday 29 September.

Once again, please feel free to leave me your comments about how this service affects how you listen to BBC radio.

Mark Friend is Controller, BBC Audio & Music Interactive.

A few months ago, I gave one of the keynotes at our annual BBC Future Media & Technology conference.

I ended my speech, which ranged from an overview of the evolution of user interaction models on technology to cloud computing and the semantic web, with a picture of the Google search window…

…and the statement:

All this innovation, and yet this is the best we can currently do for content discovery: brute force text search. We have to do better if we want to evolve.

Okay, it was for dramatic effect, but I believed then and believe now that I was absolutely accurate.

Search is one of the darkest backwaters of technological and experience development (particularly on the internet.) Since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we, the BBC, can improve search on our site, and how we can drive innovation around search in general in the industry.

Earlier this month, there were a couple of really interesting launches in the world of search.

First, Yahoo! released Boss, which is a completely open, virtually limit-free search API. What’s interesting about this is that it’s a brilliant defensive move against Google’s dominance.

Yahoo! is clearly Number Two, but since it’s a marginally zero sum game in terms of monetisable search traffic, it needs a different way to take market share. “Embrace and extend”, indeed.

This was followed almost immediately by Cuil, a Xoogle (ex-Google employee company - more about that later) which launched to much fanfare, and mostly collapsed into a mess of unmet audience expectations - always risky.

Frankly, I haven’t played with it enough to make a decision, but it wasn’t nearly as compelling as the rest of those mentioned in this post.

I was lucky enough to join Jane Weedon, our controller of business development, on a trip to Asia and to the USA to do some learning about small, young innovative companies and market trends.

In the realm of “oh my god, that looks like rocket science”, we file Viewdle. Essentially, it’s an image search engine with facial recognition software.

Born in the Ukraine out of what I suspect was a largely military development effort, the technology is funded by Anthem, a SoCal VC and frankly, after a thirty minute demo, I was blown away.

See for yourself at reuters.viewdle.com/searchm. I’m keen to spend more time on this, and feel like there’s an unknown number of ways to leverage this.

One of my favourite meetings from Asia was Naver, the Korean search giant owned by the largest online gaming portal in Korea (another interesting space for a blog).

With near 80% market share in Korea (Google has less than 4%!), 16m people visit Naver every day. They have managed to capture and data cache the majority of Korean language content on the internet.

Now, to my non-Korean-speaking western eye, this is a confusing, hard-to-understand site, but there are some really keen innovations here:

• They mix different kinds of results into an answer, presenting only relevant ones
• Their scrap tool (sort of like social bookmarking à la digg or delicious) allows users to copy parts of one blog or site onto another, helping to grow the interconnectedness of the interweb and building relevance
• Behind Naver is an engine of editorial staff who review
• They have a Google Answers- or Yahoo! Knowledge-like offer which helps to identify new subjects and content to deep dive on
• Other than the aforementioned editorial staff, which is outsourced to low-cost centres like China, the company is run by a team of just over 80 people who are amazingly innovative and agile
• They also have JR Naver kids’ search

Interestingly, US-based Mahalo lists Naver as its biggest inspiration. They have duplicated the Naver editorial model, but built it up into an amazing engine of content discovery and improvement.

Mahalo creates pages about selected subjetcs using its amazing editorial/ curation team which is distributed around the world . Their page curators, who come from all walks of life - professors, doctors, homemakers - create the pages for a nominal sum (under fifty quid) per page. It’s a model similar to Wikipedia, but managed (ie, you have to demonstrate your skills and you are evaluated regularly to assess the quality of your work).

It is an interesting alternative to the approach taken by Daylife and others (including the BBC with its Topic Pages - previously blogged here) where pages are produced automatically using search queries to find and aggregate content. This is obviously cheaper and computers can find much more content than human editors ever could. But Mahalo’s pages have a hand-built quality that can only be produced by skilled editors and well thought out workflows.

Co-founder and CEO (and a long-time friend of mine) Jason Calcanis talks about how this makes his content more “trusted”; which I think is a really interesting concept.

His new line, which I’ll repeat here, is that trust is one of the most important currencies/assets in the digital future. Frankly, I’d put it up there with metadata.

Digital has a function of changing the nature and assets in the future. Attention, data and trust, rather than cash and inventory: brave new world, indeed.

Mahalo is a Sequoia investment. I was lucky enough, with some colleagues from the BBC and Sony, to attend a Sequoia open day in SF. It’s essentially a beauty parade by the VC of their best and brightest (and most relevant) investments for larger strategic or VIP friends and family.

One of the most compelling things they showed us was SearchMe, which I was quite impressed by. Essentially, it’s a combination of a new search engine (built by Xooglers) with a new, Flash-based interface.

Now, the interface borrows heavily from Apple’s interaction pattern library and it’s a bit clunky for browsing, but it is quite striking.

I find that it’s also really good at predicting what I’m looking for, with a few exceptions. I see pieces of the old snap search engine (the creative director, Jason Fields, just joined us at the BBC) as well as X1 (long may it live - one of the most useful tools ever).

Frankly, however, it really shone when they loaded up the Searchme Ap on my iPhone. Oh MY GOD! WOW. Extremely compelling search on a phone (it replaces the internal search and I don’t miss it a bit.)

I’m converted, though they need some slightly better browse mechanisms (see what Apple did in the newest version of iTunes.)

Cuil has some interesting visual metaphors as well: the blue type, minimalist and frankly ugly and not very usable Google UX seems to be crumbling!

I really think that the next two years will be defined by those of us who can really raise the efficiency of discovery (both targeted - ie, I know what I want, and browsing/snacking - ie, I’m looking for something stimulating).

When you marry solid data and indexing (everyone forgets that Google’s code base is almost ten years old), useful new datapoints (facial recognition, behavioral targeting, historical precedent, trust, etc) with a compelling and useful user experience, we may see some changes in the market leadership of search.

Richard Titus is Controller, User Experience & Design for BBC Future Media & Technology.

At the BBC News Editors blog Richard Chapman brings news of changes to the BBC’s Weather site:

All of our forecast information is now organised by location rather than by type of data. Once you have searched for your location you will find everything you need on one page

Still at the Editors, Steve Herrmann explains some changes to the Science and Entertainment areas of the BBC News site.

Simon Lumb goes in depth at BBCi Labs blog on “Why Freesat Works“.

BBC Backstage goes to Scripting Enabled with pictures and video to come.

Jason DaPonte reports from his conference session at X/Lab in Korea on the BBC’s work on mobiles.

Embedded.com claims “TV formats in turmoil as Internet hits home” in a feature that discusses some projects the BBC is involved in, as shown at the IBC conference (e.g. Super Hi-Vision, Dirac, P2P Next).

And finally, although it’s not strictly speaking what this blog is about, can anyone help Paul Minott with his technical problem?

…do you think driving an earth spike into the ground just outside the building and connecting this to the sound system earth would help or so I need to upgrade to starquad cable?

N.B. If you want to help Paul go to the forum I’ve linked to rather than leaving a comment here.

Nick Reynolds is editor, BBC Internet blog

Editors’ note: This is a post based on an article in this week’s edition of Ariel, the BBC’s in-house weekly magazine, by Audio & Music Interactive’s Head Of Distribution Technology John Ousby. It includes John’s images from the International Broadcasting Convention, as blogged at pressred.org.

Dr Leonardo Chiariglione, the founder of MPEG, was unfortunately upstaged at his own keynote address at IBC in Amsterdam last Friday.

Google and YouTube are parasites. It’s all about content; the rest is just railway lines.

This was the message given by ITV boss Michael Grade in his recorded interview included in the session. A few people in the audience started clapping until they realised they were outnumbered by the growing army of raised eyebrows.

Were we in a conference from the late ’90s? Or did this have anything to do with the fact that ITV is due to be relegated from the FTSE 100 later this month?

The idea that content can be easily separated from technology and distribution is plain wrong. One has been informing the other since the start of broadcasting, through the production technology available at the time or the way audiences find, share, discuss and consume it.

The biggest mistakes I have seen in the broadcast world are when interactivity is slapped on once the paint is dry in the production process or when a technology application is created without consideration of the audience it is intended for.

DAB slideshow showing some of the output from the olympics twitter feed from 5live

You can’t spend much time at IBC without hearing about convergence and the ever-redrawn battle lines between content owners, broadcasters, internet service providers and telcos.

One of the debates at this year’s event was around mobile TV [mp3], which on the broadcast side hasn’t had the most prestigious start after several years of hype, trials and struggling commercial services.

Mobile operators have struggled with small volumes of low quality video clips in walled gardens that are expensive to consume and unreliable in reception. With mobile services, context is everything - not just the web (or telly) bundled across to a smaller screen, but content which takes account of where and how it is consumed, and by whom.

You could draw the conclusion that video on the move just isn’t as important as was thought. I believe it’s just a question of when.

We are in a transitionary phase where we are just starting to see the possibilities for mobile video once it’s made easy to consume and the pricing structure is relatively understood, as with the iPhone.

Let’s just start to think about mobile video and audio, of which TV is a subset rather than a starting point - both broadcast- and internet-delivered video have a part to play in the future of mobile TV.

p2p-next looks like anything else on display at IBC until you understand what it’s doing. Live p2p video streaming based on the tribler infrastructure - a potential solution to iPlayer success… Great project involving BBC’s George Wright, Pioneer and the EBU among others. Of course, not just video can use this. Nice work.

Walking the halls at IBC proffered the usual mix of landmark moments, promising new technology and the next biggest, brightest display screens, some of which can be seen in this IBC set on Flickr.

It made me proud to see that the BBC were involved in a lot of the best of show - DVB-T2 (next generation digital terrestrial TV delivery), Super High Vision (HD on steroids) and p2p-next (live peer to peer streaming), to name a few.

Let’s just hope that next year can see a keynote fit for 2009 not 1999.

DVB-T2 - rotated constellations (256 QAM): BBC has been leading the work of the DVB group in its next generation DVB-T work. DVB-T2 gives about 50% extra capacity than DVB-T and will be essential for Freeview HDTV services - currently planned for the end of 2009. More detail here:
dvb-t2

John Ousby is head of distribution technologies, Audio & Music Interactive.

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MetLife recently released a free online tool, the Employee Benefits Simplifier, for employees who need help making decisions regarding benefits. The tool addresses employees responses to the 2008 Open Enrollment survey, which showed employees with access

A MAN who fled the country after being accused of a vicious beating which left a community worker permanently brain damaged has walked free from court. Joseph Muldoon, 40, admitted jumping bail and learned that the attempt murder charge he had been